On March 22, 2025, I tested for my 1st dan black belt at CW Taekwondo Boston. As part of this process, I was asked to write an essay reflecting on my relationship to taekwondo. I’m sharing a version of it here, lightly edited to remove some names for privacy.
Taekwondo has meant many things to me. Rather than try to summarize all of it at once, I’d like to reflect on my relationship to taekwondo through a few different perspectives.
Taekwondo as a lesson in self-image
When I started taekwondo, it was out of character for me — or so I thought. I never really thought of myself as a sporty person. As I started practicing taekwondo more consistently and discovering a lot of joy in it, it made me interrogate why I had this perception of myself. It wasn’t even necessarily factual — even though I’d not really “done sports” for most of my adult life, as a child I’d played baseball and even taken some karate classes, and had also enjoyed casually running with friends in college. I had always assumed that sports were frivolous or that I didn’t really have time for it, but seeing how essential it had become to my happiness made me re-evaluate a few things about the narrative that I viewed my own life through.
I recently learned about a concept in education called self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is a person’s belief in their own ability to achieve an outcome. Research has shown that higher self-efficacy is linked to task-specific success. In other words, believing that you can do something is an important component of actually being able to do it. This has rung true for me in my experience of taekwondo. I feel the most excited about taekwondo when I achieve a good balance of challenging myself and understanding that there’s room to improve, while still cultivating a feeling of competence and awareness of how far I’ve already come. Shifting my self-image to think of myself as a dedicated taekwondo practitioner, and take myself seriously on that level, has been an important part of the journey.
Taekwondo as a reason to be here right now
Before I started taekwondo, I don’t think I felt a strong attachment to the Boston area. I had friends here, and I liked being here, but otherwise it was mostly the place where my job was. I didn’t feel like it mattered whether or not I stayed longer term. The pandemic made this feeling really acute because it maybe literally did not matter — everything was on the computer and I couldn’t spend meaningful time with anyone in person even if they were nearby anyway. The CW community really changed that for me. I met a lot of people who I hope will be lifelong friends. I met my partner here. I also made a lot of what one of my church leaders would call “high-quality acquaintanceships” — people who I am genuinely happy to see regularly because our life cadences intersect. And I genuinely think that having high-quality acquaintanceships is something we all need, and that the comfort we all find in that consistency of routine we share is a sign of a healthy community.
Now, the prospect of moving on to a new city takes on a very different emotional valence than it would have before. And I feel so fortunate to have found something that makes me feel that way. I know that nothing is permanent — even if I were staying in Boston long term, everyone else is on their own path and the people that make up this community will inevitably change. But it’s made me really value being here, now, in the present moment.
When I was a yellow belt, one of my instructors said something in her class that really stuck with me. Though taekwondo seems like an individual endeavor, we can’t do it alone. We need a community of people around us for us to succeed. We need mentorship from people who are further along than us, and we need to pass that on to the people who are coming along behind us. This has been really true to my experience. I don’t know if I could have gone through this process without my belt group buddies, without help from the instructors and senior color belts, and without being pushed to understand things well enough to explain them to lower belts.
In my academic work, we talk about the idea of a community of practice. A community of practice is a “group of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.” None of us can do it alone and we make each other better by doing it together.
Taekwondo as a way to grow as a teacher
In my non-taekwondo life, one of my goals is to help train the next generation of civically-minded technologists and designers. I do this in my capacity as a teacher and as a research mentor. I try to think about my informal experiences with teaching in taekwondo as mutually-reinforcing with how I’m trying to grow as a teacher in the rest of my life. Taekwondo is a form of embodied knowledge, which is unique compared to other types of knowledge. If you’ve ever tried to learn a dance, or asked your Chinese mother how to roll dough, you know that embodied knowledge is hard to write down or even convey in words. It’s always passed body-to-body. Taekwondo is always instantiated in someone’s body, and everyone’s body is different. You can show someone by doing, but what you’re really trying to convey is a feeling that might not even be the same feeling in their body. Trying to help others with taekwondo technique has pushed me to think about my communication style and my capacity to take on a beginner mindset.
Taekwondo as inheriting a dream
Because taekwondo is embodied knowledge, and this knowledge is reproduced at the level of a community of practice in a specific place and time, it can be different wherever you go. I’ve discovered over time that I’m not just learning taekwondo — I’m learning a perspective on taekwondo that belongs to the CW Taekwondo community. From conversations with instructors, I’ve realized that the club has its own unique perspective such that when we perform our poomsae at tournaments, we want to be recognizable as CW students (for example, through our use of rhythm and tempo).
When our Grandmaster visited us in Dec 2023, he told us from his seat at the head table, “my ideas and dreams live on in all of you.” This process has helped me better understand what he means. No matter what form my relationship with taekwondo takes in the future, I hope I will be a good representative of CW’s ideas and dreams when I share my taekwondo with others.
