Published in 2012, Liu Xuan’s memoir Xuanmu offers a look back on the journey that shaped one of China’s most celebrated gymnasts. Written more than a decade after her retirement, it traces her path from a timid, sickly child in Changsha to Olympic champion, while also exploring the personal costs of that transformation.
The opening chapters focus on Liu’s childhood and introduction to gymnastics, providing a vivid portrait of the training culture that defined Chinese gymnastics in the 1980s and early 1990s. Alongside stories of relentless conditioning, competition, and athletic ambition, Liu recalls a childhood marked by contradictions. She disliked many aspects of training, envied classmates who spent their afternoons in school, celebrated bouts of illness because they offered a brief escape from the gym, and at times questioned whether gymnastics was worth the sacrifice at all. Yet she also remembers the coaches, teammates, and family members who sustained her along the way. The result is a rare first-person account of the grueling system that produced generations of elite Chinese gymnasts.
Enjoy!
Preface
Twelve years have passed, and it feels as though I was standing on a carousel that has come full circle, returning to where I began. Life has traced another complete round. During those twelve years, I retired from competition, pursued my education, entered the workforce, and continued to grow with the passing years.
Growing up has truly reawakened every memory cell in my hippocampus relating to gymnastics. Looking back on those years gone by, I cannot help but reflect: the muscles and sinews, strengthened through training, may eventually deteriorate, but perseverance endures for as long as life itself. It is like a sacred flame once lit, burning eternally, never extinguished.
As Han Yu wrote, “Excellence in work comes from diligence and is wasted by idleness; deeds are accomplished through thought and ruined by heedlessness.”
And so I have set about organizing the story of my gymnastics career — not only to document that life of relentless training, but also to remind myself at every moment of the saying: “For one who would travel a hundred li, ninety is but the halfway point.”
Xuànmù (炫目), “dazzling brilliance,” describes the fleeting sensation when honor finally arrives. Xuánmù (璇木) is a play on my own name, Liu Xuan (刘璇), and the balance beam (平衡木), a fitting image for my athletic career. Together, these two near-homophonous expressions point toward the path that lies ahead while also preserving the memories of the life I have already lived.
When I was small, the world in my eyes was always spinning.
With every powerful takeoff, the shifting scenes around me left me dazzled and disoriented. As I sought my balance again and again in the midst of that spinning, beneath my feet stretched one stretch of road after another — rising and falling, muddy and rough. Only when I finally planted both feet on the ground and stood steady in the whirl did the world open its arms and embrace me.
As an athlete — a gymnast above all — my competitive career was, like those of other athletes, brief and intense. We all begin in ordinariness, take flight through failure, and find, after success, a new turning in the story of our lives.
Even though I managed to hold onto competitive form longer than many gymnasts of my generation, in the particular world of women’s gymnastics, my teammates and I all faced the same unavoidable question: before we had even grown up, life had already blazed with brilliance. So then — facing the long road of life still ahead, after that one blazing instant — how does one go on to write the remaining chapters?
Twelve years after retiring, I have begun to think seriously about this question.
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Notes
The title Xuanmu (璇木) is a play on Liu Xuan’s name and her signature apparatus. The character 璇 (Xuan) is the second character of her name (刘璇), while 木 (mu, “wood”) evokes the balance beam (pinghengmu, 平衡木). The title, therefore, functions on two levels: it refers simultaneously to Liu Xuan herself and to the apparatus with which she was most closely associated. I have chosen not to translate the book’s title because renderings such as “Xuan’s Beam” lose much of the wordplay.
炫目 and 璇木: In the explanatory paragraph above, I have not translated the Chinese literally, as the wordplay would not be immediately intelligible to English readers. In the original text, Liu contrasts xuànmù (炫目, “dazzling” or “eye-catching”), which symbolizes the fleeting moment when glory finally arrives, with xuánmù (璇木), a coined expression that merges her own name with the balance beam. The passage reads: “炫目，是荣誉最终来临时的瞬间感受；璇木，是对我运动生涯的形象描述。这两组同音单词，是我未来人生轨迹的延续，也是我过去人生经历的回忆。”
Han Yu (韩愈, 768–824) was a Chinese writer, poet, philosopher, and government official of the Tang dynasty. One of the most influential literary figures in Chinese history, he is best known for promoting the Classical Prose Movement and for his contributions to Confucian thought. The quotation, “Excellence in work comes from diligence and is wasted by idleness; deeds are accomplished through thought and ruined by heedlessness” (业精于勤，荒于嬉；行成于思，毁于随), is drawn from his essay Explanation of Progress in Learning (Jinxue Jie, 进学解) and remains one of the most frequently cited expressions of the value of hard work and disciplined study in Chinese culture.
The saying “For one who would travel a hundred li, ninety is but the halfway point” (行百里者半九十, xing baili zhe ban jiushi) is a traditional Chinese proverb, often attributed to the ancient text Strategies of the Warring States. It conveys the idea that the final stages of an endeavor are often the most difficult and that success should not be assumed merely because most of the journey has been completed. The proverb is commonly used to encourage perseverance and vigilance when approaching a goal, warning against complacency near the finish line. (Li is a traditional Chinese unit of distance, roughly one-third of a mile or one-half kilometer in modern usage.)
Chapter 1
I seem never to have been able to forget those days, ten years earlier, in 2002, when the idea of making a comeback first took hold in my mind. Those were days and nights when dreams and passion kept me awake, only for nightmares to wake me again before dawn.
Although in the end, for various reasons, nothing came of it, looking back on that period feels like having trudged through a long rainy season, stumbling along a road deep in mud, wretched and exhausted in body and spirit. It was because of that experience that I finally faced myself honestly and let gymnastics go for good. And from that point on, the nightmares stopped replaying — over and over again — that scene from the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, the moment I fell from the bars. Sometimes I would wake to find my pillow soaked with tears; other times, I would jolt upright with a scream, only to realize it had been a dream, and lying there in the dark, unable to hold back the tide of emotions rising inside me, I would break down and sob.
If the Sydney Olympics gave me a whole sky full of brilliant sunshine, then Atlanta left me with a bruise that never fully faded. White and black — these were the joy and the bitterness that gymnastics brought me, like two parallel tracks running through my youth, the train of life hurtling over them at full speed.
As a child, I was sickly and frail — injections and medicine were part of everyday life. Because my parents were busy with work, my grandmother stepped up without hesitation to carry the household on her shoulders, looking after my brother and me. Grandmother doted on me especially, terrified that I might suffer even the slightest hurt, and so she kept me constantly within arm’s reach, never allowing me to stray from her sight. At the dinner table, she would often say to my parents: “We absolutely cannot let our little Xuanxuan Tuo be bullied by anyone.” (Mèi tuó is a colloquial Changsha, Hunan expression, generally used to describe a little girl.)
Having lived so long exclusively with my grandmother, sheltered from the world, I had naturally had very little contact with other children. My parents worried that when I started school, I would struggle to adapt to group life and feared I might be bullied as a result. While they were at a loss for how to address this, my father spotted an advertisement in the newspaper for a gymnastics and fitness class, held at the nearby Youth Palace, not far from home. With my grandmother’s approval, he enrolled me. He hoped that the opportunity would not only strengthen my body but also help me overcome my timid and introverted nature.
Pompidou once said that destiny is the chance through which a person’s talent is put to the test. Perhaps so — and in some imperceptible way, that test arrived without a sound.
On the very first day of class at the fitness club, a coach from the sports school came looking for promising young candidates. The children selected were sent for trial training at the Hunan Provincial Gymnastics School, but after a few days, they were sent back because they didn’t meet the required standard. About twenty days into my training at the Youth Palace, another talent scout arrived. She had me perform a few basic movements, mainly to assess my flexibility and strength. When I caught a glimpse through the mirror of her approving expression, I felt a tremendous surge of encouragement and pushed myself to do even better.
For many years afterward, I never forgot the way that kind of look — warm and empowering — could make a person feel, nor the burst of vitality it ignited in me in that moment, as though some hidden reserve of energy had suddenly burst to life inside me. And so in the many years that followed, especially after retirement, when I went down to the grassroots to assist with gymnastics training, I always made a point of giving each child that same kind of warm, encouraging look. Later in life, I came across the saying, “Give someone a rose and the fragrance lingers on your own hand,” which only confirmed my belief: encouraging others brings joy not only to them but to yourself.
Perhaps it was that encouraging look from the teacher that made me work so hard. In the end, I became the only child from the Youth Palace who was selected for trial training at the Hunan Provincial Gymnastics School and not sent back. The teacher who selected me was Zhou Xiaolin, my first gymnastics coach, who was also the first coach of well-known gymnasts Chen Cuiting and Lu Li.
When I first walked into the gymnastics hall, I didn’t even know what gymnastics was. Aerobics and gymnastics seemed to me about as different as White Rabbit milk candy and sweetened milk — not much to tell apart except the texture, since the movements were basically the same. The difference was that the gymnastics hall had many more apparatus, plus a very large light-brown carpet.
The first time I stepped onto it, I thought this great mat was wonderful! Bouncing up and down on that mat, edged all around with white tape, I could always feel some indescribable magic at work. I could jump higher, spring higher. Though I later learned that small springs were buried beneath the floor exercise mat to make the bouncing easier, at the time it seemed to me like a giant candy wrapper, filled with tumbling, laughter, and fun. I came to think of that big mat as the first playground of my life — each day I could bounce around on it to my heart’s content, and that was happiness enough. Little did I imagine that this very mat would one day become the place where my willpower was forged.
Under Coach Zhou Xiaolin’s guidance, I went to the sports school to train every afternoon. In those days, all the children — boys and girls alike — wore the same uniform: leotards and shorts.
Once I arrived at the gymnastics hall and training truly began, I understood what the word “training” actually meant: gritting your teeth and enduring. Ligament stretching, back bends, leg lifts, leg holds, forward rolls, backward rolls, wall handstands, press handstands, chassés, cartwheels, and strength work for every joint and muscle — these basic introductory gymnastics movements were repeated day after day. At first, I was rather interested. Since I was naturally quite flexible, I could usually satisfy the coach’s requirements during the leg-stretching sections, while other children would often burst into floods of tears because they couldn’t bear the tearing sensation in their ligaments. Whenever I looked up and saw my teammates wiping their eyes, all the fun of gymnastics would take flight in an instant and vanish into thin air.
The reason I was naturally flexible was that before gymnastics training had even begun, my mother had regularly stretched my legs at home to condition my ligaments — though she had never intended for this to lead me toward a career as an athlete. Having been a gymnast herself, she knew perfectly well the drudgery and pain that gymnastics demanded, and the stretching at home was simply meant to keep me healthy. What she never expected was that this small habit of physical conditioning would lay the solid foundation for my eventual career in gymnastics. When I grew up, my mother told me she had initially not wanted me to become a gymnast. But perhaps gymnastics and the two of us — mother and daughter — were bound together by fate. Through all the twists and turns, I became a gymnast all the same.
A year after beginning trial training at the sports school, I also started school. At six years old, I entered Jixiang Lane Primary School in Changsha. When I enrolled, the homeroom teacher asked whether I liked dancing. I said proudly that I was training in gymnastics. She asked whether it was very hard work. I shook my head, indicating that I enjoyed it very much.
Later, to ensure that neither schoolwork nor training would suffer, my parents, coach, and homeroom teacher worked out a three-way arrangement: I would go to school every morning and head to the sports school at one in the afternoon. Training sessions ran for six hours at a stretch. Before going home for dinner, I would make a detour to a classmate’s house to find out the day’s homework. Sometimes I wouldn’t finish until the early hours of the morning.
I have always thought of myself as a very lucky person — fate has looked after me in unusual ways at many turns. At Jixiang Lane Primary School, my homeroom teacher turned out to be the very same teacher who had been my brother’s homeroom teacher. My brother is six years older than I; he had just graduated when I enrolled, which meant I arrived just in time for Teacher Guo — and so both of us Liu siblings ended up being taught under Teacher Guo’s care. To accommodate my training schedule, Teacher Guo deliberately moved all Chinese language and mathematics lessons to the morning, ensuring that my core academic subjects were protected while training was not delayed.
I don’t know whether primary schools today still have those large rope swings made of hemp. In my school days, many primary schools in China had these great big hemp-rope swings. I loved the swing enormously — the moment my hands gripped those plaited rope handles, my legs felt full of power. Many people say that girls from Hunan are naturally bold; perhaps there is something to that. In those days, with no parents or teachers standing guard, a group of little girls could swing themselves nearly to the horizontal on the school swing. Sometimes one person would swing while others cheered from below; other times two girls would stand facing each other on the swing and push off together — far more thrilling — and at the highest point, someone might let go with one hand to show off her daring and technique. Thinking back on it now, I can’t help but feel a chill, but at the time, our palms and feet were charged with energy.
Perhaps because the motion of swinging was so similar to the swinging action on the uneven bars, when I began preparing for actual gymnastics events, the uneven bars became the first apparatus I was drawn to.
The coach had us line up to watch an older girl demonstrate swinging on the low bar. The low bar, as the name suggests, is the lower of the two bars on the uneven bars apparatus. When we first began practicing, the low bar was set up over a foam pit, so that if anyone fell, there was something to cushion the landing. After the older girl demonstrated the swing, the coach asked who wanted to try. I was the first to raise my hand.
Before the bars apparatus was redesigned in 1996, the bars were very thick. And at six years old, my hands were so small that I could not properly grip the bar at all. After just a few swings, the palms of my hands were already raw. The coach didn’t ask me to stop, and I had no choice but to keep swinging. The pain was piercing — impossible to put into words.
As the swinging motion became more practiced, the coach then required me to swing up into a handstand — that is, with the coach’s protection and assistance, to support my entire body upside down above the bar on my arms.
I can no longer remember exactly how I got through that and finally came off the bar. What I do remember is that from that moment on, I truly no longer liked any game or movement resembling a swing. Because every time I came off the bar after swinging, my palms would be rubbed raw, and my arms were so numb they had nearly lost all feeling.
When I got home, my grandmother held me and wept bitterly, scolding my father furiously and telling him not to make me do child labor anymore. Grandmother said that although the family was not wealthy, feeding one small granddaughter was no problem at all, and she would not permit me to continue training. Perhaps this family battle put pressure on my young mind, because to resolve the conflict, I stood up from my grandmother’s arms, gathered my courage, and said to the whole family: “I want to do gymnastics. No matter how hard it is, I’m not afraid.”
My grandmother and my mother both wept until they could barely stand. I kept urging my elders not to cry, while my own tears streamed down without asking permission. The next morning, my father woke me, sat on the edge of my bed, and said with quiet gravity: “Xuanxuan Tuo, the path of gymnastics is a very hard one.”
In that moment, I saw the tears fall from my father’s eyes, too.
Torn palms, but the swinging does not stop. That is what training in a professional program means.
The coach required us to wear hand guards and keep swinging on the bar. But the guards only served as a buffer between the bar and flesh, and once training was underway, with every swing, the pain traveled from my palms straight into my heart.
In summer, doing handstands on the bar — whether it was sweat or tears, the drops fell one by one onto the yellow foam of the pit below. To take my mind off the pain and keep fulfilling the coach’s requirements, I imagined the drops soaking into the foam as little daisies blooming in Martyrs’ Park. Each time I swung into a handstand, I would count them: one daisy, two, three… twenty, thirty… Some of the little daisies, wilted by the heat, quickly evaporated. But as the intensity of training increased, fresh daisies bloomed with the relentlessness of prairie fire, spreading across the entire foam pit as if no force could stop them.
Three months of swinging training eliminated some of our small cohort, while forging the grip strength of those of us who remained. With enough grip strength, the bar at last felt like part of our own bodies, and our familiarity with it went without saying. Under the coach’s direction, we began to learn the giant swing.
Many people have done something like a giant swing on the horizontal bars at school. In my memory, those iron bars had a much smaller diameter — the bars on the uneven bars apparatus were nearly three or four times as thick. To perform a giant swing on a bar you cannot fully grip is a challenge whose risk and difficulty are obvious. Through unrelenting endurance — gritting through the pain, bearing it again and again — I became the first among our cohort of girls to master the giant swing.
That day, my father and grandmother came to collect me from the gymnastics hall. I excitedly pulled them over to the foam pit to watch me demonstrate the giant swing. When I finished, my grandmother took one leap straight into the foam pit and held me in her arms, crying again. I’ve lost count of how many times my grandmother cried; in my memory, almost every image connecting the gymnastics hall and my grandmother comes with tears.
Growing up, I heard from many friends in the sports commission that at facilities across the country where other athletes from other sports trained, parents were always present watching their children practice — except at gymnastics halls. Many different stories were told, all pointing to the same thing: parents who had witnessed gymnastics training would either stand outside the hall weeping brokenly, or they would pull their children away from training entirely, never to return. As children, we knew pain but did not know bitterness. Whenever an adult came to visit and said to me, “Gymnastics must be so hard!” I would reply, “Not hard at all — it’s sweet!” But whenever someone said, “Gymnastics must really hurt!” I would hold out my small palm and answer: “Yes. It really does hurt.”
In 2010, Xiaopeng got married, and we went to the United States to attend the wedding. We also visited the gymnastics club run by the parents of Xiaopeng’s wife, Anqi — the renowned gymnasts Mr. Li Xiaoping and Ms. Wen Jia. In that spacious gymnasium, the children trained with obvious happiness, treating gymnastics as an after-school activity and nothing more. We talked about the differences between training in the two countries. Sister Wenjia said: “In China, what matters is results; abroad, what matters is happiness.” Then she put her hand on my shoulder and added, “But only those of us who have been through hard training truly understand how to face life with ease. So, it’s not such a bad thing either.” Thinking it over afterward, what gymnastics gave to our generation of athletes — this deep understanding of life — may well transcend any ordinary notion of happiness or pain.
As the saying goes, if you can bear the saltiness, you can bear the thirst. The greater your capacity for suffering, the greater your capacity to recognize and appreciate what is beautiful.
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Notes
Martyrs’ Park (烈士公园) is a large public park in Changsha, Hunan Province, named in honor of revolutionary martyrs. A well-known local landmark, it has long served as one of the city’s principal recreational spaces. Liu Xuan’s comparison of drops of sweat and tears to daisies in the park draws on a familiar image from her childhood in Changsha.
Georges Pompidou (1911–1974), president of France from 1969 to 1974, argued that destiny is the opportunity through which a person’s talents are tested. The quotation implies that fate reveals itself not through grand announcements but through unexpected moments that challenge an individual’s abilities and resolve.
“If you can bear the saltiness, you can bear the thirst” (食得咸鱼抵得渴) is a Cantonese proverb that literally refers to eating salted fish and accepting the thirst that inevitably follows. Figuratively, it means that one must be willing to endure the consequences of one’s choices and bear hardship in pursuit of a desired goal. Liu Xuan uses the saying to suggest that the capacity to endure suffering deepens one’s appreciation of life’s rewards and beauties.
Chapter 2
As everyone knows, women’s gymnastics consists of four events, nicknamed in Chinese “跳高平自” (tiao-gao-ping-zi)— that is, vault, uneven bars, balance beam, and floor exercise.
As I mentioned earlier, the first event I encountered was the uneven bars, which earned me my first national championship. The second was the balance beam, which drew a perfect closing punctuation mark on my gymnastics career.
Under my coach’s guidance, I began learning the balance beam.
Training on the beam generally starts with a beam placed flat on the ground. The beam is five meters long and ten centimeters wide. To walk steadily on a strip of wood like that without wobbling is genuinely difficult.
At the beginning, our coach constantly told us to develop mùgǎn—a feel for the wood, meaning the balance beam—the same way a badminton player develops a feel for a racket or a soccer player develops a feel for the ball.
But where was this feel for wood supposed to come from?
Two steps and I was swaying side to side, like a clown walking a tightrope at the circus. I had no feel at all.
I asked my father, “What is mùgǎn?” He told me to press my face against the dining table, then against the door, and asked whether I could feel their texture. He also said: They are alive in their own way; you can sense their existence. To make the contrast vivid, he brought out the one stuffed dog toy we had in the house and pressed it against my face, so I could compare the difference. He said: “Mùgǎn is the feeling that makes wooden things feel familiar to you — not foreign.”
To find this feel for wood, I had a close encounter with every wooden object in the house. The dining table, the dish cabinet, the bedroom door, the desk, the cutting board, the chopsticks… Even in class, I rolled my pencil across my face. After school, while waiting for my parents to pick me up and take me to the gymnasium, I would hug the little tree in front of the school gate and talk to it with all my might.
As time passed, training grew steadily more intense. More and more running and jumping, longer and longer handstands — we would often train until we burst into tears. It was then that I finally understood what it meant to suffer. Those moments were truly beyond words: every minute, every second, a torment.
Jumps: 3,000 repetitions. Handstands: 30 minutes. Two minutes’ rest, then another set. Then another set, and another, again and again and again… By the end, I was barely conscious of what I was doing, moving mechanically out of pure habit.
Then one day, I developed a fever, my neck swelled up, and a hospital visit revealed I had mumps. I needed to be quarantined to recover.
My days at home felt like those of one of the Eight Immortals—free and carefree, able to do whatever I pleased. My arms didn’t ache, the pressure in my head was finally gone, and my calves weren’t cramping. Lying in bed looking up at the ceiling, I could burst out laughing for no reason at all.
When I returned to the team, during the full-squad handstand drill, every one of my teammates showered me with indignant complaints: “Why did you get to stay home? Why couldn’t you just come to the gym for one lap!” Because every single teammate wanted to catch mumps from me.
Rest. Rest. Rest. You had to pray to get sick; that’s how hard the training was.
Illness is a strange thing. When you truly want to get sick so you can stop being exhausted, illness is like a distant relative you haven’t seen in eight hundred years, never dropping by. When you’re older and want nothing of the sort, it becomes the neighbor next door; you run into it every time you turn around.
Some teammates deliberately kicked off their blankets at night, hoping to wake up with a fever the next morning. Some drank unboiled water behind their parents’ and coaches’ backs, begging and praying that gastroenteritis would come to them as fast as possible. And one teammate once slammed her head as hard as she could against a piece of equipment, hoping to open a large wound on her skull and stop training that way.
Looking back, it’s almost funny — and quite absurd: in a facility dedicated to building strong, healthy bodies, every person was looking for ways to fall ill.
It was during these days — when everyone was praying for divine intervention and desperate to get sick — that I had another incident.
Whenever there was a gymnastics competition in Hunan Province, we, children from the sports school, were sent to serve as “junior judges” — score-runners who carried scores from the scoring judges to the head event judge. In those days, computers weren’t as advanced as they are now, so after each judge punched in a score, they needed us, little assistants, to carry the scores to the chief judge. We were like ball boys at a tennis match. But we weren’t paid. The rationale: first, we could watch elite adult competitors while running scores; and second, we would become familiar with competition venues and atmosphere.
Once while running scores, I slipped — accidentally, I promise, it was not intentional! — and the back of my head hit the metal springboard in front of the vault. In those days, the front edge of the board was made of iron, so my skull was split open with a large gash, though I didn’t realize how serious it was. I got up and kept running scores. Blood streamed down the back of my neck all the way to the floor, and my fellow score-runners started screaming. That is how I finally realized I was injured. It shows just how harsh our training was in those days: our sensitivity to pain had almost disappeared.
Years later, I attended a former teammate’s wedding banquet. When we talked about that injury, my teammate said, “You have no idea — I screamed my head off when it happened!”
I asked: “Was it really that frightening?”
She said: “Frightening had nothing to do with it! It was pure envy! Jealous that you got to rest again!” That kind of escalating teasing perfectly captures the mentality of children who had lived through that kind of demonic training.
That fall nearly ended my gymnastics career. The coaching staff was worried about a concussion, so they made me stay home for a full month. That month, I was once again like an immortal crossing the sea — absolutely over the moon.
After resuming training for a year, we began competing.
This was the first gymnastics competition of my life. Although I didn’t achieve anything remarkable — only fourth place in the all-around, vault, and balance beam, and third place on bars and floor — certain details of that competition remain vivid in my memory to this day.
Since I was going to step onto a competition floor, I needed to put on my battle gear, which meant wearing a proper gymnastics leotard for the first time. When Coach Zhou brought out the borrowed kit and let me try it on, I held this blue-and-white leotard in my hands and looked it over again and again, thinking it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. How I wished it were my own! When I got home, I couldn’t bring myself to take it off. At dinner, I stood proudly on the sofa and asked my older brother, “Do I look like a gymnast?”
He said, “You look more like a gymnast than the national team!”
What does it even mean to look more like a gymnast than the national team? But those words made me so happy that evening that I didn’t want to take the leotard off even to bathe. The moment I finished bathing, I put it straight back on. Before turning off the light to sleep, I made my mother promise she would absolutely not take it off me after I fell asleep.
The competition finally began! It was the Hunan Province junior gymnastics Level 2 meet.
Walk out, salute, perform, finish. It was probably nerves from competing for the first time: a whole string of routines carried out as if directed by my subconscious, with no awareness of what I was actually doing. If I hadn’t since looked at the training and competition diary my father kept for me, I could never have recalled what I performed or what scores I received in my very first competition.
What I do remember is that during the final event — floor exercise — my mind went completely blank. After a few dance steps on the big carpet, my brain simply stopped working. I stood there motionless, like a character from a martial-arts novel who has had her pressure points struck, unable to move at all. Since I truly couldn’t remember what move came next, I simply let the floor music play on by itself, echoing through the entire arena. After a pause of roughly eight counts, I suddenly recalled the tumbling series that came next, so I frantically performed the closing combination, though it no longer lined up with the music. Even after the music had stopped, I was still doing the closing sequence. The music and the routine were like two adversaries refusing to meet.
Final salute, bow to the judges, and I walked off the floor in a daze. My teammates on the sidelines were doubled over with laughter, clutching their stomachs. In my nervousness and disarray, I had walked off the floor in the middle of the carpet with the same arm and leg swinging together, and had no idea.
Years later, whenever I went back to reunite with teammates and coaches, this story would always come up, and everyone would crack up all over again.
Athletes need a high fighting spirit and, when necessary, a competitive drive. But as a child, I had no confidence, and being introverted and quiet made it worse, so Coach Zhou was constantly calling out to me at training, “Have confidence! Believe in yourself! Where has your confidence gone?!”
After that competition, our whole squad assembled, and Coach Zhou said she was selecting a team captain — whoever wanted it should raise their hand. Of our six, every single person scrambled to raise their hands except me. I just sat there looking at Coach Zhou timidly. Because of this, Coach Zhou subjected me to a lengthy ideological talk after training.
“Do you really have no confidence that you could be captain?” She made me reflect on this question repeatedly and then report back to her.
Guided by my parents, I thought about it for a long time and concluded I truly couldn’t be captain. On this point alone, many gymnastics coaches at the time — once they heard — felt I had no future in the sport. They thought I lacked confidence and competitive drive.
Though all the coaches at the time doubted me because of my timidity, I am still proud that my parents and I never used that as a reason to quit gymnastics training.
There was a teammate in our group at the time named Li Yang. She was strikingly beautiful, with a long, slender figure, always wearing a flower in her hair, looking festive and bright. Everyone on the team adored her and was a little envious of her. In those days, we all traveled to training by bus or on our parents’ bicycles, but Li Yang arrived by car. Perhaps because of the inferiority complex this objective difference created in me, I always felt she was far better suited to be captain than I was.
For psychological reasons, I was scolded by the coaches many times and even subjected to physical punishment — made to run laps while shouting at the top of my lungs: “I must have confidence! I must have confidence!” The result: overcorrection, and I became even less confident than before.
After 1988, Li Yang suddenly disappeared. The gymnasium no longer had that doll-like little girl with the red flower in her hair. We teammates often thought of her in those days and wondered whether she was happier now that she wasn’t training. We used to imagine that her happiness might rub off on us, and let us see the day when we too might not have to practice gymnastics. And so, as they say, extremes meet: the fact that just imagining not having to do gymnastics could cheer us up for a while says something about how grueling training really was.
Twenty-three years after parting, Li Yang finally reached out to me through the internet. In that overseas phone call, talking about our childhood — well, as long as the Great Wall is, that’s how long we could talk!
She now lives in Canada with a happy family and two children. A couple of weeks ago, Wang Tao accompanied me to meet up with Li Yang and her family of three — her youngest didn’t come — at a children’s themed restaurant in Beijing. The two men spent the whole afternoon listening as the two of us women dredged up every training memory we could recall, going over it all without omitting a single detail. They couldn’t get a word in edgewise. It was a full-blown “reminiscing about bitter days” symposium. Talking about the hardship of those years, and the joy of those years, we both felt nothing but gratitude that life had given us that period of tempering because it meant that, in everything that came later, we were never afraid of losing and never afraid of exhaustion.
Although Li Yang and I had not seen each other for twenty-three years, the warmth of that reunion surpassed countless nodding acquaintances seen every single day. People who have endured the same hardships are never truly estranged by time or distance. Adversity reveals true friendship, and those far apart can feel as close as neighbors.
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Notes
30-minute handstands: In the United States, I have heard of Chinese-born coaches requiring their gymnasts to hold handstands for as long as fifteen minutes at a time.
The Eight Immortals (八仙) are eight legendary Daoist immortals who feature prominently in Chinese folklore. The phrase Eight Immortals Crossing the Sea (八仙过海) refers to a popular legend in which each immortal uses their own unique powers to traverse the ocean. In modern Chinese culture, the story is widely known through novels, operas, television dramas, and children’s programming. Liu Xuan invokes the image of the immortals to convey a carefree, idyllic existence free from ordinary burdens—in this case, a temporary escape from the rigors of gymnastics training.
Chapter 3
As a child, I was chubby and round-faced. In an era when women’s gymnastics prized delicate, cute-looking athletes, I could only keep advancing toward the professional team by being labeled the “hardworking and dedicated type.”
One day, Coach Chen Huijun came to the sports school to watch our training. Coach Zhou took me by the hand and introduced me to Coach Chen, saying, “This child has big hands and big feet, and her arm strength is quite impressive.”
Just like that, through Coach Zhou’s recommendation, I crossed the threshold and began a trial with the professional team.
On my first day at the professional team trial, the coaches were all busy attending to the older girls on the squad and had no time to look after me, a newcomer fresh from the sports school. One coach simply arranged for me to hang from the uneven bars and told me, “Don’t come down until I tell you to. Wait for my call.” And with that, he rushed off to spot the senior girls.
Chinese gymnastics at that time was in a golden age of results. Every day, the coaches sweated in the gymnasium, looking after the athletes most likely to make the national team and win medals. They forgot about me entirely, and it was almost an hour later before anyone remembered there was a new little team member still hanging on the bar. When the coach finally called me down, he was quite surprised by how composed I seemed.
That gritted-teeth, full-effort hang of mine left the coaches somewhat astonished. A girl of just over seven years old hanging for that long. Even today, perhaps not many people her age could do it. Through that remarkable bar-hanging performance, the coaches decided my forearm endurance and grip strength were good, and they kept me on for the provincial team trial. What they didn’t know was that during that nearly hour-long stretch, I had gone through the cycle several times of my arms going from pain to numbness and back to pain again. If I hadn’t been so desperate to train with the professional team and so determined to act “professional,” I would have burst into tears long ago.
Once the provincial team trial officially began, my days settled into a routine: mornings at school, at noon at the recreational sports school, afternoons at professional team training, and evenings going to a classmate’s house to ask what the homework assignment was before going home to do it.
Because of my semi-professional status, I could only attend school in the mornings. This situation was puzzling to a classmate who lived close to me and whom I often went to for homework help — she became resentful and stopped telling me the assignments. My parents wouldn’t let me tell the homeroom teacher, so I had to go to the home of a classmate who lived far away, wasting a lot of time coming and going. Back then, I could only sleep five or six hours a day and often fell asleep while doing my homework. Every time I went to class and heard classmates say they resented me for receiving special treatment, I felt deeply wronged, and tears would often well up in my eyes.
Honestly, compared to gymnastics training, I would rather have been at school. For one thing, gymnastics training was fairly monotonous; for another, I genuinely liked studying. Once, my mother was delayed at work and came late to pick me up for training, and I was thrilled. I ran to join my classmates for the afternoon class. Twenty minutes in, my mother’s figure appeared in the classroom doorway, and I tried to squeeze under my desk, but she spotted me anyway.
On the way to training, sitting on the back of my mother’s bicycle, I told her I really wanted to go back for my natural science class. My mother stopped the bike, turned around, and said: You can’t have everything — a person shouldn’t hope to hold candy in both hands at once. So in order to keep training in gymnastics, I would have to give up the natural science class. She promised that when we got home, my father would tutor me in it.
Later, the gymnastics coaches decided my situation was unsustainable — no guaranteed sleep, prone to injury in training, and the need for unified management once in the professional team. So, in September 1988, I left Jixiang Lane Primary School and enrolled in the provincial sports commission’s workers’ school. Because I was too young — the school had no lower grades — I jumped straight from second grade into fourth grade. This was the first time in my life I sat in class, and it was completely over my head, exactly like when I later enrolled at Peking University.
After the professional team trial, I was assigned to the coaching group of Guo Xinmin and Chen Huijun. Coach Guo was mainly responsible for vault, uneven bars, and floor exercise, while Coach Chen was responsible for balance beam.
At that time, we were in the midst of preparations for the Sixth National Games, and the target for Hunan’s women’s gymnastics team was the team championship. The team’s star athlete at the time was Sister Zeng Yingzi, who later briefly substituted for Coach Chen Huijun in training me. Because of the Games preparations, Coach Guo had no time for me, and handed me over to Coach Chen to work mainly on foundational balance beam movements and basic beam skills.
In those days, the Russian women’s post-landing salute had become enormously popular throughout the gymnastics world — that pose where you bend your back until your head nearly touches your bottom. It became the move that Chinese gymnastics fans most loved to mimic for fun. So, Coach Chen had us do 500 back-bends into that pose every day. Just those 500 back-bends took an hour’s practice, and when you finished, your lower back had ceased to feel like part of your body. This reminded me of when China’s soccer teams first introduced the twelve-minute run test, and a national team player, lying on the grass afterward, cried out that he couldn’t find his own backside. I think that feeling and the feeling after my 500 back-bends were very much the same kind of pain!
In addition to our daily 500 back-bends, we also stretched our ankles, pressed our knees, lifted our legs, and held leg positions. Chinese gymnastics and Chinese diving both possess the finest movement quality in the world, and this is inseparable from the strict demand, trained from childhood, that toes and knees must form a straight line. Everyone knows that diving queen Gao Min, in order to guarantee the quality of her movements, sat in the “tiger bench” to stretch her ankles after every training session, working to improve the flexibility of her feet and toes.
Perhaps because of Coach Chen’s particularly strict demands on my basic technique at that time, when I began achieving results later on, I was often praised by experts in the field for my quality of movement and the beauty of my poses.
Coach Chen was a person who cared greatly about appearances, but from childhood, I had never been praised for my looks by any coach. Back then, I had short hair and straight bangs across my forehead, looking just like a boy, and during training I wore a blue-and-dark-red striped tracksuit. Being introverted, I rarely smiled in front of others. Coach Chen thought I looked plain and decided to give me a “makeover.”
She combed all my hair back, exposing my forehead, and replaced my bottoms with a pair of black exercise leggings. With this one change, I looked much slimmer, and the whole effect was considerably more polished. Coach Chen said, “You’re actually not bad-looking; you just didn’t know how to present yourself. From now on, wear a little braid for training and competitions, and no more short hair.”
This was the first time I had ever heard someone outside my family compliment me. I was elated for days afterward, and every training session, I no longer felt like the ugly duckling in the corner.
At the end of 1988, I had the opportunity to formally transfer into the professional team, but a girl three years older than me transferred in mid-season from the wrestling team, so the sports commission decided to give the roster spot to her. (At the time, I didn’t understand; now I think — transferring from wrestling to gymnastics, what an astonishing transformation!)
In July 1989, I represented Hunan Province for the first time at the National Youth Games. Since I was still not officially on the roster and had not prepared thoroughly enough, I did not achieve good results. In December of the same year, I officially entered the provincial team and at last became a full professional gymnast!
More than twenty years have passed in the blink of an eye, and thinking back to the moment I learned I’d been officially registered, I still feel a flutter in my chest. Nine-year-old me had landed her first job in life; the joy was like that of Camel Xiangzi [the literary character], who saved three years of hard-earned money, scrimped and scraped together a hundred silver dollars, and bought himself his own rickshaw — my heart was surging.
After joining the professional team, besides the larger gymnasium, more apparatus, and more complex skills from the coaches, the food situation underwent a dramatic transformation as well. At the sports school, meals in the canteen had been restricted. But in the professional team’s canteen, it was like walking into a culinary paradise. The all-you-can-eat cafeteria let you eat whatever you wanted, and there were also fruit and yogurt. Fruit and yogurt were rationed, though, so you had to collect your portion. The very first time I collected mine, I brought it all back as a gift to my elementary coach, Teacher Zhou, at the sports school.
After joining the professional team, rest schedules also changed. Before, I went home once a week; now it was once every two weeks. Training went from five days a week to six. Every day started with 6 a.m. morning exercises; on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, there were eight full hours of training; on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, mornings were for training and afternoons for academic studies. That three-point life — dormitory, dining hall, gym — began then and lasted until my retirement.
In those days, going home only every two weeks meant I could return only on the Sunday morning of every other week, and had to be back by seven in the evening. Every time I returned to the team, I felt wretched — sitting on the back of my father’s bicycle, pressing my face against his back, clinging to him with both arms, not wanting to leave home at all.
Once, my father was cycling me back to the sports commission when the tire was punctured by a nail mid-journey and became completely unrideable. Afraid I would be late, he got off and pushed the bike while trotting along beside me the whole way. There were many uphills on the road from home to the sports commission. Watching my father, drenched in sweat, breathing hard, I didn’t know that I should feel sorry for him; I only feared being late and getting criticized by the team, and thoughtlessly blamed him. Now, thinking back to those childish words, I am filled with remorse and feel a deep understanding of the saying: “How pitiable is the heart of parents everywhere.”
A child’s longing for her parents is instinct; returning to the team meant another half-month apart, a profound loss. From that time on, I was rarely by my parents’ side, and in adulthood, I lived away from home for work for long periods. This has become the greatest regret of my life. I lost irreplaceable, beautiful time that can never be recovered.
The professional team was organized in groups of six, divided by age and level into large and small groups, each with a team leader. In my group, I was the youngest, so I followed my senior teammates’ words without question. Over time, when girls are together, they inevitably bicker, but because I was introverted and self-doubting, I never joined in. Years later, when we reminisced about those petty childhood quarrels, everyone would double over laughing. The senior girls remembered me as a shy little kid who always hid in the corner with her head down. No one would have imagined that this corner-hiding, shy kid would one day become the captain of the Chinese national women’s gymnastics team.
In the provincial team, I shared a room with Li Yi and Huang Qiujia. In those days, we didn’t have the means to shower every day, so we had to boil our own hot water. There wasn’t enough electricity, and the three of us boiling water simultaneously would trip the circuit breaker. To avoid this, we worked out a system: whoever woke up first in the morning would shout “I’m boiling water first!”, and whoever woke up second would shout “I’m second one!” This wake-up-order system for boiling water spared us any minor friction during our time off from training.
In a competitive sports environment, although we got along well, daily training still had us competing against each other, and there was inevitable quiet jealousy whenever one of us received praise from a coach. Everyone wanted to train better and earn more praise. But as the youngest member of the group, every time I trained alongside my senior teammates, an instinctive awe and respect for them made any competitive impulse evaporate completely. After retirement, I talked about this with my junior Yang Yun, and she described exactly the same inner experience — perhaps this is the psychological tradition of our generation’s gymnastics team, or of every generation since.
Chen Cuiting — winner of six gold medals across two Asian Games, the famous gymnast known as the “gymnastics doll” — was my senior teammate. We shared the same first coach, Zhou Xiaolin. During training, Coach Zhou often brought up Sister Cuiting, telling us that Cuiting was not a naturally gifted athlete, but that through hard training and the good habit of using her brain, she far surpassed athletes with better natural ability. So in our training, we were taught to, first, learn to be unafraid of hardship and to, second, learn to think.
Talking of Sister Cuiting’s intelligence and diligence brings to mind something I found particularly admirable about her. After retiring, she went to Shenzhen University. When she first enrolled, as a retired athlete, she knew almost no English. But by the second year, her English scores were number one in the whole class, and in her graduation year, she tested into Columbia University in America with the second-highest score in the entire school. Sister Cuiting’s intelligence and work ethic were legendary throughout Chinese gymnastics.
Sister Cuiting scored her first 10.0 at the 1986 Seoul Asian Games. After winning the all-around gold medal, she came back to visit Coach Zhou at the sports school. At the time, we looked at this senior from our own school with enormous pride, and she became our role model. Later, at the 1990 Beijing Asian Games, I watched on television as she scored a 10.0 again and won gold, and it was then that I truly made a private resolve to be like her — to train with diligence and dedication, not only to win the national championship but to represent China in international competition and bring honor to the country.
With Sister Cuiting as my model, I trained even harder in the provincial team. I often thought, perhaps it is because Chinese gymnastics has produced so many legendary figures that we, their successors, have had so many role models to learn from, and that is why results have been passed down, generation after generation.
Not long after joining the provincial team, a familiar face suddenly appeared in the gymnasium. I could hardly believe my eyes.
Standing before us was none other than the Prince of Gymnastics — Li Ning!
Just before laying eyes on Brother Li Ning, we had been issued a set of purple Li Ning sportswear. We each thought Brother Li Ning was extraordinary: before this, we had never heard of anyone using their own name as a brand for athletic clothing. Brother Li Ning had simply become our idol!
That day, Brother Li Ning came to watch us train at the provincial team — the greatest gymnast in Chinese history was standing right before us. My parents had pointed to him on television more than once, telling me to learn from his poise and composure. What I remember most vividly is the 1988 Seoul Olympics: Brother Li Ning competed while injured and made some errors during the competition. Yet when he presented himself, he still wore a smile, composed and unhurried. My father told me: That is the bearing of a true gymnastics champion! Whether in success or failure, you must always show your best spirit and expression to the audience. That image, even now recalling it, remains vivid. From that point on, I always held Brother Li Ning as my model, demanding of myself that I give the audience my most beautiful smile at every presentation.
On this visit, the team made a point of introducing two people to Brother Li Ning — me and Li Xiaopeng. The coach brought me before him and said, “This little girl has real potential.” He smiled, patted my head, and said, “Train hard. Work toward making the national team and bringing honor to the country.”
Just a few brief words, but I kept them in my heart, and trained harder than ever from that day on. That is the power of a role model.
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Notes
Her age: According to Liu Xuan’s memoir, she transferred to the provincial sports commission’s school in September 1988 while enrolled in second grade and was promoted directly to fourth. Under the normal Chinese school progression, second-grade pupils that year would generally have been born in 1980–81, whereas fourth-grade pupils would have been born in 1978–79. Notably, the latter range corresponds to the birth year under which Liu later competed (i.e, 1979), while the former corresponds to the birth year often used in the Chinese press (i.e., 1980). Her description of herself as a nine-year-old at the end of 1989 is also consistent with a 1980 birth year.
Camel Xiangzi (骆驼祥子) is the protagonist of Lao She’s 1936 novel Rickshaw Boy. After years of exhausting labor and extreme frugality, Xiangzi finally saves enough money to buy his own rickshaw, making the purchase a symbol of hard-won personal achievement.
Chapter 4
The Hunan provincial gymnastics team has long been known as the “Little Tigers,” primarily because our training in those days was far more ferocious and rigorous than that of other provincial teams. Everyone knew that the kids on the Hunan team were the kind of kids who could take hard training and never shied away from hardship. When competition came, every one of us had the spirit to grit our teeth and fight, and our results naturally came out a cut above.
Training in that kind of environment, we, younger squad members, would follow our senior teammates in, never being allowed to complain about the enormous training loads. My particular group was called the “Devil’s Group.” Mention Coach Guo’s conditioning workouts, and people would quake in their boots. Take handstand push-ups: other groups did sets of 20 or 30. Our group started at sets of 50, completing two sets in a row every time. For hanging leg raises to work the abs, other groups did 30; we started at a minimum of 50.
After I retired, I took part in a dance competition, and some audience members remarked that my legs looked thick. My manager at the time was worried I would be hurt by such negative comments — after all, girls do care about their appearance — and cautiously probed my feelings about it. In fact, I never felt bothered by it at all, because those legs are a symbol of the hardship and endurance of our generation of athletes. For us, they are invisible medals, forever glowing with the blood and sweat we poured into gymnastics. Looking back on the days of training under Coach Guo’s group, on top of everything already mentioned, each session also included extra squat jumps — 100 per set. Now I can’t help but laugh, because I remember the swollen, pumped-up feeling in every muscle afterward — we felt like Popeye after eating his spinach. The girls would joke around by calling each other “Sailor No. 1” and “Sailor No. 2” to find some fun in the suffering.
Back then, the morning exercises on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays were devoted to upper-body strength work. This was the training session I feared most, because after every session, my arms simply could not be lifted. Especially the morning sessions after breakfast — my body was barely functional, and the moment I gripped the uneven bars to do a swing to handstand, my arms would start shaking uncontrollably. Gritting my teeth, gritting my teeth, gritting my teeth — just to hold on. The coach demanded we push through, no matter how sore and aching our arms were. When gritting our teeth no longer helped, the only thing the girls could do was let the tears stream freely as our arms convulsed.
The most unforgettable session was one evening after academic classes. We all filed into the gym and were told to do 300 hanging leg raises.
Hanging leg raises are brutal to begin with. We grip the wooden bar, raise both legs up to touch our wrists, then lower them back down. The coach’s rule was that we could rest in between, but our legs couldn’t touch the bar, and we couldn’t drop off. Any other form of rest was permitted, he said. The problem was that under those rules, there was simply no way to rest at all. After hearing the coach’s instructions, we looked at each other, and what we saw in each other’s eyes was pure despair.
Of course, hanging leg raise training serves two purposes: first, building the abdominal muscles; second, building grip strength in the forearms. For anyone who wants to become an elite gymnast, this kind of training is simply unavoidable.
That day, the gymnastics hall became a torture chamber. Everyone in our group hung from the bars, howling, the cries of pain spilling out through the windows in a way that made your skin crawl. Members of other groups watched us with sympathy, while at the same time worrying that their own coach might decide to follow suit.
I was the first to finish all 300. The moment I let go of the bar, my abdomen and forearms cramped simultaneously. I could only lie on the floor twitching faintly, like someone who had been blasted by heavy artillery. One by one, my teammates were “shot down” and collapsed to the floor beside me, but none of us could see each other clearly; our eyes had long since swollen shut from crying.
As brutal as this training was, each of us took something away from it. For me, it was precisely that early high-intensity training that laid the solid foundation for my comeback in 1996 after a period of inactivity.
After joining the provincial team, my father would often come to the gym to watch me train. Although he very much hoped that I could go further down the gymnastics path, he also understood very clearly that achieving results in competitive gymnastics is no simple matter. Beyond talent and hard work, there are many unpredictable objective factors. Historically, great gymnasts have never been made by talent or hard training alone; it also requires building strong psychological qualities over time, and the cooperation of one’s surrounding circumstances.
My father was worried that I might ultimately fail to succeed in gymnastics and ruin my academic performance in the process. So he sought out Coach Guo Xinmin for a consultation, and the reply he received was: her physical aptitude is above average, she is obedient in training and works hard; she can keep going and see how it develops.
My father was torn. In the end, he had no choice but to ask for my opinion. I said:, “We’ve already come this far. How could I stop now?”
I was only 10 years old when I said that. Even more than twenty years later, I can still hear clearly the voice of that stubborn little girl, determined to keep fighting. The scene is like a film image — hazy and distant — a young me standing there, unwilling to admit defeat, yet unafraid of failure, holding her head up for her dream. As I grew older, having left behind the training ground that had forged my willpower, I would sometimes find my footing disrupted by sudden setbacks. Whenever that happened, I would quiet myself down and call on that brave younger self, reminding myself: Learn to persevere.
I am not an especially gifted athlete. And it is precisely for that reason that sport taught me this precious belief: perseverance. As the saying goes, “If one’s resolve is not firm, nothing can be accomplished.” Dear readers, if you are on the verge of giving up on some effort of your own, please believe in yourselves. Entrust your dreams to your inner strength, because it will be the most faithful companion of your life.
After 1990, I began officially representing the Hunan provincial team in competition.
The first competition I entered as a provincial representative was a junior meet, and it was also the first time I had a competition leotard that was truly my own. The moment I put on that bright red leotard, every cell in my body ignited with excitement. I struck poses in front of the dormitory mirror a hundred times in a frenzy, then tiptoed back to my bed as though I were making a gymnast’s graceful exit.
In this competition, I was still the youngest on the provincial team, so I had not yet caught up in difficulty across the board, and my floor exercise still used someone else’s music and choreography. Having your own music and choreography for floor is like a singer finally having their own song rather than covering someone else’s. It represents ability, and it is a symbol of true strength.
In this competition, my floor music and choreography were the same routine that one of my senior teammates had used at the 6th National Games. Even without my own music and choreography, I performed with full commitment during the competition. I finished fourth in floor exercise.
Through that competition, the coaching staff found that my mental composure was strong and that I was worth continuing to develop. So, after returning to the provincial team, Coach Guo put me through a series of high-intensity basic skills sessions. Through that training, my upper-body strength improved markedly, and my grip on the bars made clear progress. As a result, in tests of fundamental skills like giants and clear hip circles, I was consistently able to turn in good results. Within the team, I also became the first athlete my age to learn a Tkatchev.
Because Coach Chen Huijun was preparing to retire at the time, our senior teammate Zeng Yingzi stepped in to teach us beam for a period. By then, I was already able to perform a back handspring to a layout step-out on the high beam. Sister Yingzi felt that I had an excellent feel for the beam and learned skills very quickly, so she had me begin training a difficult series consisting of two back handsprings connected to a tucked full. Under the current Code of Points, this element is rated in the F group — extremely high difficulty.
At the time, nobody was performing a tucked full on beam (later, only Beijing gymnast Kui Yuanyuan performed a layout full version). Yingzi decided that this would be the difficulty element I would focus on mastering. I could already perform it on the high beam with mats stacked underneath, although the execution was not yet consistent. Because I learned the skill so quickly, my later coach, Hu Jing, identified balance beam and uneven bars as my strongest events.
During that period, training with the provincial team was brutally hard, and the pressure was enormous — so much so that I developed sleepwalking.
At first, I would often stand up in the middle of the night, calling out for my mother, crying, and saying I didn’t want to train anymore. It gradually worsened to the point where I would climb out of bed and sit beside other teammates’ beds, muttering to myself, frightening them as though they’d seen a ghost. To prevent me from jumping from the building in the middle of the night, the team moved my bed away from the window to the inner wall. But when my parents found out, they were still worried I might hurt myself or someone else in the night, and made a special trip to the dormitory to remove every sharp object.
Every day after morning training, we had an hour of rest at midday. One day, after waking from our afternoon nap, we rushed over to the training hall. As the session neared its end around 6:30 in the evening, once again, only the members of our Devil’s Group remained in the gym, gritting their teeth and fighting on. Determined not to give the coach any reason to criticize us, everyone was focused on completing their training. Suddenly, the enormous sound of an alarm clock rang out through the silent gymnasium. Hearing the alarm was like hearing the end-of-class bell. Everyone inwardly cheered for whoever had dared to remind the coach that time was up. But just as quickly, they worried the coach might punish the whole group with extra training, and the mood turned anxious. Under the coach’s furious glare, everyone scrambled to search. The alarm clock was eventually found in my bag, its little iron hammer striking the two brass bells back and forth without the slightest apology. I rushed over and silenced it, only then realizing I must have been sleepwalking again during the afternoon nap. I told the coach that, in my dream, I felt I was putting my lunch box into my schoolbag, and somehow it had turned into an alarm clock. When everyone heard this, the whole room burst out laughing.
Chapter 5
In December 1990, Coach Guo brought Yùzǐ (毓子), Yǔxuán (禹璇), and me to Beijing to participate in a twenty-day national team training camp. When I learned I was going to the national team’s gymnasium, I felt both excited and a little nervous. The national gymnastics team’s training hall is a sacred place in every gymnast’s heart! The older athletes training there were all elite gymnasts. After joining the provincial team, I had long dreamed of this day. Imagining myself walking into the national team’s training hall was a constant source of motivation for my hard work.
The day before going to Beijing, I even ran to ask senior national team athletes, earnestly inquiring whether Beijing Mandarin required an especially precise “er” sound.
And so, filled with anticipation and nerves, I finally walked into the national gymnastics team’s training hall. My feelings at that moment were probably much like Grandma Liu entering the Grand View Garden for the first time. I looked around at everything in the hall, finding beauty and brilliance everywhere, and couldn’t help letting out gasps of admiration.
On the first day of training in the hall, I didn’t even dare to straighten my back, because training on the adjacent floor were the champions who had won gold and silver for the motherland at international competitions. The anxiety was like a student who had just managed to pass the College English Test Band 4 and was suddenly asked to deliver a speech in English before a room full of Britons — tongue-tied, hands and feet not knowing what to do.
There were a hundred people at this camp. Coach Guo said that after twenty days, there would be a selection test, and the top eight could remain for national team training. During this period, I trained with great seriousness and dedication, hoping so much for the chance to step up into the national team.
Twenty days later, the test began. The number of participants had been whittled down to just fifty.
After the results came out, I ranked sixth! The moment I learned my result, tears welled up in the corners of my eyes, and at the same time, there was a deep reluctance to leave, because staying in Beijing would mean fewer chances to see my parents. But before I could even process this bittersweet feeling, Coach Guo found me, told me I had not been selected, and asked me to pack my things and return to Hunan with him the next morning.
This cold water doused me completely. After Coach Guo left, I ran alone to stand outside the national team training room, gazing at it the way one gazes at an enormous piece of cotton candy. It had given me a moment of sweetness, only to leave me with the bitterness of that sweetness suddenly disappearing and a whole night of loss.
The next day, when I went to the gym and saw Yùzǐ, who had been kept for national team training, I was overcome with envy. Coach Guo later told me the reason I hadn’t been selected: the head coach of the national training group at that time thought my posture was poor, my movements weren’t pretty enough, and I wasn’t polished enough. These points of criticism became extraordinarily precious to me, and they became the standards I constantly demanded of myself in training afterward.
After this crushing blow, when I returned to the provincial team, my training began to grow somewhat lazy and lacking in initiative. I kept feeling that since I’d been sent back, I would certainly never have the chance to make the national team again. The urge not to train kept growing, and the desire to go back to school re-emerged.
After my father saw how I was feeling, he encouraged me and analyzed my future prospects. He said that I was still young and that if the coach felt my posture wasn’t good enough, it was just something to work on. Being young was my greatest advantage, because there was plenty of time to adjust and reach my best. Father also brought up my then-favorite senior athlete, Chen Cuiting. Sister Cuicui wasn’t a great beauty at first glance, and her natural physical gifts weren’t the best either, but she still won the Asian Games championship through her own painstaking effort. If she could do it, so could I.
Father also told me a story called “A Genius.” It was about a circus performer who, because he believed his natural gifts were outstanding, grew complacent about training, and at an international competition lost to a teammate who had the worst natural gifts in the troupe but worked the hardest.
Father’s encouragement rekindled the flame of fighting spirit within me. No matter how strictly Coach Guo trained me — even the most grueling training — I gave it everything. To improve movement quality and consistency, Coach Guo would often set assignments of 100 giant swings in a set, five or six sets in a row — a terrifying amount of work. Simply doing giant swings one after another might have been manageable, but every repetition had to meet exacting standards: during the downswing, the straddled position had to remain perfectly balanced, the legs had to form an unbroken line from toes to knees, and, on the regrasp, the arms could not bend. It was like engraving a thousand poems onto a single grain of rice—every detail demanded absolute precision.
To help me achieve results quickly in upcoming competitions and prove my ability, the team raised the difficulty across the board, especially on uneven bars and beam. On uneven bars, I began learning a reverse-grip forward-somersault release move [i.e., a Jaeger]. When first learning this skill, I started with a safety belt, then gradually removed it once I could do it easily with the belt, until the skill was stable enough to take to competition. To give the skill both quality and consistency, the coach required me to hit 30 good Tkatchevs each day — a target that could only realistically be achieved within about 200 attempts on a good day. In those days, the bar would quickly turn red. When my palms tore open, the chalk would block the wound, and the blood wouldn’t flow — I’d just keep training without a word. On bars, I had originally done every skill without grips because they felt uncomfortable. But eventually my palms were entirely covered in blisters, and the pain during training was so piercing I had no choice but to wear them. My teammates all said that the moment they saw me wearing white grips, they knew my hands had torn again.
This intensive training quickly produced results in my case.
In September 1991, the National City Games. Because my uneven bars routine incorporated two release moves, my scores rose quickly, and I placed second — just behind Luo Li, who was world-class on bars at the time.
Then, in May 1992, I competed in the National Adult Championships for the first time, scored 9.8 on uneven bars, and won my first individual event title — the uneven bars gold medal. I was genuinely very proud because I had finally proved myself, proved that hard work is never wasted. Another reason for pride was that I was the youngest athlete ever to win an adult-division national championship. This record has held to this day. After the competition, Coach Guo showed me the judges’ comments: “Uneven bars — large movement amplitude, beautiful posture, good height on the release.” Reading those words, I felt a warm sweetness inside, like having endured a long, cold winter and then stepping into a sweltering summer and tasting a popsicle.
After achieving these results, the family was also happy for me. Although my mother worried about how hard I worked and had never been entirely willing to allow me to pursue gymnastics professionally, now that there were results, no one wanted to give it up, and my grandmother and mother had no choice but to swallow their pain and support me. It was also around this time that my father’s work unit at the power company wanted to groom him as a successor to the leadership cohort, which required him to substantially increase his business travel, and his daily workload became much more demanding. However, I was in poor health at the time and had arranged with the team for a temporary break from residential training, so I needed to be picked up and dropped off for training every day. To help with my training without interfering with Father’s work, Mother boldly took to the road after just a day of learning to ride a bicycle. On her way to pick me up, she fell and broke her right arm.
Mother came to pick me up with her arm in plaster. To keep me from worrying, she covered it up with her clothing. I asked her why her outfit was so strange that day. She said her hands were cold and she didn’t want to take them out. I didn’t think much of it, climbed onto the back of the bicycle, and held tight to her back. Later, Mother told me that the day I accidentally bumped her injury, tears instantly welled up in her eyes.
I had poor eyesight from a young age, and Father worried this would create even more obstacles in beam training, so he took me by bicycle every day for treatment. Especially after joining the provincial team, since I could only come home once every two weeks, Father searched everywhere for a place to treat myopia. On the day Mother broke her arm, Father wasn’t home. It was only later that we learned he had heard from friends about a factory in Guangzhou that specialized in selling myopia treatment equipment, and had unhesitatingly boarded a train heading south.
After the short break from residential training ended, I returned to provincial team training, coming home once every two weeks. But this interval was too long for effective vision treatment, so Father had no choice but to politely decline his work unit’s good intentions, give up the promotion opportunity, and ensure that, every evening after training, he could bicycle over from home to the team with the eyesight-treatment device.
In addition to correcting my eyesight, Father also assigned me calligraphy homework, and every day after training, I would write a page. Ones he judged good, he’d circle with a big red pen; ones that were poor got a blue cross and had to be rewritten. After I finished writing and after the vision treatment, Father would give me a massage to loosen my muscles. Through rain or shine, his fatherly love was like a mountain.
Later, Father came to watch me train at the gymnastics team more and more often, and naturally came to understand both my weaknesses and strengths in training. Gradually, he became my half-coach, even helping hold the safety belt when I was learning the Tkachev on bars.
Knowing my leg strength was relatively weak, he used my precious Sunday rest time at home to take me running up and down stairs, jumping stairs, to build up my leg strength.
While Father was focusing his energies on my training, something happened to Mother.
Mother fell ill from overwork, went to the hospital for a check-up, and was told by the doctor she had cancer. My parents hadn’t planned to tell me, but I accidentally overheard their conversation in the kitchen. I was only around ten years old at the time, and I only knew that cancer meant death was not far off. But I didn’t dare let my parents know I’d heard their conversation — they were keeping it from me precisely to avoid affecting my training. I ran back to my room and hugged my plush dog and cried my eyes out, then went back to the gym to train, but my mind kept wandering. The coaches didn’t know what to make of my state, and when they tried to talk to me, I refused to open up.
For a long time after that, the sky felt grey to me. In my memory, Changsha rained every day, a slow and drizzling gray.
Later, Mother went to several hospitals, and it was confirmed: the original cancer diagnosis had been a misdiagnosis. When my brother told me this news, I laughed and cried at the same time — happy for my mother’s health, and furious at the incompetent doctor. Because of one careless diagnosis, an entire family’s happiness could so easily be destroyed. How terrifying!
With the alarm about Mother’s health resolved, Father began devoting even more time to my training. He managed my studies and training in meticulous detail, treating my gymnastics career almost as his second career.
For every national competition, no matter where it was held, he would carry his own bag and follow the team to the venue to cheer for me. Throughout my gymnastics career, Father never missed a single domestic competition (apart from international ones). And I grew accustomed to seeking out Father’s reassurance at competitions. Perhaps it’s a father-daughter spiritual connection — I could always spot Father in the stands at a glance. There are three minutes of warm-up time before a competition; whenever I wasn’t feeling confident, I would look toward Father’s spot. His gaze never left me, and seeing me send out distress signals on the competition floor, he would always immediately make a clenched-fist pumping gesture to cheer me on. Every time I saw Father clenching his fist encouragingly, I felt so much more at ease.
In those days, Father and I also had a secret pact. Whenever the venue announcer said, “The next competitor from the Hunan team is ‘Liu Rui,’ or ‘Liu Wangrui,’ or ‘Wang Rui,'” I would look up at Father and exchange a smile. Because we both knew that that meant it was my turn.
My original name was Liu Jing (刘璩). The character in my original given name, 璩, is pronounced the same as 璇, and the name was chosen by Father after a long search through the Kangxi Dictionary, finalized after careful deliberation. The character “璩” has a lovely meaning — a beautiful jade stone possessing intelligence and spirit. But this rare character was constantly the source of amusement at competitions, with announcers repeatedly saying: “Liu…… (stuck) Liu……RUI……Liu Wangrui……” Coaches felt that my name was always being mispronounced, which might affect my pre-competition mindset, and suggested Father change my name.
When competing for the provincial team, I would often stay behind after my competition to watch three other athletes. Because the coaches had identified my strong events as bars and beam, Lu Li and Luo Li, who at that time had a world-leading technical level on bars, were two seniors I absolutely had to watch. Beyond that, Yang Bo’s beam was even more renowned; I simply had to watch her. Every time I stood at the competition platform and watched Sister Bo finish her beam, I couldn’t help but clap my hands red.
Since joining the provincial team, the event I actually liked competing least happened to be beam. Although beam was my strong event, having to perform a full routine on a 10-centimeter-wide piece of wood always made my heart tighten. But when it came to bars and floor, I became very proactive; you might call that quality a desire to perform!
My uneven bars difficulty at that time was considerable, and every competition always attracted a great deal of attention from coaches and athletes. So when I was flying between the two bars, it always felt like a spotlight was shining on me, and I had found a stage all my own. Floor exercise, while not my strong event, was the only event with music. The music I used was fairly upbeat, and while competing to that lively music, I felt every joint in my body was drawn taut like a string, ready to spring. In daily training, I especially loved practicing “frame sets” [架子套] to floor music. A “frame set” is our professional term, meaning you perform the routine without the difficult acrobatic tumbling, only the dance elements. Girls probably naturally love to dance, so doing frame sets at home always put me in a particularly good mood.
Father had essentially shifted his work focus entirely to me, keeping training diaries for me every day. When I grew up and leafed through those yellowing notebooks, I saw Father had written:
My daughter is becoming increasingly eager to perform. Through physical expression, she is beginning to gain a deeper understanding of how gymnastics conveys artistic beauty.
July 3, 1992
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Note
Luo Li was the bars champion at the 1994 World Championships in Brisbane. She is not the same gymnast as Lu Li, who won gold at the 1992 Olympic Games.
Beijing Mandarin is often associated with erhua (儿化), the addition of an “-r” sound to the ends of certain words (e.g., zhèr “here,” nǎr “where”). Because this feature is largely absent from Hunan speech, the young Liu Xuan imagined that speaking “proper” Beijing Mandarin might require especially precise pronunciation of these -r endings. Her question reflects both her unfamiliarity with the capital and a child’s anxiety about fitting in.
Grandma Liu enters the Grand View Garden (刘姥姥进大观园) is a famous episode from the eighteenth-century Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou Meng). A poor, rustic old woman visits the opulent mansion of the Jia family and is overwhelmed by its luxury and sophistication. The expression has become a common Chinese idiom describing someone encountering an impressive, unfamiliar world for the first time.
College English Test Band 4 (CET-4): A standardized national English-language proficiency examination administered in China to non-English-major university students. Introduced in 1987, the CET-4 assesses listening, reading, writing, and translation skills and is widely used as a benchmark of intermediate English proficiency.