From karate as a kid to swimming as an adult, Bonnie Tsui has always relished an active life. But when she started investigating muscles, she found this most durable tissue encapsulates who we are
My earliest memories of childhood involve hugging my dad, and also punching him. Let me explain. My father, who moved from Hong Kong to New York in the late 1960s, was a professional artist and a black belt in karate. When my brother and I were kids, he trained us up in his studio, to draw and paint and punch and kick like him. “I wanted to make you into little ninjas,” he told me a few months ago, with his big laugh, as we worked out with the heavy bag at his home in China, where he lives today. He’s 78 now, but he subscribes to much the same programme he did when I was in nappies. What I understood from a young age is that art and exercise went hand in hand – and that muscle was beautiful in form and function.
Our career as karate kids did not take off, since my brother and I were, and remain, constitutionally averse to conflict. But what did stick was a dedication to a life of physicality. We swam competitively, worked as lifeguards, taught swimming lessons, trained at the gym. My brother became a physical therapist and I became a journalist who writes about all kinds of things, much of it having to do with the art, science and culture of the body, and what it is to live a life in motion.
