Nguyen Phuong Lan (R) and her daughter.

Nguyen Phuong Lan did not take up wushu until she was 21 years old yet she still managed to become world champion of the martial art eight years later.

Lan took a keen interest in martial arts from a young age but put in five years of swimming training before going to work at the Hai Chau Confectionery Factory.

“Many people are surprised to hear I used to work in a confectionery factory. It’s an interesting story,” Lan said.

“In those days, we made candy on a seasonal basis. When the season ended, the workers had to do other jobs like digging or making bricks. However, everybody loved the hard work.”

She got married when she turned 20, but her enthusiasm for martial arts never waned.

One day, she went with some friends to the home of Hoang Vinh Giang, who was director of the Hanoi Department of Physical Training and Sports at the time.

Giang told them he wanted to form a wushu team so Lan enrolled in the course that had just opened to supply athletes for the team. She spent her days working in the factory and her early mornings and evenings practicing wushu.

“I was 21 years old when I started, much older than the others in the class. And my baby was only 10 months old, so the training was pretty hard for me,” Lan said. “Physically, I was not fit, but I was determined to be as good as any of my classmates.”

When wushu first came to Vietnam in 1992, there were almost no training facilities for it, so the class had to rely on videos brought in from China.

It wasn’t until more than a year later that the sports department got around to signing up a Chinese coach.

By then Lan was so eager to shine in wushu that she gave up her factory job.

“It was financially very hard because it meant I had no income. The department only gave us VND60,000 (US$3.37) a month. Fortunately, my hubby and family gave me plenty of support,” Lan said.

Her first overseas competition was the South East Asian Games in Singapore in 1993.

Her nandao performance won heaps of praise, particularly from the Chinese, but she only managed to bag the bronze medal.

“I was shocked and bathed in tears,” Lan said. “I was very disappointed because I’d expected the judges at an international competition to be scrupulously fair.

“Later on, when I’d calmed down, I thought perhaps the judges might have been biased against Vietnamese wushu martial artists as a matter of course.

“That’s when I decided it was up to me to improve the image and standing of Vietnamese wushu, and make my country a wushu power on the international stage.”

With a burning desire to change the face of Vietnamese wushu, Lan began to practice hard day and night.

In 1994, she was sent to China to train. Her wushu skills improved greatly thanks to the superior Chinese nan quan (southern fist) experts.

Lan was at her peak but there was no wushu competition in the SEA Games for several years.

In the end it didn’t matter as she won the world championship in 1999. “It was an unforgettable experience,” she said.

Lan retired from the international arena in 2003 to become a coach.

“It was much more difficult than I’d expected,” Lan said. “Working as a coach, I couldn’t share my feelings with the trainees or think of them as teammates. So I thought a lot and tried to learn from experienced coaches.

“I like to speak frankly to the students. I just want my squad to win lots of medals. That is what I call success.”

Lan is thrilled that her daughter Vu Thuy Linh has taken up wushu.

“I didn’t force her, just helped her,” Lan said. “She’s a natural. I let her practice wushu when she was five and she loved it from the start.” Now aged 18, Linh also has a large collection of medals, just like her mother, and was the runner-up in the 2007 world championship.

“Unlike me, Linh started at a young age and has achieved much already,” Lan said. “I’m always urging her to keep trying and told her that playing a sport professionally is totally different from playing it for fun or exercise.”

Her daughter will finish high school this year, so Lan plans to send her to China to study physical training and sports.

“We have to give it our all if we want to be successful at something, no matter what it is,” Lan said.

Reported by Hong Minh