YOU DON'T WATCH an Ivana Hong performance, you feel it.
Movements and motions that seem impossible when broken down instead flow easily into another as if that’s the way they always were meant to be. There are moments that beg to be locked into memory and sifted back into reality to be savored.
“How do you capture Ivana in words?” wondered Chris Swircek, Stanford’s women’s gymnastics associate head coach. “Her movement is so fluid and graceful, all the way down to her hands and her fingertips and the way she holds her head.
“It’s art, right?”
The gymnastics world doesn’t always abide by the grace of its gymnasts. It can be cruel and political, can reward power over artistry, and unjustly define lives because of what happens in a matter of seconds. Hong has experienced all of it, the good and the bad, the victories and the controversies.
What gymnastics does reveal is the sweeping scope of what is humanly possible – the breadth of athleticism showcased more vividly than in any other endeavor, and expressed by limitless imagination.
Not always apparent is the character required to get to that point, and the challenges overcome. Such is the case of Hong, whose evolution as a gymnast began long before she was born, and has progressed through injuries and disappointment to finish her storied career on her own terms. It’s a legacy of perseverance vital to her place today.
Hong is 23 and a fifth-year senior at Stanford. She’s ancient by gymnastics standards, especially considering a career that defied normal progression. She began gymnastics at age 5, first competed at 7, and was elite by 9. She won team gold for the U.S. at the 2007 World Championships in Germany on a team nicknamed the ‘Super Seven’ and so revered it was inducted as a whole into the USA Gymnastics Hall of Fame.
She won gold again that year, in entirely different circumstances, at the 2007 Pan Am Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, while being booed and harassed by anti-American fans.
She was 14.
Each routine evokes some kind of emotion, appropriate considering the range trials and life experiences ingrained in her DNA. Others can see it too, those who appreciate the sport’s artistry.
“As a coach, you become a spectator,” Swircek said.
Hong doesn’t compete to win, she said. She never has. She competes for perfection, or at least the pursuit of it.
“I’ve never been a person who has to be No. 1, or I need to win, or be the absolute best,” Hong said. “But sometimes I think back to the sense that something is missing. What’s the little thing that’s missing that prevents me from being totally satisfied?
“But since I’ve been in college, I realize it’s not about getting everything you could possibly want. The growth comes in knowing there’s always more. I think that’s one of the greatest things in life, being able to have that opportunity to be a little bit better, to give a little bit more. That’s a blessing and a privilege to know you always have an opportunity to grow.
“It’s not about where I’ve finished or what I’ve accomplished. It’s being able to hopefully inspire and motivate somebody else and give them the confidence to reach heights they didn’t believe they could.”
•••
Hong has earned four All-America honors at Stanford
•••
Hong's story truly began more than 40 years ago.
Life was comfortable in Vietnam before the fall of Saigon. Ivana’s mother, Michelle Hong, born Huynh Thi Xuan-Loan, was the second of five children to father Huynh Kinh and mother Ngo-Lam Hoa-Quang.
Kinh established a thriving textile business there, selling satin, a material cool to the skin in the humid tropical climate. The family owned seven cars, had a chauffeur and a maid, and Michelle and her sisters were among the few of Chinese heritage to attend the exclusive French girls’ school, just five blocks from the presidential palace.
Saigon was largely untouched by the conflict we know as the Vietnam War until the Soviet-backed communists from the North finally broke through the South’s U.S.-backed forces. On April 28, 1975, the presidential palace was bombed and Michelle felt her entire school shudder. She thought it was an earthquake. Outside chaos reigned in a mass of tanks, guns, and smoke. Americans and Vietnamese fled by the thousands, many by helicopter from atop the U.S. embassy.
There was fear among remaining businessmen, Catholics, and those allied with the U.S., of reprisal. Kinh gave the seven cars to the communists to allow the family to stay in its house. Teachers were taken to a re-education camp and Michelle quit school when it devolved into a propaganda tool.
Her father had worked too hard to give up his business, but knew his family needed to get out. His first attempt was to arrange marriages in France for Michelle and her older sister, paying a French woman plenty for passports that were never produced, before backing out because of worry for his daughters’ safety.
Guard towers had been placed inside the city and out, better to monitor suspicious activity, but Kinh spent hours observing shift changes and memorizing watch patterns, hatching an escape plan with a friend to secure a boat and float the family away. They buried supplies in the river, and he waited for the boat’s arrival to transport the goods. Instead, he was met by communist guards. His friend had betrayed him.
Kinh was mocked during a trial in a public square. Though released with help from bribes, Kinh was repeatedly arrested, often in the middle of the night, and held secretly for indefinite periods. He realized his next arrest could be his last and he again plotted an escape.
There was no moon on the night of June 1, 1976. Michelle, 15, was among 94 people loaded upon two small sampan boats, all wearing black and told to lie flat against the wooden planks. A week-old baby was kept quiet with sleeping pills. There was a woman in her 90s, Michelle’s hunch-backed great grandmother was in her 80s, and there were only 18 males.
They drifted slowly along a shallow river, to a designated spot where a bigger boat with provisions would come and take them in Hong Kong. It never showed.
“I saw my dad’s face turn white,” Michelle said. “He knew something had happened.”
Realizing another arrest would mean certain death, Kinh ordered the boats to push on, into the open sea. Hong Kong was 1,000 nautical miles away.
Three days later, food and water had run out. Large sea creatures, dolphins or sharks, circled the boats, which were tethered together to save gasoline. And then a large storm hit, and the rope was cut to prevent the boats from smashing into each other.
Everyone tried to capture rainwater in condensed milk cans and empty them into a barrel. Cries and wails could be heard above the crashing and heaving sea. Michelle tried to do her part, but when the storm died down – “we could not imagine how we survived,” she said --Michelle saw that nearly all the water she tried to collect had splashed out.
“I couldn’t even get one can full,” she said. “That was my way of helping.”
The next day – their fifth on the boat -- the hungry, thirsty, beleaguered, and exhausted groups saw a large-sized fishing vessel in the distance and headed toward it. Only when the boats pulled alongside did they see the communist flag painted on the side. All the work and hardship was apparently futile.
“Where are you going?” the captain shouted.
There was no answer.
He asked again.
Finally, Kinh said: “To search for freedom.”
“Freedom?” the captain replied. “You’ve made a big mistake.”
The passengers were loaded onto the vessel and were thankful for rice and tea. But another round of anguish was audible when the captain ordered the boat to return to Saigon. Michelle recalled that the crew had two M16 rifles and an M72 portable anti-tank weapon.
Over the next few hours, Michelle could sense a buzz among her fellow refugees. As her father approached to speak to her mother, Michelle listened through a porthole.
“We’ve decided to fight back,” he said. “We have a 50/50 chance of survival. If we win, we live. If we don’t, we’re dead. But it’s better than doing nothing. If we fail, at least we’ll die quickly, instead of by torture.”
Beads of sweat gathered on Michelle’s skin.
“When I saw the guns and heard my dad’s plan, I was lying there like a corpse,” she said. “I could not move. I could see failure already … doom already.”
There were 10 men on the ship’s crew, and there were 10 men of fighting age among the 94. The plan was to attack each crew member simultaneously and wrestle the weapons away. They synchronized their watches.
At 2 a.m., with the lights of Vietnam visible from the deck, gunshots rang out. Kinh found the barrel of an M16 pointed at his stomach as he grappled for the control of the rifle, hands grasped tightly near the trigger as he vowed during those split-seconds, as an atheist, to worship God if he lived through this.
A bullet grazed the eyebrow of Michelle’s sister, a boy was shot through the leg, a girl also was hit. But the mutiny was successful. Kinh, whose palms were blistered during the fight for the rifle, was otherwise unhurt, and a believer.
The ship changed course and headed south to Thailand. Some jumped off to swim to the nearby shore, including one man who drowned. For the next two nights, cigarette tobacco was placed into wounds to control bleeding.
The ship anchored on the southeastern coast at Songkha. The locals, unsure what to think about a communist vessel in their midst, did not allow the refugees to disembark.
“We refused to leave,” Michelle said. “My dad said they could shoot all of us if they liked. We didn’t care anymore.”
Finally, an American from the consulate was summoned and interviewed the refugees. He left and returned by himself and navigated the vessel north to a refugee camp within the Thai borders.
Within a month, the Huynh family, with a relative in Mission Viejo, was processed and moved to California. They arrived in the United States on Aug. 2, 1976.
•••
Michelle Hong holds daughters Isabel (left) and Ivana
•••
THE GOAL OF ANY immigrant is opportunity, but Michelle could hardly think of the future when she felt so dwarfed by the present. She was overwhelmed by the gargantuan nature of America – the freeways, the houses, the buildings, the trees. Each night, she cried herself to sleep as she tried to understand how to adjust to her new life.
Michelle enrolled in an English as a Second Language class at Saddleback Community College, and registered for math and typing because she felt she could get by without knowing the language.
It didn’t take Michelle long to immerse herself in school. With a dictionary on standby to study any word she did not know, Michelle took 18 units, then 22, and then 25 (“Is that even allowed?” Ivana recently wondered). She declared to the head of Saddleback’s tutoring program that she wanted to earn all A’s. That woman, Dolores Schultz, was impressed by her drive and believed in her so much she drove Michelle herself to visit Stanford and Cal-Berkeley. Unknown to them, it was Big Game week, and vacancies were impossible to find, so they slept in Schultz’s car.
Michelle indeed came to Stanford, graduated in 1981 with a degree in international relations, and later saw in her daughter Ivana a similar focus.
As Ivana sat at a podium with microphones in front of her in advance of a pre-Olympic meet in Chicago in 2008, the years rushed through Michelle’s mind as she grasped the contrasts of their lives. At age 15, Ivana was among the best gymnasts in the country and representing the United States. At the same age, her mother had been floating in the Pacific Ocean without food or water.
•••
IVANA WAS PLACED in her first gymnastics class at 5 because her mother needed a free hour each week to run errands. At first, the gym refused to take Ivana without her mother’s supervision because she looked too little to follow directions. At Michelle’s urging, they agreed to try her out for one hour. Transfixed by the natural talent at hand, that hour turned into much more.
Ivana climbed quickly up the gymnastics ladder, going through levels in months rather than years.
The Stanford coaches first met Hong, already on the junior national team, when she visited the gymnastics gym in 2004 as an 11-year-old.
“Are you Ivana Hong?” Swircek asked.
Ivana thought she had done something wrong and was too nervous to reply, but later opened up when the talk turned to her gymnastics and her skills.
“We could use you against UCLA this weekend,” someone said.
Ivana was thriving at GAGE, the gym in Blue Springs, Missouri, that she had hand-picked. Michelle and Ivana’s three siblings joined her while father Mike remained in Orange County because of his job. They saw each other twice a year – at Christmas and at the national championships. Al Fong coached two 2004 Olympians and stressed proper technique and form, which matched perfectly with Ivana’s greatest skills.
Hong was on track for the Beijing Olympics, but in late 2007, Ivana suffered an ankle injury. It caused her pain and affected her movements, her ability to plant properly, and even walking. Descending the stairs each morning was agony.
Hong was pressured to ignore it. When finally diagnosed in December 2007, Hong learned she had fractured her tibia, but continued to train and compete. She advanced to the Olympic selection camp, but ultimately was left off the team as one of three alternates.
“An alternate is amazing,” Hong said. “But when you’re there, and so close to being on the team, is that a success for you? Or, is that seen as a shortcoming?
“Had I rested my ankle a little bit better, so that I was able to train to the extent that I was able to … there’s no way of telling. I don’t know. Truthfully, I can say that I do have regrets.”
Those words pain her mother.
“I told her, ‘I love you so much. I don’t want you to have any regrets.’ ”
After six months of rest, Hong felt renewed by switching to the WOGA gym, in Plano, Texas, where she was coached by Valeri Liukin. Hong won national championships on the balance beam and vault, and silver in the all-around in 2009. She won World bronze on the beam and was primed for a push for the 2012 Olympics … until an ACL tear ended that dream for good.
•••
•••
THE BEAUTY OF college gymnastics is it offers a fresh start.
Hong has competed for Stanford since 2012. She is a Four-time All-American, a 2015 NCAA runner-up on beam, and leader of the No. 19 team in the nation.
Stanford competes at the Pac-12 Championships Saturday in Seattle. There are NCAA Regionals and, pending qualification, the NCAA Championships next month in Fort Worth. She graduates in June with a double major of human biology and sociology.
The college sport doesn’t emphasize the big, the huge and explosive. It emphasizes the small, the minute and subtle.
“Generally, in elite gymnastics, if you have a lot more difficulty, you have a higher chance of scoring better, whether it looks good or not,” said Stanford sophomore Elizabeth Price, also a former U.S. national team member. “That’s the big difference. It’s harder for elites in college to make sure we’re hitting every skill perfectly.
“All college gymnasts have this problem, but, for us, it’s like we’re doing easier skills, so we’re generally harder on ourselves because we feel we should hit them perfect all the time. I know Ivana shares that frustration sometimes.”
College gymnastics is a place where even the elite can be humbled, but also reinvented. A formerly solitary existence is replaced by an emphasis on friendships, relationships, and trust. Though elites sometimes take time to get used to this, they nearly all eventually experience a new sense of purpose.
Hong was skeptical at first, but learned that “the interactions and emotions that you share with your teammates and your coaches leave a much bigger impact than your most perfect performance,” she said.
At the 2012 NCAA regionals, Stanford suffered an early fall on the final rotation, the beam, and was in danger of elimination. Hong followed the fall with a confident and clutch routine that allowed the team to advance.
At the 2015 NCAA team preliminaries, again during the final rotation, Stanford was faltering. Hong hadn’t competed on vault in two years after her second ACL tear, but had hounded the coaches into giving her another chance. As a last resort, she was given that opportunity and produced a 9.850 that catapulted the team into the Super Six, the sport’s version of the final four.
“She’s the one person we can always count on,” Price said. “She’s so confident in herself. You might be questioning yourself and she’s hitting her routines. It’s amazing and it’s nearly perfect all the time. It changes the whole atmosphere in the gym.”
Soon, it will end.
“We try to teach them gymnastics is not who you are,” Stanford head coach Kristen Smyth said. “It’s not your identity anymore. It’s a piece of what you do. It’s all the qualities that you’ve developed through being a gymnast that is going to set you up for the rest of your life. And they go out into the world and find that next thing that they’re going to fall in love with.”
Hong is at peace with it.
“It doesn’t have to be a perfect routine or a perfect fairytale ending,” she said. “It’s not about my story. It’s about our story as a team.”
•••
THERE ARE THOSE who appreciate grace and elegance, even in an era of elite gymnastics when it seems those things no longer matter. When Hong leaves, the sport will be that much poorer.
Who knows what mix can inspire and create the artists of the future? For Hong, it was that unique combination of the heroism in her family’s past, and her own sense of poise and determination. Hopefully, Hong will not be forgotten, not completely at least.
After a Monday evening dual meet against Arizona State last month, as the teams and spectators collected their gear and headed toward the Burnham Pavilion exits, a competitor approached Ivana and asked if she could take a photo with her.
In the car later that night, Michelle asked her daughter, “Who was that?”
“A fan, Mom,” Ivana said, “from a long time ago.”
•••