My personal Power Rangers… and a little bit of Korean

By Sierra Trujillo

I grew up with my own personal set of bodyguards. When we were in our own house, all bets were off, but once we stepped outside, my brothers had my back. It helped that they’re both black belts in Taekwondo and have been for the majority of my memory.
Before baseball fields and cheer practice and football games, I spent what seemed like every waking moment on the sidelines of a TKD mat. It started when my older brother Nick wanted to be a Power Ranger at the age of four. When he didn’t stop asking, my parents’ only solution was to put him into Taekwondo.
Because he was so little when he started, my mom didn’t just want to leave Nick at practice by himself, so she lugged two-year-old me and newborn Mark (my younger brother) in his car seat to practice too. And it’s there that I learned how to count in Korean. Little two-year-old me, with a blonde mushroom haircut, counting in Korean to her Barbie dolls.
A few years later, when Mark was out of the car seat and running around the place already, my mom decided to sign him up for TKD classes as well. He strapped on his first white belt and then I had two brothers training to be Power Rangers, while I sat there counting higher and higher in a different language. I never had any interest in joining. My brothers beat up on me enough at home that I didn’t need an excuse for them to be able to do it during a sanctioned event.
Before we spent weekends driving up and down California for baseball games, we spent weekends driving up and down California for TKD tournaments. I’ve seen it all, too. Nick knocked his opponent out cold with a kick to the head, and 11-year-old me was cheering him on (whoops). And when I say cold, I mean that Nick got in a roundhouse kick to the side of the kid’s head and if we could have seen it in slow motion, it would have looked like it does in the movies.
Then we weren’t just traveling up and down the California coast, but across the country. (My family’s favorite phrases are “Go big or go home” and “Go ‘til no” so that’s what we did.) My brothers qualified to compete in the Junior Olympics in Georgia, so we packed up the five of us, along with every other family from Sunnyside TKD, and made the trip from the west to east coast.
We spent a week in Atlanta with my brothers competing in both poomsae and sparring. And get this, Nick ended up competing against a guy from California, who he had faced numerous times in the past. We traveled literally across the country for him to fight someone who lived 45 minutes from us. I honestly don’t remember any of the outcomes from the Junior Olympics, all I remember is that Mark had to spar without a coach in his corner and that the next year, when my brothers decided not to compete, I laughed because the Junior Olympics were in San Jose and that would not be as fun of a trip as Georgia anyway.
Nick could never quite give up on the Power Ranger dream, because after all these years he’s still teaching. Twenty-one years later, though, I think he can officially call himself a real Power Ranger, because he recently tested for, and received, his fourth-degree black belt, officially making him “Master Nick.” If I were him, I’d make everyone call me that, but he probably doesn’t.
I guess you could say that instead of bodyguards, I grew up with my own set of Power Rangers, ready to defend their sister against anything and everything. And for the record, I can still count to 19 in Korean.