Sports / Olympics

Pistol competitor aims for Olympic gold

Lien Chao arrived in Canada in 1984 with $35 in her pocket. She is going back to China this summer to watch her daughter Avianna, now 33, compete for Canada as an Olympic pistol shooter.

"It isn't about the outcome, it's about the journey," Toronto's Avianna Chao says of her approach to pistol shooting.



"I came to find my dreams," I answered
"To find my lost dreams,
to rediscover my childhood dreams,
and to dream what I couldn't dream before ..."

– from Maples and the Stream: a narrative poem, by Lien Chao

The voice was deep and lyrical, the words spellbinding to Lien Chao's English class.

As the visiting Canadian professor read aloud from such writers as Margaret Laurence and Pauline Johnson, Chao and her classmates at Wuhan Teachers College in China didn't dare breathe, lest they miss a word.

"I became interested in this country so far away, near the North Pole," recalled Chao. "I couldn't imagine what life was like there."

Lien Chao arrived in Canada in 1984 with $35 in her pocket and a desperate hope for some kind of equality.

She'd risked everything for a passport out of China, leaving her 9-year-old daughter Avianna behind at first, as she became one of the first self-sponsored students from her country to arrive here. With help from the visiting professor whose readings mesmerized her, she got a scholarship to study Canadian literature at York University.

She was an outcast in China, a strong-minded woman who refused to conform. As the first on her block to get a divorce, leaving an abusive husband, her neighbours spat on her for not just biting her tongue. When she went to get her belongings, bricks rained down in an ambush in which she was also attacked with metal bars.

"I could really have been killed that day," she said.

She'd been a brilliant student, smart enough to attend Wuhan No. 2 boys' school, where she not only bested the boys on math tests and essays but in foot races. But her dreams were crushed by the Cultural Revolution. She was designated a "bourgeois flower" because her father was an engineer, and consigned to hard toil in the countryside.

"I really wanted to get out, I really wanted to have this opportunity," Chao said of coming to Canada. "I would pay anything. If they want my blood, I would give them my blood."

Flash forward a quarter-century – to the unthinkable. Lien Chao is going back to China this summer to watch her daughter Avianna, now 33, compete for Canada as an Olympic pistol shooter.

Avianna picked up a gun only seven years ago, following her boyfriend into the sport, and now she's an Olympian.

As Lien Chao quickly points out, the storyline could never have unfolded in China, where athletes are selected in childhood and groomed on a daily basis to become champions.

"It's amazing, a miracle if you say; it's a wonderful miracle, but it could only happen in Canada," said Lien Chao.

My baby's cry and laughter
my life's comfort
from dawn to night
singing a mother's melody

AVIANNA CHAO'S memory of her first day at school in a new land remains incredibly vivid, more than 20 years after the fact.

She'd struggled under strict teachers in China. She was an excitable kid who couldn't sit still, forever getting herself into trouble.

To her delight, she quickly learned things were different in Canada. Today, sitting on an old beige sofa chair at the shooting range in Toronto where she trains, Chao playfully mimics the body language and mindset she had as an 11-year-old.

"My first day at school, I thought, `I don't have to sit like this the entire time?'" said Chao, sitting up ramrod straight.

"I can sit like this?" she said, relaxing, slouching slightly.

"No one's going to complain? Teacher's not going to send me to the back of the room?"

She slouches a bit more, rubs her chin with a finger, arching her eyebrows slyly.

"Maybe I can even draw something and not pay attention. ... Oh, I'm free!"

Avianna thrived in her new environment, although her mom had her doubts as her daughter sat in front of the TV for countless hours watching cartoons, Wheel of Fortune, and her favourite, James Bond movies.

"She was like, 'Omigod, I knew this would happen. You bring your child from China to Canada and this is all they do, they sit in front of the TV all day, they don't do anything,' " said Avianna, laughing.

"But that's where I learned the language. I started to mimic what they said in the cartoons. I would memorize entire scripts."

What she remembers most about that period, though, are the sacrifices her mother made. Things were always tight financially, but Lien Chao created countless opportunities for her daughter.

Avianna had never learned to swim in China.

"I had bad teachers," she said. "They would threaten to throw me into the pool and they were like, `Oh, you'll figure it out – or you'll drown!' That didn't work with me."

Her mother took her to the University of Toronto pool every week in the middle of winter.

"We'd get a really great workout, come out and our hair would all freeze into icicles," said Avianna.

During this time, Lien Chao worked as a tutorial assistant at York while studying for her masters in English (she would also get her Ph.D.) and later held a number of jobs with the Toronto District Board of Education. She has also written several books.

Avianna recalls her mom helping her late into the night with homework and essays, even though she'd have to rise first thing to teach a class.

"That dedication is incomprehensible to me," said Avianna, who got into the University of Toronto on a scholarship and graduated as an engineer. "I don't have children and I think, `I can't even imagine that.'"

It's not surprising, then, that when Avianna filled out a questionnaire for the Canadian Olympic Committee before last summer's Pan Am Games, she didn't hesitate when she came to the question: Who is your hero? Of course, it was her mother.

Lien Chao chokes up talking about it.

"That was almost too much. I thought, `Wow.' I always felt like I deprived her of having a father. Her ideal childhood was clipped, right? It was not ideal. But in a sense, from her side, there was never any complaints, there was never a lack of something emotional," she said. "Some kids become needy because they were deprived of something in childhood. That I would really blame myself for. She was such a considerate kid. When she was growing up, she would say, `Mom, you're the best mom.'"

Picking up a maple leaf
nourished by the stream
I search for my own stream
my passionate vision

WHEN XIANGJING Chao learned his eldest granddaughter had taken up shooting, it made him very nervous. The old-school engineer gave Avianna some advice: Keep it quiet, don't tell any potential employers.

Then, she won her first national title and made the Canadian team.

It was her grandfather who then started letting the cat out of the bag.

"He was like, 'Oh my granddaughter, she's on the Canadian national team, you know, she's a shooter,' " said Avianna. "When I won my first international medal, that's where it really took off."

She's given her grandfather lots to brag about since she started in 2001, after deciding to go to the range so she could spend more time with her then boyfriend (now fiancé and coach) Patrick Haynes, who was trying to make the national team.

Chao won a national title in just her second year in the sport, was fourth at the 2003 Pan Am Games and captured a bronze at the 2006 Commonwealth Games, but her big breakthrough was winning a gold medal in the women's 10-metre air pistol at last summer's Pan Am Games in Brazil because it earned her an automatic Olympic berth.

Still relatively new to the sport, she's not a medal contender for the Olympics. She struggled at a pre-Olympic event in Beijing earlier this month, finishing 64th in the 10-metre air pistol and 56th in the 25-metre sport pistol. She found herself unnerved by the pressure she put on herself, mostly because a dozen relatives were in attendance, and knows this is something she'll need to conquer before the Games in August.

She describes her sport as being very Zen, almost like meditation. She notes it's probably the only Olympic discipline where you're not trying to go faster, jump higher or lift something heavier.

"It's not about motion; it's about the entire lack thereof."

She said it's critical for her to let go of self-expectations, expectations from others and "all the external stimulus that crowd your mind and make it noisy and distract you from performing."

"If there's one trick to shooting, you have to let go of all of that," she said. "That I think is a very Zen, very Buddhist type of influence. It's about letting go, not forcing anything, of letting the process happen, guiding it rather than controlling it."

Avianna has pondered the uniqueness of her situation in returning to China for the Olympics, but she hasn't dwelled on it.

"I really think of myself as a Canadian more than anything else," she said. "I do recognize the Chinese heritage part, that's a valuable part of it. I think it's probably going to be more special for my family back in China to see me go back and to compete in the Olympics. That's really special for me."

Remembering the phoenix in my dream
I feel the vibration of rebirth in process:
a strong contraction of pleasure and pain
... an unquenchable passion
a new hope

AVIANNA CHAO wears a little sailboat pendant on her necklace, a present from her mother that symbolizes her name in Chinese, meaning journey or navigation. Beside it is a tiny charm with the Canadian Olympic Committee insignia, given to her by her fiancé.

"That's pretty much it, right?" she said. "It's about my journey to the Olympics, the two things I keep close to heart, that it isn't about the outcome, it's about the journey."

Once Lien Chao realized her daughter might have a shot at the Olympics, she started banking time under a sabbatical program at the Toronto District School Board. She's taking the entire year off, serving as her daughter's fundraiser, media liaison and chief dumpling maker.

Avianna goes to her mother and stepfather's every Sunday night for dinner and, when it's time to leave, she's loaded down with bags of dumplings and other nutritious dishes. It's like manna from the heavens for an athlete who works full-time as a computer engineer while also trying to train every day.

Lien Chao travelled with Avianna to Beijing for the pre-Olympic event and is currently with her in Munich for a World Cup.

"You need courage to persist," said Lien. "Discipline. Those are the qualities that Avianna's looking for. I think that's what keeps her going. Medal would be good, but that has never been her goal. Our family never talks about medals. We never put any pressure on her."

Just as when her mother came to Canada, Avianna Chao only wants a chance, an opportunity to find her own limit.

"I've grown so much as an athlete over the four years and that is much more memorable and more important as a person," she said. "I don't want to just become a good shooter. This is life. It's just a sport. It's just a game, right? Who cares? So what (if) I can punch holes really specifically down range? It makes no difference.

"It's the growth as an athlete but also growth as a person, the maturing process as a person, that's why I'm doing this. It isn't for anything else."

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