There is a moment in Selina’s match against “Mad Kat” Karina for the Queen of Asia title where the match stops completely. Not because something has gone wrong. Because something has gone exactly right.

Selina is down. She is selling a knee injury with a commitment that makes the ringside crowd hold its breath. The referee is crouched over her. The whole show pauses. And then because she is, above all else a cheat, she kicks her opponent square in the face with the supposedly injured leg, and the crowd erupts in a fury of middle fingers and expletives that she finds personally gratifying.

“I’m just so happy no one ran in and did something,” she says, laughing. “Wrestling fans sometimes take things a little bit too seriously.”

This is Selina. She is composed, controlled, working the room with the patience of someone who does, in fact, spend her days managing rooms full of people who don’t yet know how things work.

Because outside the ring, she is a schoolteacher. And her parents have absolutely no idea about any of this.

The Grandfather’s television

She was three, maybe four years old, when her grandfather put wrestling on the television.

“Back in those days, it’s not live,” she explains. “Not only is it not live but we were probably months behind in Singapore. We don’t get all these live broadcasts. We’re buying DVDs from the stores.” But none of that mattered. Something about what she saw reached straight through the screen and into whatever part of a small child’s brain decides what they are going to care about for the rest of their life.

“It just unlocked some sort of core memory in me. I was like: this. I don’t want to watch any cartoons. I want to watch this.”

It would be years before she did anything about it. Singapore, she explains, is not a country that has traditionally offered a clear path from childhood wrestling fandom to adult wrestling career. There is a word she uses “kiasu” isn’t it, but the feeling is similar, for the pressure to follow the approved trajectory. School. University. Stable job. House. Family. Everything in the right order, nothing wasted, nobody surprised.

Wrestling is, by definition, surprising. She started training as a teenager, did a handful of matches, and then when COVID hit and other reasons converged she walked away.

Why she left, and why she came back

She is careful about how she describes what made her leave. There were incidents. There were the broader conversations about safety and conduct happening across the industry in that period. She and some friends made a collective decision that the timing was right to step back.

“I don’t want to blame it too much on the people there,” she says carefully, “but with the incidents that were going on, the Me Too movement, everything that was happening inside the company, me and my friends just felt like it was a good time to go. And COVID was like the perfect moment …”

She trails off, then restarts. “At the end of the day, my love for wrestling trumps over this. After a few years, it’s like, ah, if I never do this again, I think I will regret it for life.”

She came back, but she came back differently. The person who returned to Singapore Pro Wrestling was not the nineteen-year-old who had trained to try it and see where it went. She had, in the intervening years, grown a considerably thicker skin.

“When I started out, I couldn’t take criticism. Or, not that I couldn’t take it, but it affected me very easily. I’d take it and say thank you, but then I’d go home and dwell about it for weeks. And that made me not like wrestling as much as I did.” She considers this. “Now I take criticism and say: okay, how can I work on this? Not live with ’that’s negative, what will people think about me?'”

The character also changed completely. She kept the name. Everything else is new.

“I feel like we’ve grown so much as a person and we’re so different in terms of our character. As Selina, I’ve only been wrestling for one and a half years. Less, actually, because we only do shows once every two months.”

That works out to fewer than ten matches as the current version of herself. It does not, watching her work, look like it.

The family situation

Her parents don’t know.

She says this with the slightly amused, slightly resigned air of someone who has made peace with a fairly significant ongoing omission. They are conservative. Their reference point for women’s wrestling is the Attitude Era, which is to say, their reference point is bras and panties matches and women who were employed primarily as scenery. The gap between that image and what their daughter is actually doing is not, perhaps, as large as she might wish.

“Even at my age, they don’t know. They don’t know about me.” She pauses. “If they ever find out, it will be a huge … woo. But yeah, as of now, it is what it is.”

She has appeared on television but they don’t watch television anymore. She sometimes turns up to their house with bruises; she sometimes moves stiffly, her back announcing itself before she does. They see these things.

“I think they kind of know, but I think it’s like, if we don’t say it out loud, then…” She shrugs. It’s the don’t-ask-don’t-tell arrangement that families sometimes arrive at when the alternative is a conversation nobody particularly wants to have.

Her students, needless to say, also do not know. Though the teacher gimmick Selina, sensational teacher, correcting her opponents’ behaviour with approximately zero patience for excuses did not come from nowhere.

“The teacher gimmick came because I am actually a teacher,” she says. “So now it’s as if I’m moving further away from my actual person, but I do borrow things from my own personal life. I’m trying to separate my private life away from my character as I’m growing online. But I do actually still believe that you are your best when you play yourself on volume 200.”

She pauses, then adds, “My gimmick is still me. It’s actually just a side of me that I don’t use at all. But it is still part of me.”

A young scene at the edge of something

Singapore is, Selina explains, where Southeast Asian professional wrestling began. Singapore Pro Wrestling launched in 2012, the first promotion of its kind in the region. Malaysia followed in 2014. Indonesia launched its first promotion only last year, and has not yet run its first show.

“It’s a very young industry in Southeast Asia, but it is growing.”

There are currently two main promotions in Singapore: SPW and Grapple Max. The women’s division at SPW consists of three people, including Selina herself, which creates particular challenges around match variety and the limited pool of opponents. She has spent the past year working extensively with one opponent, Mad Kat Karina. She is looking further afield.

“I’m going to Thailand next month to wrestle,” she says, with the satisfaction of someone who has made their own arrangements. She hopes to go to Indonesia when their show calendar develops. She is, bit by bit, building a regional presence.

The shape of Southeast Asian wrestling, she notes, is broadly similar across the countries she has visited. The scenes are young, the promotions are small, the talent wrestle primarily for love rather than money, and the day jobs persist.

“Our wrestlers who do regularly wrestle overseas still have their own day jobs,” she says. “As of now.”

The standard to which Southeast Asian wrestling aspires, she suggests, is represented by Dante Chen (Sean Tan Li Hao), a Singaporean who came up through SPW and is now signed to WWE’s NXT. His success has done something for the scene that no amount of promotion or marketing could quite replicate.

“It draws eyes to the business in general. I mean, I must guess that there have been many people who dreamed about being a wrestler when they were a child. And then they come across a news article that says this Singaporean guy made it to WWE and he brings clicks. And those clicks bring eyes.”

The mask she didn’t take

There is a moment in the conversation where she reflects on whether she might ever have gone the Lucha route: the full mask, the hidden identity, the character who exists entirely apart from the person inside.

She considered it, she says. Decided against it for reasons that say something true about how she understands herself as a performer.

“I think it’s not something I wanted to do because I felt like I’m personally not very athletic. I felt like my strong points would be on the mic and in my charisma. So I have to make up for something. If I were to cover my face, I can’t mask the fact that I’m still a beginner wrestler.”

She is, throughout the conversation, precisely this honest about where she stands technically. She knows what she is and what she isn’t. She knows that selling an injury well, working a crowd, landing a moment with the precision of someone who has spent years at the front of a classroom; these are her weapons. She uses them deliberately.

“With the cheating, with the hard look, with how I brand myself. That’s my strong points.”

This clarity, she says, is part of what has changed since she came back. The nineteen-year-old who first stepped into a ring didn’t really know what she was for. The woman who came back did.

The strange gifts of inter-gender matches

Working in a scene with so few female wrestlers has pushed Selina into territory she might not otherwise have explored. Inter-gender matches are, in SPW, a practical necessity as much as a creative choice.

“Everyone that I have worked with in the match has been very professional and very kind,” she says. “And there are pros to working with male wrestlers too.”

The pros, it turns out, are specific and physical. “I can hit them harder. Males can take the hit and it’s like, how hard can you hit? Which is true.” She also, being on the larger end of the women’s roster, can attempt moves with male opponents that are simply not possible with her female peers. “I can actually do things like a head scissors takedown, which I cannot do on any of the other girls.”

She is thinking through what that means for her repertoire, how moves learned in one context might be adapted back into another. It is the kind of careful, analytical thinking that might, in a different context, sound like lesson planning for a class of school children.

What wrestling does that Singapore doesn’t

Ask Selina what she gets from wrestling that she doesn’t get from the rest of her life, and she takes a moment to think. What she says is worth hearing slowly.

Singapore, she explains, is “very rigid in terms of society. We’re still quite a one path fits all kind of mentality. We go to school, you study hard, you go to university, you get a stable job, a good job, you earn good money. Buy a house, start a family. Finish.”

She does not say this with particular bitterness. It is simply the air the city breathes.

“Wrestling in Singapore is just so different. So many of my friends and colleagues who have come to watch say that it’s like, at the moment they step into the venue, it doesn’t feel like Singapore anymore. Because the rest of Singapore is so … everyone has to be like this one straight line. You have to follow the path that everyone else is doing. But maybe for one night, why not?”

She says this lightly, but there is something underneath it that isn’t light at all. She is describing, in a polite and measured way, a space that gives people permission to be somewhere other than where they’re supposed to be. To cheer and boo and feel things they don’t usually have occasion to feel. To watch a woman in stripes boss around a room full of large men and find that, actually, they love it.

Wrestling, she says, makes her happy. That’s the full answer, and she’s not apologising for its simplicity.

“I think what’s most important to me is that I’m doing wrestling because I’m happy and I like it. And I’m happy right now, so I feel that I’m successful right now.”

What she’d tell the nineteen-year-old

If she could go back, she says, she would tell her younger self one thing above all others: be stronger. Be more resilient.

“I take criticism now and say: okay, how can I work on this? Not live with ’that’s negative, that’s negative, what will people think about me?’ Back then I couldn’t do that.”

She can do it now. The dwelling has become doing. The criticism has become curriculum.

It is, perhaps, not entirely surprising that a teacher figured out how to learn.

The lasting impression

The final question is the same one that gets asked of everyone who sits down for this conversation. When you hang up your boots and when it’s done, when you’re sitting in the crowd rather than standing in the ring, what do you want people to say? What should Selina have been?

She takes a genuine moment with this.

“I want to say memorable. Like she made a lasting impression.” She thinks about what that actually means. “Like she might not be here anymore. But if they see my face in the crowd and I’m watching as an audience member, they will still come up to me and say: oh my gosh, I remember you. You’re this person.”

She considers further. “It’s always the small gestures that matter the most. I apply that same concept in my teaching career. It’s always the small gestures from the children that makes teaching worth it.”

Selina, the character who cheats and schemes and lords it over opponents with the satisfaction of someone who has graded everyone in the room and found them wanting, is at her core, built from the same instinct that sends someone into a classroom every morning. The belief that the things you do in the room, small and unremarkable as they might seem in the moment, can stay with people long after they’ve left.

She will wrestle in Thailand next month. She will not tell her parents. She will go back to school on Monday.

The path in Singapore is one straight line. She is quietly, stubbornly, taking a different one.

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• Selina competes for Singapore Pro Wrestling (SPW). She can be found on Instagram and YouTube, and will be wrestling in Thailand next month.*

If you've read this far, please consider buying me a coffee! It's really expensive here in Melbourne.

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