SACRAMENTO, CA (MPG) - On most evenings at 7385 Greenhaven Drive, Xai Lor stands at the front of the class and watches children kick, yell, and grow up. Some are 5 and still learning to skip and kick. Others have been with her long enough to become black belts themselves.

One recent evening, a younger student fought to control his impulses. Before an instructor could reach him, a teenage black belt walked over, stood next to him, and calmed him down.

No one told him to.

That moment – more than a trophy or a championship – is why Lor has spent 15 years here. This month she is inviting the neighborhood to come see it: iYa Taekwondo marks its 15th anniversary with a community potluck on Saturday, Sept. 12, followed by Spirit Week from Sept. 14 through 18 and an open house for former students, neighbors and families.

To understand what 15 years means to her, though, you have to go back much farther than Greenhaven Drive.

Lor was 3 years old when her family fled Laos. She remembers pieces of that night: darkness, moving water, being carried, and the urgency in her mother’s voice.

“Hurry, or they will kill us.”

The family crossed the Mekong River, reached a refugee camp and eventually began another journey to Northern California. When Lor arrived in America, she knew not a single word of English.

She had no idea then that starting over would become the recurring theme of her life. She learned the language and the culture, and in college she found Taekwondo, which taught her that strength was not how hard a person could kick, but the willingness to get back up.

iYa Taekwondo opened in 2011, and it did not look like much. Classes started at Yav Pem Suab Academy, moved into a cafeteria, and only later found a permanent home on Greenhaven Drive. Lor raised three children on her own, and they grew up alongside the business: homework at the school, training on the mat, watching their mother teach classes and keep a family moving at the same time.

One student became 10. Ten became dozens. Families told other families. Thousands of students have passed through her doors since. Today iYa serves more than 200 active students, teaching poomsae, Olympic-style sparring, self-defense and leadership development.

Ask Lor what makes Taekwondo different from the other activities a Pocket family might choose, and she does not begin with kicking.

Most youth sports train the body and hope the rest follows. Taekwondo treats the body, the mind and the spirit as three things that have to be trained on purpose, in the same hour, or the training is incomplete.

The body is the visible part: balance, coordination, conditioning, the discipline of controlling your own weight in space. The mind is the part parents notice at home. A student learning a form has to hold a long sequence in their head, find the step they got wrong, and stay with something that is not yet working. That habit does not stay on the mat. It shows up over a math worksheet.

And the spirit is written directly into the curriculum. Courtesy, integrity, perseverance, self-control, indomitable spirit and focus are not a poster on the wall at iYa. They are recited, taught, tested and required for promotion. A student cannot advance on athleticism alone.

Then there is what the sport does not do. There is no bench and no cut list. No child sits out a season waiting to be noticed, and no one is measured against the fastest kid in the room; a student’s only opponent is their own last attempt.

“Martial arts is not just training,” Lor says. “It’s a foundation for success, a mindset for achievement and a lifelong path to personal excellence.”

Parents describe it more plainly. A shy child starts speaking up. A student who quits easily starts finishing hard things.

Then, five years after the school opened, Lor heard the words no parent or business owner is prepared to hear.

The timing mattered. iYa was young, still growing and could not run without her. Cancer did not arrive after everything was safely established. It arrived in the middle of building it.

Lor would face metastatic breast cancer, and the following year, metastatic colon cancer, along with surgeries, chemotherapy, radiation and years of treatment. 

And still, everything else kept moving. Her children needed their mother. Students kept arriving for class. The doors had to open.

For years, she had asked students to recite “indomitable spirit” and told them perseverance means continuing when something becomes hard. Now the same question was being put to her.

Would she continue?

She did. She survived both cancers, and the school survived with her. A decade later, iYa is turning 15: a number that for Lor marks every moment the story could have ended and didn’t.

“We are here,” she says. “We’re still growing. We’re still teaching. We’re still serving families.”

The Next Chapter

Lor is writing a book about that journey, titled “Indomitable Spirit.” The phrase she uses with students is shorter: Learn it. Live it. Which is why a teenager calming a younger student is not a small thing in that room.

She is not treating 15 years as a finish line. After a career spent teaching people to be physically and mentally prepared, Lor has entered the financial services and life insurance field.

The two may sound unrelated until you hear where the idea came from. During treatment, Lor was not only wondering whether she would survive. What happens to my children if something happens to me? What happens to everything I spent years building?

Cancer taught her that a family can be strong, hardworking and loving and still be one unexpected event away from losing its footing. She began to see financial protection as another form of self-defense.

“In martial arts, you don’t wait until the emergency happens to learn how to respond,” Lor says. “You prepare beforehand. I believe families should have the same opportunity financially.”

 For 15 years, she has worked on making children stronger. Now she wants to help protect the families standing behind them.

There are many places this story could have stopped. At the Mekong River. While building a business alone with three children. When cancer arrived five years in.

It didn’t. On Greenhaven Drive, the children are still lining up, and Lor is still standing at the front of the room: still teaching, still building, still beginning again, right here in the Pocket.