At first, I hear nothing but a murmur of voices. I try to open my eyes. The harsh light blinds me. I’m lying in a hospital bed. Slowly, the memories come back.

I’m back in that pub—the moment the mob storms in and starts beating on people at random. There’s this guy. He’s hammering away at a young woman, and nobody steps in. Without thinking, I jump between them.

I only see the jagged bottle in his hand when it digs into my forearm again—I’m trying to shield my body. He lunges again, and I feel something give way—something breaks. Everything starts to spin …

Carlo shows me his forearm, the thick scars—still raised even today. His fingers, and parts of his hand, are still numb from the old injury. Thirty stitches.

These are the visible traces. The kind that pull Carlo straight back to 2005: the Cronulla Riots—racist mass violence in an otherwise affluent suburb of Sydney. And Carlo—Filipino heritage and all—maybe put him right in that man’s line of fire.

Carlo is 23 when the riots happen. He’s already completed his training in telecoms—but the company cuts jobs. Including his.

He trains hard. He works. He takes every opportunity. He trains as a barista. And then comes the incident that changes his life.

In that phase of his life, alcohol is just calories in a glass—nothing a hard session can’t erase. And certainly not this incident!

But what Carlo doesn’t expect is exactly what happens: the incident burns itself into him far deeper than it should.

Carlo starts to slip.

In the aftermath of trauma, he can’t hold on to the jobs he finds. His “calories in a glass” takes up more space than he wants to admit. Sleep falls apart. He trains harder. He drinks more. Nothing you couldn’t fix with hard training and alcohol … right?

But there’s something even more important to Carlo. He finds stability in his relationship with his wife. In 2012, the two of them get married.

She’s the one whose career takes off. Her performance in the South Pacific puts her on the radar. In 2017, Carlo’s wife gets the chance to transfer to the company’s headquarters in Hamburg. She takes the opportunity. Carlo comes with her.

In 2019, their daughter is born. And during the COVID pandemic, they decide their daughter should grow up in Australia. They try it for 18 months—a stretch of time that somehow feels unfulfilled. The old familiarity suddenly feels foreign. And a decision takes shape: back to Germany. Back to Hamburg.

And this time, Carlo is all in.

If he didn’t like many things at first, he approaches it differently now. A decision has been made. Their daughter is the anchor. She will grow up in Hamburg—and she’s even learning Spanish by now.

And Carlo? During his first stay in Germany, he’d already started building a network. Now he leans into those contacts and builds his business as a Muay Thai trainer. These days he runs his training groups at the studio together with Winnie—whose story I told in Chapter 5.

And the most important lesson Carlo passes on to his students today has less to do with Muay Thai itself—and more with the life he’s had to go through.

Did you enjoy the story? Do you also live outside your country of birth—and have a story to tell?

Come on. Tell it to me.