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The first thing you notice about Angela Lee is her mega-watt smile. Her bubbly nature is unexpected for a world-class MMA fighter.
“After my debut, everyone was like, ‘Who is that little Asian chick who keeps smiling, doesn’t she know she’s about to fight?” Angela tells me over lunch. “But it was because […] I was enjoying it so much.”
At 23 years old, Angela is the youngest fighter to win a world title in MMA in 2016. She currently competes with One Championship, Asia’s largest sports media property.
But she isn’t alone—she’s joined by her younger brother, 21-year-old Christian Lee, who won a world championship fight of his own earlier this year.
The two have trained together since they could walk. Their parents, Ken and Jewelz Lee fought in Tae Kwon Do competitions and have run MMA gyms in Hawaii and Canada. When they started having children, they brought them along to the gym as well.
“It was like any other after school activity,” Angela recalls. “They’d have this back room set up for us with a microwave and we could watch cartoons while we waited for them to finish teaching. We didn’t think anything of it.”
They enjoyed rolling around on the mats, but what they enjoyed the most were the competitions. When Angela and Christian were about 15 and 13 respectively, their parents took them to their first amateur competition in Croatia. It was the first time Angela met so many other kids who were also really enthusiastic about MMA, she says, and it helped her feel less self-conscious about her hobby. She and her brother won the competitions, which gave them a glimpse of what life could be like if they became professional MMA fighters.
The siblings continued training and winning. In 2014, Angela started college, where she began studying business, but her heart wasn’t in it. She told her parents that she wanted fight professionally full-time.
They supported her, and her family moved part-time to Singapore with a sponsorship to train at Evolve MMA, owned by One Championship owner, Chatri Sityodtong.
Angela jumped into the ring ready to go: she won all her first five matches, earning her the nickname “Unstoppable.” Soon after, her brother Christian joined her while he was finishing up high school. “My teachers were really supportive,” he says. “The people in Hawaii are very supportive of MMA and sports in general.”
With both brothers and sisters in the business, you might expect there to be some sibling rivalry, but there isn’t. Much has been written about how tight-knit the Lee family is, and it’s not an exaggeration. Every member of the family, including grandparents, show up to her and her brother’s fights, Angela says. “I think we’re unique in that aspect because I don’t see any other family doing this,” she says, laughing. “And people will be like, who’s that old lady watching the fight?”
Both Angela and Christian train at the gym their parents started in 2013 in Waipahu, Hawaii, called United MMA and Christian now runs almost all the classes for the adults there. When Angela bursts into tears in the middle of a press interview, Christian stops his own interview to go comfort her. When Christian won his world championship title, Angela was captured on tape sobbing with joy. The feeling of love between the two is palpable.
It’s also not by accident, says Jewelz and Ken Lee. When they first got married, they knew early on that they wanted to keep their family as tightly-knit as possible. “That’s why we started the business, we wanted to keep our family together,” says Jewelz.
“When they win, it’s a win for the whole family, when they lose, everyone feels it,” she says.
Finding Confidence
Despite the tough expressions they sport in their match promotion posters, Christian says it took him a long time to find his confidence. “When I started competing in higher level tournaments, it was Angela who would always win,” he says. “When I decided I wanted to be a professional fighter, I would be training every time I had free time. And when I saw that hard work pay off, that’s when I started developing confidence. It made me realize that I can get and achieve anything as long as I put my mind to it.”
At the same time, Angela says she leans on her younger brother for support. “I have very high highs and very low lows,” she says. “He balances me out really well. He’s got that steady consistency whereas multiple times a day, I have to remind myself, ‘breathe, keep it together.’”
She remembers after one of her losses, Christian went to a 7/11 to get ramen and ice cream and went to her room to check up on her. “It’s like an unspoken thing, but it’s because we’ve spent so much time together and we know each other so well.”
Asian American Pride
Growing up in Hawaii and traveling often to Singapore, the Lee siblings have a lot of pride for their Asian American heritage.
“There’s a lot of Asian Americans who feel like they’re American, but of course they’re Asian and they grow up wanting to be American, not wanting to embrace their own culture,” says Christian. “It’s important for us to know that we’re American, being proud of that, but also knowing our real roots. It’s a healthy balance you have to find the confidence in yourself, where you’re from and where you come from.”
The Lee siblings have a lot to smile about these days. They spend most of their waking moments at the gym their parents own. Angela married Brazilian fighter Bruno Pucci who she met training at Evolve and Christian recently became engaged to fellow fighter Katie Guzman. Angela’s next fight will be in October when she will defend her atom weight championship title against Xiong Jingnan, a fighter representing China. Sometime next year, Christian will defend his lightweight belt.
