In Chinese, there is an expression, “You have to eat the bitter to get the sweet.” When you work hard and sacrifice to achieve a goal, the Chinese say you are suffering bitter, 辛苦(xīnkŭ ). So, in Chinese, there is always this concept of enduring the bitter, the pain, in exchange for a payoff later. But, a wrestler told me once, the difference between being a wrestler and a san da fighter is that in wrestling, “Apart from bitter, there is nothing.”
Read The Wrestler’s Dissertation, by Dr. Antonio Graceffo, available in paperback and Kindle from Amazon. #Wrestling