Joshua Van stood at his father’s grave in Houston two days after winning the UFC’s flyweight championship in December, a visit he said he had not made since December 2022. He said he usually stays in the car when he goes to the cemetery with his mother, and only walks in after doing something big. “I was nothing but a disappointment when he was alive, you know what I mean?” Van said.
That visit came at the end of a run that turned the 23-year-old from a kid born in Myanmar into one of the UFC’s fastest-rising champions. Van is 16-2 overall and 9-1 in less than three years in the UFC, and he became the second-youngest champion in UFC history last year behind Jon Jones. On Saturday at UFC 328 in Newark, New Jersey, he is scheduled to defend his 125-pound championship against Tatsuro Taira, a fight that follows a title run built as much on survival as on skill.
Van’s story started far from Houston. His father spent much of his childhood searching for a way to move the family out of Myanmar, and when Van was 9, he was separated from him and two sisters while waiting to join them at a refugee camp in Malaysia. “Two of my sisters went to my father first, and then me, my mother and younger sister went after one year,” Van said. “None of us had cell phones. We could only talk when they were able to call our home phone. It would be a whole year without them calling and us not knowing what was happening. It was crazy.”
The family migrated to Houston when Van was 12, but the move did not immediately settle anything. He was teased because he struggled to speak and understand English, and the family relocated numerous times in hopes he would find peace. Van later moved out of Houston after a friend warned him, “Bro, this one is serious, you need to get out of the city,” and two days after telling his father, he left for Iowa. His aunt then pushed him to fight for the pride of his country and family, not for himself in the streets, and when he returned to Houston and found an MMA gym, he committed himself to training.
His father died when Van was 16, before his amateur debut in 2020 at 19 and before his UFC debut in July 2023. By then, the UFC had barred fighters from carrying national flags to the Octagon because of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and even after the ban was lifted in October 2023, Van’s next five requests to walk out with the Myanmar flag were denied. Coach Daniel Pineda said the denials became its own frustration. “[Van] would get mad about it every fight because they would make him put the flag away right before [he walked out],” Pineda said. “He would literally have it ready to make the walk, and they would tell him he couldn’t have it.”
Now Van goes back into a championship defense carrying the same history that shaped him. The man who once stayed in the car at the cemetery is back in the spotlight, and Saturday’s fight in Newark will show whether the title is becoming a finish line or just the next place he has to prove he belongs.
