Ping-Pong Diplomacy

by Nicholas Griffin

  In Cobo Hall, the Chinese were showing their preparation. They had figured out where each of the American players were from and let the hometown players shine in front of their own fans. Dell Sweeris, one of America’s best, was from Grand Rapids, Michigan, northwest of Detroit. Playing against Liang Geliang, he seemed to get better and better as the game continued. The American crowd took the game as they saw it, celebrating a hard-earned win in front of the cameras that were providing the coverage table tennis so badly needed.

  During the commercial break on television, Haggar, a men’s clothing company, premiered a commercial for its new red Dacron polyester pants. A Communist Party official in China smiled into the camera. He was very, very happy with his red slacks. They were only $17. “We make everybody look good,” came the voice-over.

  The next day was spent in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan, where the Chinese got a taste of campus life in the 1970s. There were friendly faces, pamphlets, and protesters. “We recognize the lies of the Nixon administration for what they are,” one leaflet began. There were long beards and short skirts, effusive welcomes, earnest handshakes, and only a few backs turned. There was also Carl McIntire, the minister of the Bible Presbyterian Church, shadowing the team with his faithful demonstrators, waving a “Mao Killed More Christians than Hitler Killed Jews” placard. The Chinese documentary team following the players added a simple voice-over to the footage: “The young Americans express their friendly feelings for New China.”

  Despite Carl McIntire, the opportunity to meet regular students was sweet relief from the initial stiffness of the tour. “How do you like American food?” one student asked as he approached the Chinese. “We’re getting used to it,” said their interpreter. “So are we,” replied the student.

  CHAPTER 48 | Capital Performance

  A day later, the Chinese delegation touched down near Colonial Williamsburg, the heart of Virginia. The Chinese remembered this as their favorite place on their tour. It was well chosen, a sly nod to the revolutionary past of the United States. The Chinese walked past the apothecary, past the tavern, past the Authentic Barber and Peruke Maker, past windmills and bowling greens. Dinner was served by candlelight. “I thought it was beautiful,” said woman’s champion Zheng Huaiying, “to see all the old customs were still kept.”

  As the Chinese politely listened to a potted history of America, the US Air Force was launching a heavy air assault on the Vietnamese port of Haiphong, six thousand miles away.

  The first to feel the painful awkwardness of their position were the interpreters. “It was like putting a dagger in their back, and you then shake their hands,” thought Vee-ling Edwards. Bob Woodward of the Washington Post called to interview her and asked why the Chinese didn’t refuse to continue the tour. “They could never do that,” she explained. “They were guests.” Though the conflict in Vietnam magnified the opposing interests of the United States and China, the Chinese team never mentioned it. Obviously, though, the bombing of Haiphong did not go unnoticed. Every morning, when Edwards went to greet the team, she’d find the officials going over the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the local papers, scissors in hand, creating a scrapbook of their journey.

  Before leaving the revolutionary past of Williamsburg, Zhuang Zedong stood up in a Virginia restaurant after finishing his apple pie and led the team in singing “Home on the Range.” Some songs were more controversial, such as “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”; Vee-ling Edwards was interrupted by Chinese objections when she reached the line “life is but a dream.” It was politically incompatible with the teachings of Mao.

  One of the translators solved the problem, and the Chinese resumed singing: “Merrily, merrily, merrily, life is full of steam.” After they finished their songs, the bus chugged north toward Washington, where the team was due to meet with the man who had ordered the bombing of their North Vietnamese allies, Richard Nixon.

  In the Cole Field House, on the University of Maryland campus in College Park, just ten miles south of the White House, thousands came to greet the Chinese. Tim Boggan stood up in the stands and looked around him at the sea of Americans gathered for a game of table tennis. “Would you believe it! Would you believe what’s happening! After all those fucking years in dirty subterraneous basements!”

  Seated neatly together in reserved seats were the US secretary of state Bill Rogers, Graham Steenhoven, and Zhuang Zedong, next to President Nixon’s daughter Tricia. Nixon had been encouraging Tricia to take her honeymoon in China, but the Vietnam War still loomed over the president and his family. A big banner was unfurled saying, “Tricia Nixon Watches Ping-Pong While Her Father Bombs Haiphong.”

  The Chinese team entered, and a huge roar went up. It wasn’t welcoming. “Kill Mao!” screamed the Nationalists who’d bought a block of seats near the floor. A boisterous Taiwanese woman heckled the team with obscenities. Neither Zhuang nor any of his players ever turned in her direction. Sometimes, part of Ping-Pong politics was to maintain that the politics did not exist. This wasn’t only a Chinese trick. Toward the evening’s end, Tricia Nixon and Secretary Rogers walked down from their seats to shake the players’ hands. “The [American] students changed their chant without let-up to ‘Rogers is a murderer.’ And it was the Secretary’s turn be inscrutable and imperturbable.”

  The demonstrations and counterdemonstrations in Maryland were so large that after the match, the local section of US Route 1 was shut down for two days. The governor of Maryland called out the National Guard, giving the Chinese ample proof of what domestic troubles Nixon and Kissinger were facing and how important a solution to Vietnam would be to them.

  The situation in Washington, DC, was worse. The Haiphong bombing had stirred up furious antiwar protests yet again. At campuses around the country sporadic violence broke out, “as rock-throwing student groups tried to seize buildings while police used clubs and tear gas.” For the first time in six months, hundreds had been arrested on Pennsylvania Avenue, and the White House was surrounded by a defensive ring of buses as the Chinese neared.

  The day was bright. The Rose Garden was in bloom. On arrival at the White House, the two teams were separated. The Chinese, “the first group from the People’s Republic of China ever to visit the nation’s capital,” stood in the middle of the Rose Garden, while the Americans were herded behind a slim rope with the press and public. The president emerged to say a few words. “In the course of your contest,” he intoned, “there will be winners and losers. But there is one big winner and that’s more important than who wins a match. The big winner is Friendship—between the people of the US and the People’s Republic of China.” It was the echo of Zhou Enlai’s words a year before: Nixon’s pong to Zhou’s ping.

  The American team had never looked smarter. They were almost fluorescent in their blue-jacketed brightness. But no one in the White House had thought about introducing them to Nixon. Those who had gone to China, who had somehow not contaminated twenty months of strategic planning, would not be given so much as a handshake. The slight was all the more cutting because it was obvious that such a step had not even been considered.

  The Americans watched Zhuang Zedong shake hands with Nixon and lead him down the line of the Chinese delegation. The president had a word and a handshake for every single one, despite the shrill cries of “Come enter the free world!” wailing from the protesters on Pennsylvania Avenue. By that point, explained a Chinese player, they’d come to realize that this was “the American way of doing things.”

  The president was guided back toward the White House. Just before he disappeared, a voice piped up in indignation: “Don’t you want to meet the team that went to China?” “Oh, yes,” said Nixon, turning around. “I didn’t know you were here.” Finally Nixon stepped toward them. “I noticed as I came out that some of you were in uniform,” he added, “and I wondered who you were.” He shared a few gracious words and then moved on again. Consultant for Press Affairs Marcia Burick cringed at the memory of n
eglect. “It was awful.”

  There was another conflicted team in Washington that day: the American interpreters. Should they boycott the White House event as a political statement over Haiphong in support of their guests, or toe the line so that they could be there to assist the Chinese? One of the interpreters, Perry Link, considered “the bombing of Haiphong too contradictory” for him to participate in the Rose Garden ceremony. Another three interpreters agreed, including Vee-ling Edwards. Their decision was met with fury by both the White House and by Graham Steenhoven, who recommended that all the offenders be fired at once. Their only comfort was from a Chinese official who had noticed their absence. “One day,” he said to Vee-ling Edwards, “we’d like you to come visit the Ping-Pong team in China.” It was the subtlest way the delegation could find to let Edwards know that their stand had not gone unnoticed.

  CHAPTER 49 | United Nations

  As their motorcade, accompanied by circling helicopters, reached New York for their visit to the United Nations, the US table tennis players seemed to have dropped into the role of extras. The press was always there in great numbers, often more than two hundred. They had their own 747 that followed the Chinese plane and their own bus that followed the Chinese bus, but they weren’t interested in covering the American players. If some of the American team had chafed at Glenn Cowan’s hogging of the limelight the previous year, it turned out that without him, there was no limelight at all.

  What the US players had failed to recognize was that they had already done their jobs. Thanks to them, politicians had more room to maneuver without being restricted by a surprised or angry public. A few more games in front of thousands, and then Ping-Pong would return to the basement. You could almost smell the neglect reclaiming American table tennis.

  The visit to the United Nations brought out the contradictions, joys, and disappointments experienced by the attendees. In the wake of America’s warm receipt of the Chinese table tennis overture in 1971, countries had rushed to reestablish diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic. America’s UN ambassador and future president George H. W. Bush fought hard for Taiwan, but the mood had turned thanks to Ping-Pong diplomacy. Bush’s efforts were undercut by his own president.

  The man the Chinese chose to be their first ever ambassador to the United Nations was none other than Huang Hua. Thirty-four years earlier, he had been the translator who guided Edgar Snow into the mountains to find Mao and Zhou Enlai, and he slept alongside Snow on top of a Ping-Pong table after surveying the Red Army.

  The Chinese documentary voice-over was at its most breathless inside the United Nations. “This is the Security Council chamber, the seat of the permanent representative of the People’s Republic of China.” The fact that for twenty-two years that seat had belonged to Taiwan was left unsaid. Ping-Pong diplomacy was changing the shape of the world. The camera cut to Zhuang Zedong sitting in Huang Hua’s chair. Zhuang leaned back, smiled broadly, and patted the armrests, the perfect hybrid of player and politician. Why not smile? His actions the previous April had helped cause more countries to reestablish relations with China since the year Mao had come to power.

  The American Ping-Pong players’ experiences were very different. At the drinks that followed a brief exhibition game, Steenhoven looked around him at his players and their spouses. Steenhoven hadn’t invited any spouses. The players had smuggled them in for the tour of the building. Minutes into the drinks, Steenhoven ordered all his players to leave. He accompanied them back to the hotel where a spontaneous meeting took place.

  The players voiced complaints. Being ignored, not playing, not being paid, husband not allowed into hotel room, no invitation to a drink or to a dinner. It was a bizarre inversion of the criticism meetings that the Chinese squad had endured in previous years. So many American players believed this was their one dance in the spotlight, and the spotlight was gliding past them.

  Most criticized of all was Steenhoven, but his closing remarks had a quieting effect. “I’ve fought for table tennis every step of the way,” said Steenhoven to the group. “And they don’t know me. They don’t know Steenhoven. Zhuang Zedong takes my hand when I’m introduced. He introduces me.” The neglect ran from top to bottom.

  The next stop was Memphis, Tennessee. It contained exactly three registered table tennis players but was the world headquarters of Holiday Inn, which was keen to make an impression on the Chinese. The chairman of Holiday Inn welcomed them with a few well-chosen words. “We’re going to have a Holiday Inn in every city of the world,” he said, “and I hope we can soon have one in your great country.” A mortified Vee-ling Edwards chose to translate such an aggressive pitch as politely as possible. “We hope we can include you in this grand design.”

  That evening the team was invited onto a riverboat called The Memphis Queen, filled with buxom “Southern Belles . . . in their antebellum costumes.” It steamed down the river followed by a helicopter that swept “the banks of the Mississippi with powerful searchlights . . . as if to flush out the snipers.” The New York Times reporter called it “an unfortunate reminder of the Vietnam war.”

  As they headed west to Los Angeles, the American team riding in the aircraft provided for the Chinese, Boggan watched Zhuang Zedong entertain the teams with card tricks and sleights of hand, amazed by the man’s ability to charm. Zhuang hadn’t just sat next to the US secretary of state nor simply taken President Nixon by the arm and introduced him to all thirty-four members of the Chinese delegation, he’d also bowled on a lawn in Williamsburg, tossed a Frisbee with college students, hit a single at a high school baseball practice, signed an orange, and would soon play Ping-Pong with a dolphin named Peppy at Marineland. He was, as Chairman Mao had said, a very versatile diplomat.

  In California, the mood was more relaxed. On a visit to Disneyland, “they were greeted by Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Pluto and a six piece band” and got dizzy riding in swirling giant teacups. At Universal Studios, players shook hands with Frankenstein, saw a dog show, and survived a flash flood. They took the train past the man-made lake, where a submarine periscope appeared and a torpedo hurtled through the water toward them to soak the team with water. A year before, real Russian warheads had been aimed at Beijing. How quickly life could change.

  The first to jump off the bus at Universal that morning was Doug Spelman, designated as the main interpreter for the day. He landed at the feet “of this large, fat man standing right there.” Spelman looked at the familiar face. “Hello,” said the man, “I’m Alfred Hitchcock.” The director was spotted later in the Universal cafeteria. “Jeez,” said one player, “I might be in the middle of a mystery and not even know it.” The team finished their meals and walked down a corridor past the poster of one of Alfred Hitchcock’s earliest films, Sabotage. If the team had paused to squint at the credits, they would have seen that the name of the producer was the same as the original architect of all Ping-Pong diplomacy, Ivor Montagu.

  For the press officers, players, and interpreters it had been a long two weeks. Even though few friendships had managed to jump the language barrier, there were plenty of odd and touching scenes. At a last, unscheduled stop in Napa, California, the Chinese players were left alone with their State Department security agents. One of the players came up with a bottle of the scorching alcohol mao-tai. One of the State Department bodyguards borrowed a set of golf clubs. The Chinese and Americans, not a golfer among them, started trying to drive balls down the valley.

  As they hit, the Chinese noticed people below tending to the vines. Throughout the trip, they’d been asking their hosts when they would meet peasants. “We don’t have peasants in this country!” Rufford Harrison kept explaining. “We have farmers . . . but no peasants.” Here at last were peasants. After the golf concluded, the Chinese strolled toward the vines to shake hands with migrant workers to express their solidarity. Zhuang Zedong helped plant a vine, but little communication was possible because the Chinese interpreter spoke no Spanish.


  Plenty of problems on the tour were caused by the Chinese carrying the rigidity of the Cultural Revolution on their backs. In Detroit, they’d refused to enter a local church. In Washington, they’d walked out on a high school choir that “began the program with a sacred song.” They balked at entering the Kennedy Center of the Performing Arts after spotting a Taiwanese flag outside. At the National Gallery of Art they canceled their tour after finding a Taiwanese reporter in the media entourage. They’d refused a tour of the New York Times after taking issue with an article in that morning’s paper. The same evening, at an Alvin Ailey performance of modern dance, they’d risen as one when told it was an interpretation of Jesus’s life, until Vee-ling Edwards chided them, “Don’t you walk out on Christ: he was a friend of the poor.” They took their seats again.

  Yet by Chinese standards, nothing big had happened. The bombing of Haiphong, demonstrations, Carl McIntire, dead rats, the National Guard, and Frankenstein had all been greeted with equanimity. The cumulative effect of the tour only strengthened the goodwill between the two countries. Anyone who doubted it hadn’t seen the footage from the tarmac as the Chinese players departed. Genuine tears flowed on both sides. Vee-ling Edwards, at the age of fifty-four, realized that it was only the third time she had ever cried. They weren’t the tears of indelible friendships but the recognition that something remarkable had happened. In twelve short months, the majority of Americans no longer “considered citizens of the People’s Republic of China their enemies,” and the proof remained in the Ping-Pong players.