Beautiful Country

by J. R. Thornton

  She followed me to the dining room and watched me pour the milk on the cereal. The milk was warm and had a metallic aftertaste, and I tried not to think about what chemicals negated the need for refrigeration. I smiled at her and gave her a thumbs-up. She nodded her head and disappeared. I walked back to the kitchen to look for some sugar. As I was opening cupboards, she appeared again. I tried to mimic sprinkling sugar onto my bowl of cereal. She nodded and disappeared and reappeared with another box of unopened cornflakes. I was about to head to my room and get my Chinese-English dictionary to find the word for sugar when Victoria called to say the traffic was very bad, and she would be late. As I put the phone down I kicked myself for not having asked her how to say sugar in Chinese.

  I abandoned hope of improving breakfast and instead had a closer look around the Zhangs’ living room. Next to the huge television was a small room that contained the Zhangs’ massive DVD collection. On all four walls the room had shelves from floor to ceiling. Every shelf was filled. The titles ranged from Disney classics such as Aladdin and The Lion King to Chinese films I had never heard of to the films that were still in theaters in the United States.

  The tables were covered with framed photographs. Some appeared to be from holiday trips—the Zhang family together on a tropical beach, in front of the White House, with Western friends on the Great Wall, David and Lily holding a tiger cub. Then there were endless photos of Mr. Zhang with all sorts of famous and important-looking people. There was a picture of Mr. Zhang with President George H. W. Bush, one of the whole family with the former Chinese president, Jiang Zemin, one of Mr. Zhang and his wife with Bill and Hillary Clinton, and one of them with a very young boy dressed in Buddhist robes who I learned later was the eleventh Panchen Lama, the highest-ranking Buddhist Lama after the Dalai Lama. The young Panchen Lama was a divisive figure because the Chinese government had controversially intervened in the selection process and chosen him against the wishes of the Dalai Lama. There were many more pictures like those, with people I didn’t recognize but I could tell must be important. My father had told me that Mr. Zhang was a wealthy businessman, but that was all he had really said. The pictures made me question if there was not more to the story. I began to wonder who Mr. Zhang really was.

  五

  I began playing tennis when I was six years old. My father had been a very good junior player and had captained the varsity team at Yale his senior year. Some of my earliest memories of Tom are watching him play tennis with our father. Once Tom learned how to serve, our father started taking him to eight-and-under tournaments all around Connecticut and New York on the weekends. When Tom turned nine, our father hired Lukas Bartek, an ex-professional player from Slovakia, to be his private coach and paid an athletic supply company to construct a backboard behind our tennis court. I think he envisioned Tom using it to practice during his free time, but Tom never did. I am not sure that Tom ever loved tennis, not the way I did, at least.

  Tom might not have used that backboard much, but I certainly did. After years of being dragged along to Tom’s lessons and tournaments, I couldn’t wait to start playing myself. Every day after I finished my homework, I used to take my miniature racket and go out to the backboard where I played imaginary matches against Sampras, Rafter, and Agassi. I never lost. By the time I had my first real tennis lesson, I could already claim seven French Opens, four U.S. Opens, and, most importantly, eleven Wimbledon titles.

  Despite my illustrious success in my own backyard, it was at about age nine when I got serious about tennis. Once I started the fourth grade, I began practicing with Lukas. He was the best coach I ever worked with. Lukas had grown up in the brutally competitive Soviet-run Czechoslovakian sports system and had been ranked as high as three-hundredth in the world on the professional tour before a shoulder injury prematurely ended his career. While he had exchanged his homeland for that of the United States, he had brought with him the methods and intensity of the sports system he had grown up with—as well as the attitude that if you were an American kid, you were, by definition, spoiled.

  Prior to working with Tom and me, Lukas had trained some of the world’s top junior and professional players and demanded the same work ethic from us as he did from them. He used to say that if you finished practice without throwing up, then you hadn’t worked hard enough. Lukas proved to be too tough for Tom, who lost interest in tennis by the time he was fourteen and gave up the sport altogether the following year despite our father’s strong disapproval. But for me Lukas was a phenomenal coach. He demanded a lot, but under his guidance, I became one of the top players in the country for my age group. When the decision was made that I would take a year off from school, Lukas had urged my father to send me to train at the elite Laver Tennis Academy in Florida and was adamantly against me going to China to train. Both he and I thought there was a very real chance that I could become a top professional tennis player. After it had been confirmed that I was leaving for China, Lukas took a job coaching a player on the West Coast.

  The National Training Center was south of Beijing’s central district. Despite being relatively close to the Zhangs’ apartment, it could take over an hour to get there because of the traffic. When the traffic was particularly bad, Driver Wu would often pull out of our lane into the opposite lane of oncoming cars.

  The outskirts of Beijing had a sameness to them—two- and three-story buildings, shops, apartment buildings—many built at the exact same time so that the result was a succession of identical structures, all in varying states of dilapidation. We turned down a road dense on both sides with gray concrete-block buildings, and rundown shops. At the end of the road in front of a formidable gate stood a green-uniformed soldier with a red star on his cap. He held a machine gun across his chest. Driver Wu rolled down his window and gave my name. I showed my passport and Victoria handed over her national ID card. The guard checked a list and then opened the gates. Driver Wu parked the car in a small lot behind the gatehouse and told Victoria that we would have to walk the rest of the way.

  Fifty feet from the gates, a giant five-faced statue towered in front of a collection of dreary cinder-block buildings and cast a long, wide shadow onto the tarmac below. I gazed up at the huge statue as we walked by. It began with a gray-colored stone column that rose thirty feet into the air. Atop the thick column were five athletes representing different sports: javelin, sprinting, tennis, discus, and shot put. They pointed outward in five different directions, their bodies meshing together in the center. They had been sculpted so that their bodies were flawless with lean rippled muscles, but their faces lacked any clearly defined features, and there was no joy in those cold, stone-gray faces. There was something unsettling about that statue. The way that the figures with their sad, not-quite-human faces seemed to represent athletic ideals rather than individuals—as if their identities had been lost.

  The center seemed deserted. It was supposed to be one of China’s main athletic facilities, and I had expected to see athletes running, stretching, or just walking around the complex, but there was no one around, not even any maintenance workers. I was worried that we had gotten the address wrong, but Victoria assured me we were in the correct place.

  We wandered into a gym. The room was poorly lit, and water dripped from a brown stain on the ceiling into a plastic bucket by the door. In the corner was a stack of free weights. The weights were of different brands and materials, a hodgepodge collection that looked as though it had been assembled through random donations. There were two bench presses, one multipurpose weight machine, and a spin bike that was missing the seat. Everything looked at least fifteen years old.

  The ratty old gym equipment convinced me that we had come to the wrong place. There was no way that this could be the national training center. Most of the Best Westerns and Holiday Inns I had stayed in for national tournaments had better equipment in their small gym rooms. We turned around to leave when a guard appeared in the doorway. He held a machine gun and questioned Victori
a. He sounded angry. Victoria replied and I recognized the word for tennis court. He barked a message into his radio. We stood in silence as he waited for a response. His fingers never left the machine gun, and he looked at me with what I can only describe as hostility. Finally a reply crackled over the radio, and the guard nodded to Victoria. He escorted us out of the gym and toward a second building. When the guard was three strides ahead, I asked Victoria why he had been so upset. She whispered that every Thursday high-ranking government officials came here to play tennis with members of the men’s team. That guard could have lost his job if anyone had discovered that we had been allowed to wander into the building. He was responsible for securing it, and we had nearly walked into the officials’ reception area. We should have never been allowed to wander around unsupervised.

  Inside the second building, I heard the unmistakable sound of tennis balls being hit clean and hard, and I knew we had come to the right place. I thought back to the decrepit gym and wondered if my father had realized the training facilities would be so poor. Maybe once I explained all this to him he would let me transfer to the Laver Tennis Academy.

  It had been nearly a week since I had last played, and I was anxious to get on the courts. I knew that once I felt the ball on my racket and the bounce-hit rhythm of a rally, I would be back in a world I knew well, and I would feel more at home.

  After a few minutes, a tall, unsmiling woman appeared and walked toward us with long strides. An old wooden racket was tucked under her arm. She was dressed in a white warm-up suit and dark sunglasses and wore white gloves, but she didn’t offer either Victoria or me her hand to shake. “Jiang Jiaolian,” she said. She looked at me and pointed to herself and said, “Madame Jiang.” She turned and motioned for us to follow her. She led us down a corridor and pushed aside a blood-red-colored curtain to reveal six indoor tennis courts. Two teenage boys were hitting on the first court and three more stood to the side, unpacking their rackets.

  Madame Jiang yelled out, “Bo Wen!” The boys on the first court stopped playing and one of them came over. He was tall and thin, with long black hair tied back with a yellow bandanna. He bounced on the balls of his feet as he walked. He smiled at me and held out his hand.

  “My name is Bowen,” he said in English. The rhythm of his speech was slightly off. It was like he had seen the words written on a page but had never heard them spoken aloud. I shook his hand and introduced myself. Madame Jiang cleared her throat and said something to Victoria and motioned for her to translate.

  “She wants the two of you to play a set,” Victoria said.

  Tennis courts need to be resurfaced every few years to be kept in playable condition, and I could tell just from looking at them that these courts had not been touched for at least a decade. If courts aren’t resurfaced regularly, the surface wears away and they become increasingly difficult to play on. With wear outdoor courts become scarred with cracks and bumps, while indoor courts can become so polished and slippery that the ball flies off the surface as if it were ice. I followed Bowen to the first court, dropped my bag at the net post, and walked to the baseline to begin warming up.

  As I had expected, the courts were slick and fast. Bowen, the only left-handed player in the group, spent little time warming up. He played like a typical indoor court player—sending the ball extremely fast and low over the net with barely any topspin. The technique of applying heavy topspin to the ball had been drilled into me by my coach, day after day, and was ideal for the slow Florida clay courts but totally useless on these slick indoor courts.

  When Madame Jiang noticed that the boys on the other courts had stopped playing to watch our warm-up, she yelled something sharp that I didn’t understand. They immediately resumed play on their courts.

  I could tell from my first few shots that I wasn’t going to play well. After thousands of hours on the court, every time you hit the ball, you know at that one-millisecond point of contact how good the shot is going to be. That day my arm felt detached from my body, as if it belonged to someone else, and every time I felt I was starting to settle into a rhythm, I sent a ball flying wildly long.

  I hadn’t realized that the trial was going to consist of a brief warm-up and a set. I had expected I would practice with the team for several days, play a few sets at the end of the week and then hear the verdict. In America, if you joined a team practice to be evaluated, you would be asked first to drill. You might be asked to play points or tiebreakers at the end of practice, but you would never be evaluated by having to play a set right at the beginning.

  Bowen came to the net and stood his racket on its head. He played with a red thin-beam Wilson racket, the same racket that Roger Federer used. It was a difficult racket to play with because it gave you little power and required perfect timing and coordination due to its small sweet spot. Very few players on the pro tour other than Federer were able to play with it, but those who could were rewarded with excellent feel. Bowen lifted the racket and held it so the butt pointed toward me. He pointed to the red “W” Wilson logo on the butt. “M or W?” he asked, stumbling over the letters. I wondered how much English he knew. “W,” I answered. He nodded his head and said, “Hao de (Good),” and spun his racket with his left hand. It may seem like a small thing, but this one gesture, spinning the racket to see who would serve first, made me feel at home. So many things here at first seemed to be the same as in America, but on closer inspection they were different, imitations or alterations of the original; this gesture of spinning the racket was the first familiar gesture I had seen, and as the racket twirled, for a short second I was no longer in Beijing, but at the indoor center near my house in Connecticut. But then the racket tripped on a crack in the court’s surface and came tumbling down, and I was back on the other side of the world once again.

  Bowen won the toss and chose to receive. I expected that Madame Jiang would give us new balls for the set, but Bowen just picked up the dead balls that we’d warmed up with and sent them flying toward me. I played a terrible first game, double-faulting twice and sending two sloppy forehands long past the baseline. Bowen, on the other hand, played his first service game close to perfection. He approached the baseline and cracked his serve fast and hard, and it skidded low on the court. Bowen flowed around the court, so perfectly in sync with the game it was as if he saw everything two seconds before it happened. He seemed to know where I was going to hit the ball even before I did. When Bowen hit his ground strokes, his thin arms moved laconically in a loop, bringing the racket up and then dropping it down below the ball. Then, just before the point of impact, his racket became an extension of his arm and his muscles uncoiled to whip the ball back across the net at seventy or eighty miles per hour. A tennis ball stays on the strings of a racket for only a few hundredths of a second, and yet that minuscule fragment of a second was all Bowen needed to get the ball to do whatever he wanted.

  I knew from the start of the warm-up that I was outclassed. Bowen simply played on a different level than I did. He was profoundly talented, there was no other way to say it. His movement, his anticipation, his reading of the game, his timing, everything was exquisite. I knew I would never be able to play the way that he did. It was as if the game of tennis had somehow been woven into the threads of his DNA.

  At 4-0, I feared I was going to get blown off the court without even winning a game. I looked over at Victoria on the sidelines for support, but she was texting on her pink phone. I walked to the back of the court and stood there for twenty seconds, looking down at my strings. I needed to figure a way to get back into the match. I approached the baseline and took several deep breaths to try to focus my mind. I cracked a first serve, hard, down the tee—ace. I was starting to get a feel for the slick courts and began hitting slice serves so that the ball skidded low and fast. Bowen missed returns on the next three points. I was still a long way off from being back in the match, but at least I had gotten myself on the scoreboard. Madame Jiang yelled across the courts to ask what the sco
re was. Bowen shouted back 4-all. I was confused—I had only won one game. I thought I must have misunderstood him, but he smiled at me and raised his eyebrows.

  That moment always comes back to me—Bowen acknowledging to me that he was up to something and that I was somehow part of his plan. I would come to see that it was his supreme confidence in himself and his ability that permitted him to tease fate. I passed the balls to Bowen and he got ready to serve the 4-all game. Madame Jiang came over to our court and watched with her hands folded behind her back. Bowen won the game easily to go up 5-4, and I won the next game by hitting winners that I suspected he had set up for me. Bowen controlled everything that was happening. At 5-all he went into another gear and raised his game and effortlessly pulled ahead and won the set 7-5. When Bowen won the last point, Madame Jiang nodded her head, as if to say, This is how it should be.

  By fabricating such a close score with the gift of three fictitious games, Bowen had ensured that I would be considered good enough to practice with the boys. At the time, I had no idea why he had done it. Maybe he knew that if he played his best he would keep me off the team and he did not want that responsibility; maybe he wanted someone new to practice with. I wasn’t sure, but I was glad he had let me back into the match. It wasn’t until months later that I understood what he had been up to.