We walked along the cracked, gray pavement and followed the curve of the athletic stadium. We passed the five-sided statue that guarded the entrance. One guard and then a second emerged from the stadium’s periphery. They marched side by side, chins held high, red-starred caps pulled down low, black automatic rifles pressed tight across their chests into their starched and pressed green uniforms. Neither acknowledged us. I wondered if their guns were loaded.
Bowen interrupted my thoughts. “Why do you come to China?”
“I want to turn pro when I’m older. So I’m not going to school this year. Just playing tennis,” I said. Knowing it was something I was going to be asked a lot that year, I had practiced my answer a thousand times in my head. But when I heard it, it sounded false. It was the truth, it just wasn’t the whole truth.
“Me, too.” Bowen’s sudden intensity surprised me. “I want to be professional player, too. Wimbledon.” He struggled with the word and tried again. “Wimbledon. I am going to win Wimbledon.”
“My club at home has grass courts,” I said. “But I’m terrible on grass.”
He frowned. “But why do you come to China? I think maybe it is better in America, no?”
“Well, my dad is here a lot for work,” I said. Both of us knew that this was an incomplete answer. I wasn’t sure I knew the true answer myself. Bowen didn’t press me on it. We had now left the stadium and were following a brick path that bordered an artificial soccer field. Trees covered with a thin layer of dust lined the brick path. But they were barren and seemed pathetic compared to the maples and oaks that colored Greenwich every fall with impossible shades of red and yellow.
“So in America you are number one?”
“Me?” I asked, surprised. “No, no. In the twelve-and-under I was number fifteen. Now in the fourteen-and-under I am lower.”
“Oh,” Bowen said, clearly disappointed. “I am number two in China for under fourteen. Dali? You know him?” I shook my head. Bowen stopped and pointed back in the direction from which we had come. “He plays here. He is tall, hits ball like this.” Bowen screwed up his face, grasped an imaginary racket in his two hands, ducked low into an exaggerated athletic stance, and sidestepped to the left, pulling the pretend racket back as he did. He stopped and shadowed a double-handed backhand, slow and awkward, grunting loudly as he did it. I laughed out loud, recognizing it as the backhand of the tallest of our teammates.
“Okay, yeah, I know him,” I said.
“He is number six,” Bowen said. “The others are not so good, maybe numbers twenty, twenty-five. So you practice here now? How long?”
“For one year, I think,” I said.
“Good. I can practice my English.” He patted his chest and opened his hand to me as if he was offering something. “Maybe we can play doubles.” I knew we couldn’t because foreigners were not allowed to compete in the national tournament, but I sensed this was his way of making up for the other boys.
I felt a hand on my shoulder and saw that Bowen had stopped walking. To our left were several rows of identical one-story bungalows that extended far down the brick path. Most wore their years poorly, their green doors pockmarked with brown patches where the paint had flaked off, and their whitewashed walls chipped and divoted. Bowen pointed down one of the tiled avenues that ran perpendicular to the bungalows, cutting the rows into columns. “Okay,” he said. “I go here. You should go back. Maybe Madame Jiang will look for you now. She can be angry.” The thought made him frown, but only for a second. He began to walk away but stopped and turned back to me. “Hey, what kind of music do you think is beautiful?”
“Coldplay, Outkast.” I could see the names meant nothing to him. He listed some names that he said were famous, but I didn’t know them and have still never heard of them again.
“Okay, I will give you, uh—” He searched for the word.
“CD?”
“Yes.” He beamed. “I will give you CD.”
I walked back to the courts quickly with my head low. Bowen’s warning had made me anxious about Madame Jiang’s reaction to my leaving practice. I passed several uniformed guards. In all my time at the center, I never got used to their presence. I broke into a jog and rushed past the five-sided statue and up to the indoor complex. As I approached the main doors of the indoor center, I imagined an irate Madame Jiang waiting for me, and I imagined the conversation I would have to have with my father about my skipping practice. I felt an anxiety I had last felt while waiting outside my principal’s office after I had gotten into that fight with Jake Green.
But when I walked in, Madame Jiang didn’t even register my presence. She must not have realized I had been gone. Or maybe she just didn’t care.
十一
Bowen was back with the team the following week. After Monday’s practice he pulled out a CD from his tennis bag and held it out to me with a wide smile on his face. He asked me if I had brought one of American music for him and I told him that I had forgotten but that I would bring one the next day. I tried listening to his CD that night but I couldn’t get it to play on my computer. The following day I gave him a NOW pop music compilation that I had brought from America. He studied the glossy album artwork and flipped it over and stumbled over the names of artists as he tried to read them aloud. He ran over to the other boys and showed them what I had given him. None of them seemed that interested, but for the next week Bowen would pull me aside before and after practice and ask me questions about the different artists and how to pronounce their names.
After two weeks of practice, I began to get to know my teammates quite well. I wasn’t sure if it was because he spent so much time talking to me, but I began to get the sense that Bowen wasn’t quite part of the gang. The other boys would walk to practice together in a group. But Bowen would already be at the courts alone, running sprints or hitting serves. When we would have water breaks, the other boys would stand in a circle and chat and joke, while Bowen came over and sat by me. I noticed other things about my teammates too. You can learn a lot about a person’s nature by the way they play a sport—whether they are conservative, impulsive, imaginative, bold, optimistic, pessimistic, a risk taker, a cheater—it’s all coded in the choices a player makes. Lukas always said that a hard-fought game of tennis laid bare one’s soul.
The boys on the team had differing levels of commitment to practice. With the exception of Bowen, they played with a sense of obligation and duty as if they were going to work every day. Random treaded water, waiting for the time to come for him to leave. Only Bowen had his heart in it, or at least that is how it seemed to me.
I would later learn that Random was the only boy who didn’t come from a desperately poor background. I don’t know how she found out, but Victoria informed me that Random’s father had recently made money in a shirt business—selling cheap white shirts to the growing Chinese workforce over the internet. So Random had a safety net underneath him. I guess because he knew he had a better future than the other boys, he had developed a protective attitude toward some of them. I once asked one of the boys if I could borrow some tape for blisters on my hand, but Random shook his head and said I shouldn’t ask for anything from them because they couldn’t afford to give anything.
In the first two weeks I was paired with Little Mao quite a bit. He said he was sixteen, but he looked older. His teeth were so crooked and at such odd angles to one another that I guessed it must have been hard for him to bite food properly. He hit the ball flat and hard and never varied the way he played. He stayed on the baseline and was uncomfortable at net. I had figured out on the first day that the way to beat him was to frustrate him by mixing up the speed and placement of the ball. A chip, followed by a lob, followed by a heavy forehand would rattle him, and he would miss by overhitting. If you gave him the same ball every time in a rally, he would lock onto the rhythm and send a winner streaking past you. When we did drills such as figure eights or side-to-side movement, Little Mao almost never missed. He was like playing t
he backboard.
Dali was the opposite of Little Mao. Whereas Little Mao was small and worked hard, Dali was tall, thin, and extremely talented but the laziest player in the group. Little Mao could not hide his irritation at Dali’s squandering his talent. He would look over in amazement at Dali doing a tough drill with ease and then later react with disgust as Dali tanked another match because he didn’t feel up to it. He always looked for the shortcut in a rally, and he was happier to let a ball go than to lunge after it. But even though Dali was the laziest out of all of us, his raw ability meant that when he actually tried, he was the second-best player in the group. I also liked his name because it reminded me of the artist.
Then there was Lu Xi, whose last name, 路 (Lu), meant path or road, and whose first name, 希 (Xi), meant hope. We called him Hope for short. Hope was agile and graceful and played a way that was reminiscent of the bygone era of serve and volleyers like Stan Smith and John McEnroe. He wore glasses and old tennis whites. He showed up and went to work like a dutiful accountant and never showed any emotion at practices. The only thing he would do if he missed a volley at net was to push his glasses closer to the bridge of his nose with his index finger.
Despite practicing every day for months with Hope and Dali, I never really got to know them well. Hope was only seventeen, but there was something broken about him, almost as if all emotion had been drained out of him. The only time he ever really seemed content was when he was on the tennis court. He had a good serve that depended more on placement than power, and he often came to net. All his tennis clothes, I later learned, were hand-me-downs from his uncle who had been the men’s number one player for Taiwan. I once tried to speak to him about Taiwan, but he did not want to tell me anything. He kept to himself, even among the other Chinese boys. Hope and Dali were both seventeen and would soon be moving on. Either they would be good enough to make the men’s team, or they would be deemed not good enough and dismissed from the program. No second chances, no safety nets, no soft landings. Only Dali didn’t seem to care about the outcome.
Over the time that I spent playing with these boys, I came to understand the risk with which they had to live life. They were given one opportunity, just one. It was theirs to manage, and there was no one to help them. I guess things had been decided for me too, but it was different. I was expected to apply myself as my father had done and as his father had done before him, but if I was not doing well at something, there was an alternative plan, and there was always someone watching out for me.
Of all the boys, Bowen was by far the most naturally gifted and the best player. He was never without his yellow bandanna tied around his shaggy head of hair that he held up high in a sort of defiance against the world. As a lefty, he nailed his serve consistently at high speeds, and he could place it almost anywhere. Each shot took him at least three feet closer to the net, so he just attacked and attacked until his opponent returned a weak shot. Bowen would then send the ball to the open court with so much precision and power that most times his opponent wouldn’t even bother to chase it. By the time two weeks had passed, I could tell that Bowen had consciously played me in such a way as to bring out the best in my game. It was as if he had flipped his understanding of how to win into an understanding of how to lose, but in a way that still made it look as though he was trying.
Bowen was always asking questions about America and what it was like. He noticed my clothes—if I wore a T-shirt that I had gotten at a national tournament that had the location of the tournament printed on it, he would ask me about the city—San Antonio, Fort Lauderdale, Palm Springs, Dothan. He was especially curious about the Orange Bowl. At the start of one practice I fished out a bottle of Advil from my tennis bag. My elbow hurt from hitting the hard flat balls. Bowen asked me what Advil was.
“It’s medicine for my elbow. To make it stop hurting so I can play.”
“Does it work?”
“It helps.”
Practices in Beijing started differently from how they did at home. In America, we would warm up by first stretching and then jogging twice around the court and then turning sideways and sidestepping around the court. Next came alternating crossover steps that twisted your body from side to side. Sometimes our coaches would ask us to get our rackets out with the covers on and swing them in shadow strokes to warm up our shoulders. The routine had been thoughtfully crafted to minimize injuries and gradually increase the level of exertion.
Without fail the Chinese practices almost always started with juggling. Perhaps Madame Jiang thought it would train us to keep our eyes on the ball. Occasionally she would interrupt practice and tell us to run laps around the outdoor track that was part of the sports complex. The randomness of her inclusion of this conditioning exercise was disruptive to practice. Only once can I remember her ever instructing us to run laps at the end of practice.
Though I hoped my time in Beijing would greatly improve my tennis, what little instruction was given during the tennis drills was incorrect, and I found myself regressing. None of Madame Jiang’s footwork drills made sense. When we were doing an overhead drill, she chided me about my footwork. As I had been taught by Lukas, when jumping back for an overhead I would push off my right foot, scissor kick, and land on my left. But Madame Jiang tried to get me to do the opposite, to jump off with my left foot. It made no sense to me. I knew what she wanted me to do, but the movement was so awkward and made it much harder to generate any height or power. Bowen looked as if he were playing badminton. I resisted what she was instructing, and she got frustrated with me. Bowen said to me quietly, “Do what she asks.” I did as Madame Jiang instructed even though I knew it was wrong. She was pleased and smiled and nodded her head. When the drill was over and we were picking up balls, Bowen moved close to me and repeated what he had said when I had first practiced with the team. “She doesn’t know how to play tennis. Only volleyball.” He lifted his chin toward her. “She doesn’t know anything about tennis.”
“What do I do at the next practice?”
“Do it both ways. When she looks at you—left foot, when she is not—right foot. She forget soon. Just wait.”
十二
A few summers before Tom died, my father took us on a trip to visit good friends who spent every summer in a beautiful but crumbling villa in Tuscany just outside the small town of Marlia. My father’s friends didn’t have children and didn’t know what to do with Tom and me so we were free to do whatever we wanted in the day. Tom had gotten a video recorder for his birthday and for those two weeks he filmed our exploration of the run-down villas in the surrounding countryside. We would spend the evenings watching and editing the day’s footage. It soon took shape as And So We Venture Forth, a film, Tom declared, that would rival any documentary of exploration he had watched on the National Geographic Channel. For the next two weeks Tom and I snuck into falling-down villas, private chapels, stables, and, in one case, a frog-filled tunnel that connected the main house to a kitchen house. We lit our way with flashlights, and every so often in the film, Tom’s voice would softly say, “And so we venture forth.” At the bottom of one of the hills we explored, Tom found the plot for his movie in a large fountain that graced the entrance to a sixteenth-century villa. Tom took the opportunity to introduce himself to the camera and said, “In the spirit of other great explorers, he, Thomas Ott Robertson, being of low birth but high ambition, hoped”—hoped: he repeated as if to emphasize the odds against us—“to find the source of the fountain.” He filmed us going through the bamboo gardens and paths that led to a large stone tank that collected rain and spring water that ran off the hill. At the end of the film, Tom balanced the camera on the ledge of the holding tank and walked around to face the camera. He described our affinity to the world’s greatest explorers: Captain James Cook, Sir Ernest Shackleton, Hernando de Soto, Sir Walter Raleigh. Tom put his arm around me and concluded, “And so we ventured forth.” He made me promise that every year, with or without him, I would do something worthy
of the And So We Venture Forth Club.
On the weekends, Victoria and I would take trips around the city, to markets, to museums, to old Buddhist temples, and to monuments from both the Communist and Imperial eras. I looked forward to those trips and I think Victoria did too because she told me once that she planned to do the same thing when she had a daughter. It was a nice break from the everyday routine of Chinese lessons and tennis practice, and we got to visit a lot of really interesting places. It gave us the chance to talk about a lot of things too, and it was nice just to have someone to talk to.
I also felt as though those trips helped me learn about China in a way that books never could. Victoria showed me how the buildings of Beijing held the history of China in their bricks and mortar. She showed me the old city wall that had once been the outermost layer of the city and had protected the citizens against centuries of invaders. But the wall now stood useless, miles from the city’s expanded limits. Like most things from the past that no longer had a use in modern-day China, the wall was seen not as a part of history that should be preserved, but rather as an inconvenience. Large sections of the wall had been torn down to make way for new real estate developments and thousands of bricks had been stripped from the remaining sections of the wall to be auctioned off at exorbitant prices to China’s new wealthy elite as symbols of their wealth and prosperity. The Zhangs had several of those gray stone bricks displayed on a bookshelf in their living room, next to the picture of them with the Clintons.
My favorite afternoons were the ones where we just wandered through the hutongs, the fast-disappearing network of winding, narrow alleys that spidered through Beijing. We visited old courtyard houses and tea shops that had been in the same families for hundreds of years. People walked or rode bicycles everywhere. Elsewhere in the city it felt as if the pace of time had been set to fast-forward. Every day more hotels opened, more malls were planned, more factories sprouted up, more jobs were created, more people bought cars and laptops and iPods and designer clothes, and more and more parts of the old city disappeared. But in the hutongs, time crawled reluctantly forward and it was easy to get lost in those narrow alleyways.
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