When practice was over, she ordered all the boys to leave except Bowen. He was told to pick up all of the balls and lock them away. She left quickly, and the other boys slotted their tennis rackets back into their bags and, exhausted, walked slowly back to their rooms. There was none of the ribbing or jabbing that often followed them home. I offered to help Bowen, but he said no, he could do it. The balls were spread across three courts, and he walked slowly back to the far side to begin rolling the balls to one side of the courts. I started picking up the balls on the first court, but when Bowen saw me helping, he yelled at me to stop. The frustration in his tone surprised me, and I shrugged and went to pack up my bag. I collected my things and walked out to the parking lot where Victoria and Driver Wu were waiting.
“Where’s your hat?” Victoria asked.
I touched my head and checked my bag and then remembered that I’d thrown my hat at my bag during one of the laps. I walked back to the courts and saw Bowen sitting on the bench. He didn’t hear me approach; he was slowly peeling his socks off his feet, which were red and dripping in blood. “Bowen!” I exclaimed. He looked up, not acknowledging that I had seen the condition of his feet. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, it’s nothing. Just cheap copies,” he replied in Chinese, too tired for English. He pointed at his shoes, and I saw the ghost of a Nike swoosh where the logo had fallen off.
十五
The following day the only sounds at tennis practice were the sounds of tennis balls being hit—no skidding of rubber tennis shoes, no exhalations as someone nailed a serve, no emotional outbursts when a ball didn’t go in, no joking around. Madame Jiang may have sensed that she had gone too far, but she also sensed that she had won. We were all sore beyond belief and had blister-ravaged feet, but the thing that hurt the most was the knowledge that we were unable to stand up for ourselves. I knew that the other boys blamed Bowen, but they also hated Madame Jiang for being so unfair and punishing them for something they had not done.
Good tennis coaches are tough, and the best are brutal—they have to push their players beyond the level even the cockiest and most arrogant one thinks he can achieve. And great coaches are never satisfied. They must prepare their players for exhausting physical battles, and more importantly, for taxing mental challenges. Tennis is like a boxing match: you go out on the court and engage in a physical battle to beat the other player—one on one, no one there to help you in a fight that can last over three hours in 100-degree heat.
And how does a coach prepare you for the moment when you choke and dump an easy overhead into the bottom of the net on match point? How does your coach teach you to erase the thought that had you not gotten that bad bounce, or had the net been half an inch higher or lower, or worse, had you not been cheated—you would be walking off the court the winner instead of the loser?
The answer: the coach creates situations on the practice court to replicate those moments, again and again, until you begin to hate losing so much that you teach yourself to block out all the emotions of a match—the joy, the disappointment, the hope, the despair, the guilt, the sense of unfairness, and the anger—until your mind is devoid of everything except a cool, intense focus. It takes a long time, but eventually you get there. Great coaches push you to the point of almost breaking. But they do it to help you, not to punish you.
Madame Jiang was the opposite. She made us run those stadiums because she wanted to punish us, not because she wanted to help us. She made her point. But that day she lost our hearts, because we realized that she had never been on our side.
At the end of practice, Bowen sat down next to me on the bench. He hadn’t said a word all practice. We waited while Madame Jiang finished drilling Hope. She was getting irritated that his glasses kept fogging up, and he constantly had to take them off and wipe them. As I leaned down to zip up my tennis bag, I noticed Bowen’s white tennis shoes were stained pink around the point where the soles joined the leather.
The following Monday, Bowen didn’t appear. I asked Random where he was, and he said, “Ta sheng bing le (He’s sick).” I asked if he was in the dorms and Random grunted, “Dui (Yes).” I asked if I could go and see him. “Bu keyi (You can’t),” he said. “Guards don’t let you in.”
With Bowen absent, Madame Jiang started to pick on Hope. Over the past weeks, Hope had seemed to lose focus. He had started coming to practice late, tanking when we played points, and developing a new “injury” every other practice. Even at the age of fourteen, I had been around tennis long enough to recognize the signs of burnout.
I watched Madame Jiang drill Hope on overheads. Start with racket on the net, run back, scissor kick into the air, smash an overhead, sprint back to the net, slap the net with racket, backpedal to hit another overhead, thirty in a row—nonstop. In the middle of the fourth set of this drill, Hope stopped and held out his hand. He took his glasses off and wiped them on his shirt. His hands shook. Random said, “She is supposed to buy contacts for him, but she won’t so he has to play with those lousy glasses. They are too big, and they keep slipping.”
“Why doesn’t she?”
“Where do you think she gets the money to buy those sunglasses?”
We were silenced by another outburst from Madame Jiang. “Luxi, ni zenme zheneman? Ru guo ni bu jinbu, wo hui song ni hui jia (Hope, how are you so slow? If you don’t improve, I will send you home).”
“Can she do that?” I asked Random.
“Ta shi. Dang ran laoban (Of course. She’s the boss). She can do what she wants.”
When players burn out, their minds and bodies go stale. They stop trying as hard in practice and start losing more matches. And without the joy of winning, they are left only with the anxiety and depression that accompany loss. They spiral further and further down until the sport they once loved becomes a chore they resent or even hate. I had seen burnout among countless players at the academies in Florida, and I could see it happening with Hope.
A wise trainer would notice the signs and see that there was little left and give the player a week or two off. Let the body rest and the mind recharge. But Madame Jiang became harder than ever on Hope. For three days in a row, she spent the entire practice on Hope’s court, standing behind him and shouting at him whenever he missed an easy overhead or volley. During a water break I heard Random whisper to Hope, “Just pretend she isn’t there.” I could see that Hope tried to block her out. He pretended she wasn’t there and gazed ahead into nothingness. But I could also see that she made him nervous. He played far worse whenever she was watching. The worse he played, the more she screamed.
So much of my time in China seemed detached from the world I had left behind. Here I was on the other side of the globe, almost seven thousand miles from home, twelve hours ahead, and no one knew where I was or what I was doing. I could disappear, and no one would notice. I could play extremely well or extremely poorly, and no one would care. I wondered how these boys sustained themselves. They had followed the same routine every single day, year after year, since they were seven or eight. I had an escape. I knew that this was only temporary. With each day that passed, I came closer to returning home. And that gave me something to look forward to. But for my teammates, this was it. There was no end in sight for them.
Hope kept himself contained longer than I could have, but Madame Jiang stayed on him, even after Bowen returned, and a couple weeks later he snapped. During a practice set with Random, he missed a put-away overhead right on top of the net on set point. From three courts away Madame Jiang screamed for everyone to stop. She ran over to Hope’s court and started shouting at him, telling him what a useless player he was. At first he stood there and took it. As she yelled at him, he kept his eyes focused on the ground. Then without warning, Hope let out a yell and smashed his racket on the ground, breaking it in half. The courts were suddenly silent. Hope walked off the court, leaving the broken racket behind him.
I only saw him again once after that day. A few weeks later as I was lea
ving practice with Victoria, I saw Hope across the street sitting on the curb staring at the entrance to the sports complex. He removed his glasses and wiped his face with the dirty gray T-shirt he was wearing. When he pulled the shirt away I saw that he had been crying. He put his glasses back on, and we made eye contact for a second. But then he looked away and walked off with his head bowed. That was the last time I ever saw him.
Before coming to Beijing, I had a bad habit of cracking rackets when I wasn’t playing well. I wasn’t the only one to do it. Most of the kids I played with in the States had broken at least two or three rackets out of frustration. We did it because we thought it looked cool, because we saw players like Marat Safin do it on TV. It was a way of saving face when you were losing. A way of letting everyone know that you should be winning, and that you were losing only because you were playing badly.
After what happened to Hope, I made myself a promise that I would never again break a racket. I remembered the old beat-up equipment that Hope had to use. What had seemed cool to me before suddenly felt spoiled and entitled. From then on, every time I raised my racket in thoughtless anger, ready to bring it down hard on the cement, I would see that image of Hope sitting on the curb with tears in his eyes. And I never broke another racket.
十六
About a month after we went to see her husband’s art studio, Victoria took me to Beijing People’s University so that I could see what a Chinese university looked like. First she showed me the original school building, which had been constructed in 1896 by the Methodist Episcopal Church as a seminary to train missionaries and priests. Back then, the school had been known as Beijing Harmony University. The redbrick building with its white windows and small bell tower resembled a classroom building of an Ivy League university. It was an odd thing to find in the middle of Beijing. Surrounded by buildings of Chinese architecture, it looked entirely out of place. Behind the original building was a larger one that had been built with funding from the Nationalist government after Beijing Harmony University had merged with Peking Imperial University in 1917. The building featured a weird blend of European and Chinese architecture styles, with Roman columns supporting a sloped, green-tiled roof that was adorned with gargoyles in the shape of Chinese dragons. Victoria agreed with me that it looked strange and told me that the old Peking Imperial University had a really beautiful campus featuring classical Chinese architecture. She would take me on another day if I wanted to go. We walked a bit farther, and Victoria showed me a group of four entirely identical buildings that had been built during the 1950s by the Soviets as a gift from Stalin to Mao. The buildings were monstrous four-storied concrete rectangles that had been painted a dull shade of gray. They were buildings that had been designed purely for function with no concern for beauty. Just looking at them made me depressed.
We continued down a road and passed by an athletic facility on our left. Behind two turf soccer fields was a huge concrete playground planted with dozens of basketball hoops. Both soccer fields had pickup games going on, and there were a number of people playing basketball. We kept walking and came to a building that was still under construction. The parts of the building that were finished looked grand and expensive. Victoria told me that this structure was to be the brand-new China Center for a top American university. She said it had become controversial after someone discovered the center had been funded by several wealthy businessmen who used their connections in the government to make it happen. A large grant had been given by the Chinese Ministry of Education and there were rumors that the Minister of Education’s grandson had just been accepted to the American university in question. Victoria waved her hand at all the buildings we had seen. “See? It’s like a map of one hundred years,” she said.
She led me through a parking lot past the university’s library to a small one-story building that was set off from the rest of the university buildings in the corner of the campus. She stopped outside the building and examined the entrance. The accumulated layer of grime and soot that covered the walls made it difficult to see that the building was painted a light blue. I could tell from the dusty, broken windows and the graffiti on the front door that the building had been abandoned for some time.
“What is this place?” I asked Victoria.
“Remember how I told you about Gao Fei and Da Ning?”
The names sounded familiar but I couldn’t remember what Victoria had said about them. “Who are they again?” I asked.
“The writers!” Victoria said. “I’m going to give you one of Da Ning’s books, remember?”
“Oh yeah. I remember now.”
“This is where they learned to write,” Victoria said. “And Su Tong too. He is another very famous writer.”
I looked at the small, run-down building with skepticism. “Here?”
“Yes, this was their school. There was a teacher here who taught all three of them. Now they are China’s three best writers.”
“What happened to the school?”
Victoria took a few steps in the direction of the front door and stopped and looked around. She motioned for me to follow. Victoria pushed the door open. I heard the sound of glass splintering under her shoes. “Careful,” she said.
I followed her through the door and stepped around the broken glass. I looked up and saw that we were in a room I assumed must have been the building’s lobby. The room was dark, and the windows were boarded up, and the only light came from the doorway behind us. The floor was scattered with paper, random debris, and fragments of broken glass. The room had been stripped bare and there was no furniture except for a tall reception desk that was pushed up against a wall. I took a step toward the desk and felt something under my foot. I looked down and saw that I had stepped on a dead mouse.
Victoria crouched down on the floor next to several messy piles of documents. She picked up a loose stack of pages and pulled out her cell phone, holding down a button so that a dim light came from the screen. By the light of her phone, Victoria methodically flipped through the documents.
“What happened to this place?” I asked.
“The government closed it down after Liu/Si (6/4).”
“What’s that?”
“June fourth. Have you learned about Tiananmen Square?”
“Yes.”
Victoria paused her search and assumed the role of questioner. “What do you know about it?”
I shrugged. “My father told me what happened. I Googled it too and read about it on the internet.”
“Here you cannot read about it on the internet. The government blocks everything. Nobody really talks about it.”
“But why did this place get shut down?”
“After Liu/Si, the universities were in a lot of trouble because most of the protestors were students. The government saw the universities as the cause of the problem. Many professors were arrested. Writers were considered very bad then too because many of the student leaders were writers who were writing very criticizing things about the government. So the university president here closed down the program and pretended like it never existed.”
I frowned. I couldn’t imagine Harvard or Yale shutting down an entire graduate school because of student protests. “But the protests were over. Why did they have to shut the whole school down?”
“The university president had to. Maybe he would go to prison if he did not close the writing school. I think it is sad though, because maybe many more great writers could have come from this school. I’ve always wanted to come here.”
“Prison? For what?”
“It happened to many people. All the writers like Gao Fei and Da Ning and Dan Xiaolu were expelled and removed from the university records. Their teacher and some of the students were taken away.”
“What happened to them after that—after they got out of prison?”
“They didn’t get out. I don’t know where they are.”
Victoria went back to looking through her stack of papers. I had no idea what she
was looking for, but whatever it was she clearly didn’t find it. She moved on to a second one. Her words unsettled me. I glanced around the dark room. Now that I knew the history of the building, I couldn’t help but feel an eeriness and a strange and cruel irony that I hadn’t felt before. An institution devoted to writing—the act of recording the past—had become a reminder of how humans often try to remove the unwanted parts of their history. The building stood on the campus, both a derelict memorial to what had been and a terrifying reminder of what happened to those who fell out of favor with the government. I thought about the students and teachers who had been here and wondered where they were now. The building’s ghostly structure was the only remaining evidence of their history, a history that had been almost entirely deleted from the record. But while the government could remove the physical proof of the past, it could not destroy that past entirely. For it lived on in the memories of the mothers and fathers and children of those students and teachers who had disappeared. The building made me nervous and I wanted to leave.
“Victoria, let’s go.”
Her head was bent down over a piece of paper, her eyes squinting to see it in the dim light. “Chase! Look!”
I crouched down and looked at the paper. It was a page of messy handwritten Chinese characters. I wasn’t sure why Victoria was so excited by it.
“What is it?”
“I think it’s from a story by Da Ning,” she said and held it out to me. She pointed to two characters at the top of the page: 大凝. “Look, that’s his name there. See? Da Ning. He must have written this when he was a student here.”
I tried to share Victoria’s enthusiasm, but the piece of paper meant nothing to me. I was nervous that someone was going to find us. The door creaked open. It was only the wind. “Victoria, can we go?”
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