by Vivian Yang
All were made to line up at the beginning of each training session. In a dramatic reversal of my position in the school procession, I became the person everyone looked to in forming a straight line since I was the tallest of both genders.
My breasts, sporadically sore and itchy, were protruding against the swimsuit bubbles. To conceal my nervousness, I kept my vision steady and straight. Eyes front.
My mental picture suggested that Coach Long liked my focused attention. Thanks to the ingenious design of the swimsuit, he wouldn’t notice my bosom. Or so I thought.
“One, two, three!” Coach Long clapped his oar-like hands toughened by years of pushing water and pumping iron. “Jump now!”
I was always the first to be dropped into the swimming pool. Coach Long would call out: “Mo Mo! Ready? Go!” He would push me into the water before going for the tallest boy who was half a head shorter than me.
We moved our hands outwards and downwards, pushing, pedaling, doing a horizontal breaststroke.
Soon I learned to scull, to stay afloat: an important skill now in water and for later in life.
The coach held out a fishing rod-like bamboo stick with a plastic lasso attached to its end and extended it to a sinking child to grab on to. Standing firm like a pagoda with legs apart and chest bare, Coach Long emphasized structure and discipline.
“Train hard!”
“Aim high!”
“Swim well!”
“Honor our motherland!”
We recited these in unison throughout the session. My top spot on the team more than compensated for my apathy for slogan shouting on the way to school. I was by far the most audible, aware of the coach’s eyes on me.
Coach Long often rested his broad hand on my shoulder and said, “You first, Mo Mo! Set a good example.” While coaches generally did not raise an eyebrow when they heard kids sneeze, Coach Long would occasionally hand me a beach towel after training and say curtly, “Don’t catch cold!”
Only coaches were allowed to use these beach towels left on the poolside bench by the cleaning lady. They had the same blue-and-white stripes as the mental hospital patients’ overalls and bore the name of the swimming pool in bold, red characters. This labeling was essential to prevent theft. Most people wouldn’t buy large towels because precious ration coupons for textile products had to be used in addition to Renminbi (Currency of the People), neither easy to come by. The coupons were generally reserved for buying material that could be made into clothes. Besides, bath towels would do us people little good when the majority of the households had no bathtub, shower stall, or indoor plumbing.
One day, when Coach Long put a towel in my hand, I met his gaze. It seemed to be penetrating my swimsuit like x-rays. Feeling as if my hand that held the towel was on fire, I blushed and ran into the changing room. Once inside, I was greeted by a chorus of rhythmic chanting:
“Mo Mo is big, Mo Mo is white.
Big white Mo Mo is the coach’s pet!”
Usually I would be upset with such taunting but not this time. I enjoyed being called the coach’s pet. Like every other girl on the team, I was secretly in love with Coach Long, whose last name Long was the same character for dragon. I adored the power and the grace he exhibited when he whipped and chopped the water like a real dragon with flippers on, butt undulating, his timing perfect, rhythm ideal, never missing a beat or a breath.
Coach Long seldom spoke to us on a personal level. Most of his words came out in the form of commands such as “Don’t keep your head too high -- your hip will drop!” or “Watch your leg drive. Whip to full extension!” But the majority of the instructions were given in hand gestures, since he was mostly on land. I would close my eyes and relive the montages of him signaling us to enter or get out of the water. Straight! Keep pace! and Ready, set, go!
Long before I taught myself the English expression “tall, dark, and handsome”, before I saw Da Vinci’s anatomical dissection sketches of the human male and Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker, with his flexed muscles, pursed lips and gripping toes, there had been this man eight years my senior who epitomized male authority, power, and dominance.
Despite my size, I wasn’t the fastest on our team. But I didn’t worry. Coach Long once patted me through the towel he had placed on me and said, “There’s no need for you to feel awkward, Mo Mo. A good swimmer needs a well-rounded physique.” His reassurance convinced me that I had a fighting chance. This endeared me to him all the more.
“Yi, er, san, si. Wu, liu, qi, ba.
Er, er, san, si. Wu, liu, qi, ba.
One, two three, four. Five, six, seven, eight.
Two, two three, four. Five, six, seven, eight!”
Coach Long would command in his booming baritone, occasionally letting his whistle do the work. Most of the time, though, the aluminum whistle on a red silk string just rested on his bulging chest like a pendant. I envisioned that to be a silver medal, a gold one if I were the person looping it over his neck.
The coach wore a crew cut so closely cropped that the contour of his skull in between the dark and spiky hairs was visible. In a sport where maximum propulsion and minimum resistance were critical, the completely shaved “Buddhist monk haircut” was not uncommon among male athletes.
The 1970’s witnessed the arrival of the form fitting, “skin” swimsuit showcased by the East German Women’s Olympic Team. Although deemed scandalous at the outset even by the Western media, the record speeds the body-hugging design had helped to generate silenced all critics. Naturally, nobody living in China could have heard about such decadent things. As far as our authorities were concerned, the East Germans were ideological lackeys for the Soviet revisionists, hence their practices were totally dismissible.
Coach Long’s “skin” suit was his torso itself. With his bronze skin tone and gleaming teeth, he looked especially handsome when he smiled, something he rarely did. People spoke of him as being serious. I regarded him as focused. It was his routine to swim a 10,000-meter medley after he finished training us.
For the segment of our training devoted to “political consciousness-raising”, the coach used the topics stipulated in the authority’s handouts, often with some personal elaboration. Japan being one of the first developed countries to have reestablished diplomatic relations with China, there was talk of “Sino-Japanese friendship generation after generation” after our governments exchanged giant pandas and sakura-cherry trees as gifts. Because of the similar Northern Asian facial features, cultural customs and the common usage of Chinese written characters, the Japanese were the most acceptable type of foreigners.
“However, we should never forget the war crimes the ‘Eastern foreign devils’ had committed to the people of China and other Asian countries,” the coach said.
He, too, referred to the Japanese as the Eastern foreigners, I noted.
“Remember the Japanese soldier who hid in the jungle for twenty-eight years and fed on leaves and animal meats?” I asked.
Not wanting to play favoritism in front of the group, Coach Long said, “You heard about this unusual story, but do you know what ordinary Japanese eat?”
“What do they eat?”
“Japan is an island nation so fish is abundant. The Japanese enjoy raw seafood known as sashimi, which is written with the Chinese characters stabbing with a bayonet and body.”
We were all surprised. “Really? They like to eat ‘stabbing with a bayonet’ into a ‘body’? How do you know this?”
So the coach told us about his old training buddies’ experiences in Japan. “At a banquet welcoming the Chinese National Team, the athletes were served sashimi. Just like you now, our delegation found it unthinkable that the Japanese would find such a concept appetizing. The head coach warned that this could be their host’s way of making our athletes come down with stomach problems, thus thwarting them from being in top competitive form. However, not only did nobody get sick, they all enjoyed the fresh raw fish themselves. I would try sashimi too if given the chance – to thin
k that food is not rationed in capitalist countries!”
I was fascinated by his story as well as by him. From a teammate who had joined the team before my batch, we knew that he was a native of Qingtian in coastal Zhejiang Province who practically grew up swimming. Fast. So fast that, at the suggestion of his middle school PE teacher, he hopped on a Shanghai-bound freight train as a stowaway and got himself recruited by the Shanghai Municipal Team. However, his professional athletic career ended prematurely when he was reassigned as a team coach to us. This downgrade was a punishment for a “political mistake” he had made during the 1974 nationwide “Campaign to Criticize Lin Biao, Confucius, and Song Jiang”. Here’s what caused Coach’s downfall:
Song Jiang was a 12th century personality immortalized as the bandit-leader protagonist of the historical novel Water Margin. Since the Cultural Revolution, all literature, be it Chinese, Western, historical or contemporary, had been banned. Water Margin, one of the four greatest Chinese classical novels, was no exception (“It glorified gangster heroism”). Coach Long had read the story about the Song Dynasty gang leader from a copy that was only meant to be used as the “negative teaching material” for group criticism meetings during the Campaign and told some of his teammates about its contents. Hence his expulsion from the team.
His personal misfortune aside, the girls on our team were just happy that he had become our coach. Coach Long was my hero, from head to toe.
I turned thirteen on May 15th, 1975. A child’s birthday was rarely marked and an adult’s, hardly remembered. The birthday party as a practice was condemned as bourgeois. The few determined to go against the tide would have been thwarted by the challenge of baking a cake due to the rationing of flour, eggs, and sugar and the absence of an oven. December 26th was the only exception as Chairman Mao was born on that day in 1893. All of China was legislated to eat “noodles of eternity” to wish him “ten-thousand lifetimes of longevity without limits”.
At the beginning of our training on my birthday, I noticed Coach Long’s eyebrows were knotted like two forceful Chinese calligraphy strokes. There was a tug in me when his eyes failed to sweep across me as they always did.
“Today, we’ll streamline to make our team leaner and stronger. Same heat ordering, now!”
“Streamline” was a code word for team member elimination. I feared for my fate.
The splattering upheavals now over, Coach Long pronounced the death sentences for some. I could feel my heart filling with joy when I realized I had been spared.
“The verdict was reached collectively by all coaches. Today’s results support our decision.” So the list was pre-determined. The heat competition was just a formality.
Coach Long frowned when a girl began to sob. “Tears won’t get you back on the team. Even though you don’t have the talent for competitive swimming you can still achieve by focusing on your academic studies. Keep in mind Chairman Mao’s teachings: ‘Study well, and make progress every day.’ There are many ways one can succeed in life.”
The common phrase describing athletes as “possessing well-developed limbs but a simplistic mind” reinforced the perception that one could be a good student or star athlete but not both. I was always interested in Chinese composition although little was available for us to read to improve our writing. I dreaded being regarded as overly intellectual. My physical appearance was enough of a problem. I had been jotting down my thoughts in private and hid my notebooks under my mattress. Bold lines like “I admire him to death but don’t know why,” in which I confessed my nascent feelings towards Coach Long, would definitely brand me a la san if discovered and be classified as “bourgeois poisonous weeds”.
Of course there were entries about the street sweeper who had vanished from the Pushkin graveyard area. During the past three years since I last saw him I had often imagined bumping into him again, with him unmasked and handsome. I had even written down what I’d say to him if I saw him again: Please allow me to thank you for giving me the confidence to overcome difficulties in life. I still remembered clearly the faint but visible creases on his khakis and the high quality but unpolished leather shoes he wore. I could always see his encouraging eyes. The appeal the street sweeper had on me was persistent, and my secret diaries attested to my largely make-believe attraction to him.
Well, that day, I was already drafting my birthday diary entry in my head while the “streamlining” was taking place. It should definitely be recorded, I decided. After the session, as I dragged my feet to the changing room, Coach Long strode over in my direction. I stopped to wait. Next, he snapped a towel at me as though to startle me. I was shocked at his open flirtation. Red to the root of my long bare neck, I thanked Buddha Guan Yin that none of the other girls had seen this. Coach Long draped the beach towel over me and whispered, “Wait for me outside where I parked my bicycle.”
My heart jolted as my cheeks burned. A giddy feeling hit me. “Mo Mo, you have become a la san and Coach Long is your man,” I told myself.
When I walked out, he was standing like a bronze statue next to his bicycle.
“Hop on!”
As soon as I side-saddled onto the metal rack on the back wheel, it began to roll. “Hold on to my waist!” he commanded without turning his head.
Steadying myself with my arms around him, I could feel my heart beat as if I had just competed in a swimming race. Then, without warning, he sped up and took his hands off the handlebars as the bicycle swished along. “Look, no hands!” he called out, revealing an adventurous side of him I had not previously seen.
I held tightly onto him, my cheek pressed against his broad back. “Where are we going?”
“You’ll find out soon enough. I’ve got something for your birthday.”
“How … ? and what is it?” I’d never received anything for my birthday.
“The team’s personal dossiers were reviewed for the streamlining so I know,” he turned his head to tell me. “Now don’t make me look back again.”
He pedaled on. I clutched onto him, anticipation building inside of me.
Half an hour later, we arrived at an old building in Hongkou District. Coach Long parked his vehicle against the front wall and chained both wheels. Bicycles being the sole means of transportation aside from public buses, they were a highly prized commodity whose purchase required coupons, a long waiting list, and months’ worth of salary. More so than towels, they were the most desired targets for thieves. The exterior of the house had many exposed bricks and moss had grown in the cracks.
“Who else lives here?”
“Other unmarried male colleagues.”
So this was the Sports Authority staff residence. “You share?” I asked nervously, never having been to this part of town that was the de facto Japanese concession during the WWII.
“The facilities, yes, but I’ve got my own space with a coffin.”
“A coff…?”
Before I could finish, Coach Long entered the front door and pulled me in. I bumped into a wooden shelf filled with mud stained rubber rain boots, umbrellas with bent spines, and nylon string-knitted net bags with used brown wrapping papers.
“Watch out!”
I looked down and saw a mousetrap with a darkened piece of fried dough on its hook. Hairy stuff from a rat’s rear end graced the baseboard. I let out a cry.
“Don’t scream,” he said curtly, offering a hand, which I took.
“Why is the shelf right by the door?”
“Can’t move it, it’s fixed to the wall -- Japanese style. The Eastern foreigners stored their shoes here before entering the house.”
Coach Long’s dim room was even smaller than Wang Hong’s home, about the size of two shower stalls. The first thing I noticed was another fixed wooden shelf heaped with piles of gym clothes and a pillow without its case.
“So this is the …?”
“Yeah. The Japanese used to tuck away their comforters during the day and sleep on the tatami at night. We all jokingly call it t
he coffin, and I use it as a bed.”
I gaped at the tiny straw-matted floor space and nodded absent-mindedly. A faded blue plastic sheet served as the curtain to a wood-framed window, which wouldn’t fully close. A mound of envelope-sized papers sat in a corner. A wooden stool and a child-size bamboo chair constituted all the furniture.
Coach Long switched on the 15-watt bulb hanging down from the ceiling by pulling the attached rope. I was astounded to see that the rope was connected to a replica of the plastic lasso used in our training.
“Why do you use this here?”
“Oh, I took it from the pool because it’s easy to be grabbed from the coffin in darkness. Now don’t just stand there like a candle. Sit.”
I fidgeted on the bamboo chair and wrung my hands.
Coach Long came squatting before me, one knee on the tatami. “I’ve got something very important to tell you, but first promise me you won’t cry.”
“I promise,” I said, my hands clasped tighter.
“Good. Now, I didn’t announce this in front of everybody, but today was your last training session as well …”
“I knew it! I knew it!” I shouted, tears misting my eyes.
Coach Long put his hands on my shoulders and said, “You promised not to cry, Mo Mo.”
Biting my lip hard, I struggled to hold back tears. “Sorry, Coach,” I murmured, sniffing.
“Good. I told you I had something to show you, didn’t I?”
He fumbled around in his trousers pockets. I caught a glimpse of something green. He tucked it down under one of his thumbs, stretched out all eight other fingers, palms down.
“If you guess correctly which thumb I’ve got it under, I’ll show it to you.”
I stared at his hands, transfixed. They belonged to a man in his prime: big, firm, blue veins popping, and very much in use. The nails were so closely clipped that their white tip sections were nonexistent. In yet another effort at water resistance reduction, swimmers often wore their fingernails short. No dirt could accumulate under those nails buried inside the flesh.