Finding my way in Beijing was tougher than I'd ever imagined. But sharpening my skills at a local youth academy for ping-pong—a game at which I'd dominated friends back home for years—seemed like an opportunity not to suck. So what if it meant beating up on little kids at the school and old men in the park? This would be my key to assimilation. Nice plan—but then I stared down the pre-teen pong machines and got my first real taste of China's national pastime.
On my first day at Shichahai Sports School, the elite athletic academy in Beijing, Coach Chang introduces me to his ping-pong class. "We have a new American student," he says, peering out from behind the prescription sunglasses he wears indoors. As all eyes turn toward me, I feel a rush of nerves. It's like day one of kindergarten again, only this time I have chest hair. "He claims he's been playing for more than ten years," Chang goes on, "but from what I've seen, it looks more like ten days." The class erupts into high-pitched giggles.
We're lined up in one of the school's three basement ping-pong halls, a huge gymnasium with 27 tables, a Chinese flag hanging on the wall, and video cameras mounted everywhere. ("For security," says Coach Chang.) Whereas most students attend Shichahai after distinguishing themselves at smaller regional schools around the country, I just walked in the front door mid-semester and paid the exorbitant $25-a-class foreigners' rate. (Chinese students pay $1,500 to $5,000 a year for morning academic classes and twice-a-day ping-pong lessons, plus room and board.) I enrolled knowing I'd be one of the older students. I didn't realize it'd be by a factor of three. Flanking me are two dozen gangly 9-to-12-year-olds in bright jerseys, hiked-up shorts, and near-identical buzz cuts, yet I'm the one who looks foolish.
You could call it karma. I have a history of cruelty when it comes to ping-pong. As a kid, I'd trounce my little brothers so badly over our family's table that they'd cry. When I lived in a group house in D.C. after college, I'd plant myself at an end of the table my girlfriend bought me for my birthday and pick off challengers one by one. It wasn't their fault. I simply operated at a higher level, unleashing slices and cross-slams and sidespins unfit for social settings. I took it seriously too, chatting away while ahead but getting real quiet and whispering to myself when the score tightened. Eventually, friends stopped accepting my invitations, roommates made excuses. Most people know a ping-pong jerk, and all my life, that was me.
When I left the comfort of D.C. for a job in Beijing last summer, ping-pong seemed like a natural in. The sport was everywhere, and I figured the history of "ping-pong diplomacy" that led to the re-opening of relations with the U.S. in 1971 might lend my presence some much-needed gravitas. It also seemed like a rare opportunity to not suck. Moving to a new country, especially China, is an exercise in crippling humiliation. Hailing a cab, asking directions, ordering food, even attempting to digest that food (with occasional ugly results)—every activity reinforces one's ridiculousness. Even friendly encouragement—Chinese people tend to lavish praise on foreigners for their Mandarin, no matter how shoddy—can feel infantilizing. I especially feared the challenge of making and keeping Chinese friends. Ping-pong would be my salvation. It would not only help me meet Chinese people, it would earn me their respect. Whereas in the U.S. ping-pong enjoys about the same esteem as dodgeball, China puts its champions on prime time. I'd prove I was more than just a big-nosed idiot foreigner—I was a big-nosed idiot foreigner who could excel at a sport they revere. If ping-pong could make Chinese people like Nixon, I just might have a shot, too.
My first opponent at Shichahai, a smiley kid named Wang, stands eye-level with my chest. On the orders of Coach Chang, we edge up to a nearby table and start rallying. Though rallying couldn't be less accurate. Wang serves. The ball bounces over the net and hits my side of the table. I strike it with my paddle, it springs over the net, and does not hit his side of the table. It doesn't hit anything. This must happen 25 times in a row. The physics are all wrong. It's like instead of a paddle I'm holding a pancake.
I get ushered off to a side table, where an older coach named Zhang is making like a human ball machine. Standing at one end of the table, he draws balls from a bucket and sends them skimming over the net. Each serve travels at the same speed, same angle, same rhythm. A student, hunched over like a wrestler, returns them in perfect metronomic time. All at once ping-pong looks like a sport.
When it's my turn to rotate in, Zhang begins by correcting my grip. I use the traditional "handshake" hold, same as most Americans, and the paddle hangs loosely in my fingers. I expected to learn the "pen" grip used by many Chinese players (and Americans trying to look cool). No need to switch, Zhang explains, but he moves my thumb in a way that keeps the racket locked against my hand, and bends my wrist sideways to make the paddle an extension of my arm's line. My forehand stroke now looks like a robot ninja salute.
Coach Zhang serves to me. Using my new stroke, I don't hit the ball so much as graze it. The ball topspins its way down, the table exerting its own gravitational pull. Zhang serves until the bowl is empty, and another student steps up to drill. "Good!" Zhang says in English, giving a thumbs up. I feel gleeful, if also condescended to by his big English "Good!" But mostly gleeful.
The floor is littered with hundreds of balls. Drenched in sweat, I get down on my hands and knees to collect them, and as I crawl an errant shot smacks me in the face. I stand up and prepare for the next lesson. Coach Zhang says we're doing forehands again. "What about backhand?" I say. "Maybe after another eight or ten classes," he says. Some of these students have been training since they learned to walk. "No rush."
As the weeks progress, my classroom humiliations don't disappear so much as take on subtler forms. I arrive one morning during my second month to find two kids facing the wall. I ask Coach Zhang why. "They were being stupid," he says. After several minutes, they receive the second part of their punishment: They are forced to drill with me.
Another day, I come to class with a cold. When I line up with the rest of the students, Coach Chang tells me to stand on the other side of the room, lest I contaminate China's future. Most of the students at Shichahai go on to regular high schools and universities, many of which recruit for ping-pong, but the best ones graduate to Beijing's youth squad, the Beijing team, and, in a handful of cases, the national team. It's entirely possible that I've been getting wrecked by a future Olympian.
That thought consoles me when, playing a match against a little guy with a massively out-of-proportion head, I can't seem to score. The old moon gravity is back, and every ball I strike flies over the far edge. Just one point, I tell myself, one point and I'll be happy. I'm losing 10-0, when the kid deliberately serves the ball off the table: A charity point, another student later explains, to give me face. I lose 11-1.
Still, I feel my game improving. Intention and results start to align, at least during drills. Whatever muscles are engaged by bending down for hours while swinging your arm back and forth are getting stronger. But bad habits linger. I plant my feet. I don't twist. I flick my wrist lazily instead of building spin into my stroke. It feels like I need to re-learn everything daily. Try as I might, I'm not a child. "My son is easier to teach than you because he is a blank slate," Coach Chang says, referring to his 6-year-old. "He can't do much, but everything he does, he does right. You try hard, but you do everything wrong." To prove it, he parks his son in front of a table and starts a cross-shot forehand drill. The kid might as well be playing patty cake; he doesn't miss.
Explanations of Chinese ping-pong dominance range from the pseudoscientific to the cultural to the systematic; while Europeans and Americans are big and strong, Asians are quick and nimble, I am frequently told by Chinese ping-pong enthusiasts. (Never mind Yao Ming or the 2012 Olympic gold medal-winning, world record-setting weightlifter Zhou Lulu.) The Chinese also think strategically, says Chang—something he says I would understand if I read classics like The Water Margin or The Art of War. Then there's China's vast ping-pong infrastructure, a network of local, city, provincial, and national training centers that teach players using the same methods and promise their best players a life of wealth (some make close to $1 million a year) and fame (top players like Ma Long and Ma Lin are household names). Since 1988, when table tennis became an Olympic sport, Chinese players have won 24 out of 28 possible gold medals.
But China's greatest strength may be its sheer numbers. Teodor Gheorghe, the coach of the U.S. women's Olympic ping-pong team, remembers visiting China with the Romanian team in 1970 and hearing a Guangdong official lament that the province had "only 5 million players." "You can imagine how we were shocked," Gheorghe says. Unlike soccer or basketball, ping-pong doesn't require much space or equipment—just a table, two paddles, and a net (or lacking that, a row of bricks). Just as no one can throw a baseball quite like an American boy or dribble a soccer ball like a Brazilian kid, your average Chinese child grows up knowing his or her way around the table.
The Shichahai students and I get along, but in the same way they might get along with an intelligent dog. When they demand to see a one-dollar bill, I thumb one from my wallet and point out George Washington. "He's America's Mao," one of them informs the others. They ask me about the U.S.—mostly the prices of things, like iPhones—and I tell them as much as I can before they stop listening and start curiously stroking my arm hair.
One day, I rally with a tiny kid who looks like he's about to fall asleep. He serves lazily, his body limp and his eyes almost fully closed. I start mimicking him, and he laughs. Bingo. I finally have a plan.
We play matches at the end of class in which students rotate from table to table, each facing everyone else at least once. My first opponent is a kid with a bruise on his face where a classmate kicked him the other day. (They're cool now, he assures me.) I serve the first ball normally. On my second serve, though, I suddenly pull in my chin, puff out my cheeks, and bug out my eyes. He panics and hits it into the net. Next serve, I cross my eyes. His return sails off the end of the table. My strategy is working. I keep it up, flashing a goofy yokel overbite, rolling my eyes back into my head, and making farting sounds as I serve. He still wins the game, but I've discovered my secret weapon—my crane kick. The next game, I'm up against a stringy kid who can't stop laughing when I pretend to fall asleep while serving. It's the first match I've won.
This should probably count as cheating, but it feels like a breakthrough. I've turned my disadvantage—my ridiculousness in these kids' eyes—into an edge. I've out-10-year-olded the 10-year-olds. Later, when discussing my progress with Coach Zhang, I guiltily confess my clown strategy. To my surprise, he smiles and nods with approval. "That's wisdom," he says.
···
After several weeks of classes, I'm ready to face my first real-world test: Beijing's pensioners. It's a clear spring day—the sun actually looks like the sun, not a dull yellow moon—so I bike to a park on Houhai, a man-made lake in central Beijing, where I know I can find some pickup pong. The park is strewn with track-suited seniors engaged in a tableau of Chinese exercises. A slack-faced woman glumly rotates a giant yellow wheel, one of many pieces of public exercise equipment installed in the run-up to the Olympics. A man is draped across two railings doing full-torso sit-ups. Another in Coke-bottle glasses and a beanie pads around with his arms frozen in mid-air like he's wearing a pair of invisible water wings.
When I approach the ping-pong tables—two marble slabs resting on blue steel bars—heads turn. I'm not the first foreigner this crowd has seen, but I may be the first with his own racket case and balls. A man in a fake fur hat asks to see my paddle. He holds it by the face and taps the handle against his head, judging the quality of the wood by its sound. "How much did it cost?" he asks. Twenty-five yuan at a supermarket, I say. "The quality isn't good," he says. (A coach at Shichahai was not impressed: "Supermarket—banana, orange, apple," he said, in English. "Not ping pong.") The man in the fur hat shows me his racket. The padding on one side is fresh—he just replaced it himself—the other side is bare wood, with a deep indent where his knuckle has worn it down over three decades. "This one was three-and-a-half yuan," he says. Not only will I crush you, he implies, I will do it affordably.
A husky lady in a pink puffy vest is playing a gray-maned gentleman in orange socks and shiny black sneakers. She insists I take her place. The man, Mr. Jiao (paddle: 500 yuan), serves. He flips the ball into the air with his open-palmed free hand, the sphere nearly grazing the bare branches of the trees above us, and then clips it over the net with a stomp of his foot, perfectly timed to disguise the sound of the ball against the paddle, so I don't know whether he's hitting it with the racket's soft side or its hard side. Sometimes he gets fancy and tosses the serve from behind his back. His moves would seem more ridiculous if they didn't work so well.
Athletes always want to compare their sports to chess—fencing is chess with swords, boxing is chess with concussions. But to a greater extent than any game I know, ping-pong really is like chess, and the reason is spin. Every ball requires a split-second calculation, as the player identifies its spin and responds with the appropriate counter-spin. "In chess, you can predict the next three or four steps," Coach Zhang says. "In ping-pong, the possibilities are endless."
Mr. Jiao's spin jujitsu puts me on the defensive from the start, and he wins the first game. I get more aggressive, trying to fight spin with force, and, with the help of several strong gusts of wind, I win the second. The third is tied 10-10 and goes into extra points. He beats me with a shot that nicks the table, or, in Mandarin, a "scrape-side-ball." After weeks of getting destroyed by children, a close loss to an adult feels like a victory. We shake hands. "You don't speak very fluently," he says. I take the honesty as a compliment.
If there's one thing you learn playing American sports as a kid, it's that everyone gets a trophy. But after three months of ping-pong training, I still have nothing to show for my efforts except a wilted ego and a blister on my thumb. So when I hear there's a local tournament scheduled for early May, I sign up. The site is North Riverside Park, home to one of the city's swankier public ping-pong facilities (i.e. it has real nets). The tournament seems like the perfect chance to prove how far I've come. But first, I undertake a Rocky-style training montage.
The Shichahai classes have raised my game, but don't offer much individual attention. I need a mentor, I tell a ping-pong buddy I met at Houhai. He says he knows just the guy.
When I shake hands with Coach Deng at his ping-pong shop across town, he has just eaten, so we sit and talk—I bring a friend along to help translate—while he digests. He's bald and round and speaks with the rasp of a lifetime smoker, or perhaps just a lifetime Beijing resident. He's not a ping-pong player himself, he explains; he creates ping-pong players. "Any player I stand behind, he will win," he says, lighting a cigarette.
Between drags, he dispenses advice for the tournament. First, clothes: Wear a warm shirt for the morning, and a light shirt for the afternoon—if I make it that far. Food: "The night before, eat noodles," he says. "But only eat till you're 60 percent full." The morning of? "Noodles," he says, but this time only till I'm 50 percent full. (After hearing all about China's "Three Represents," "Four Modernizations," and five-year plans, I've gotten used to numerical specificity.) I should also be sure to bring a snack to the tournament, Coach Deng says, preferably two chocolate wafers. For lunch, I should eat noodles, followed by one more chocolate wafer in the afternoon.
I take this down, and we set off for a basement ping-pong club nearby. Inside, it looks like a fallout shelter. A long fluorescent lamp flickers above two tables. Posters of ping-pong greats hang on the walls. This, I tell myself, is where champions are made. We rally. He tests me with some tricky spin and notes my reactions, or lack thereof. Something feels off. I can't concentrate. It's like everything I learned, I've since unlearned. I can tell he's disappointed, and this makes me perform even worse.
After a while, we break and I ask him what he thinks. "Let's start with your strengths," he says. "Your strength is you enjoy yourself." I wait for more. "Your weaknesses," he goes on—and then proceeds to list every aspect of the game: My grip is wrong, my stroke is flimsy, I don't rotate my torso, my feet don't move. The last few months suddenly feel pointless. He gestures to one of his friends, who plays ping-pong like I imagine Bruce Lee would. "He is in the sky," Deng says. "You are on the ground."
I ask what this means for the tournament. "Eighty percent of the people there will be better than you," he says. "You can barely play." Getting to a level where I could compete, he said, would take three years of practice, two sessions a week.
He then inflicts what might be my worst humiliation yet. We play a game, and he lets me win. I don't actually win—he just deliberately loses points, knocking balls way off the table or into the net. I might score points here and there, is the implication, but only because he allows me to. "I wanted to encourage you," he says afterward, grinning. Whatever his intent, the effect is the opposite. After months of being treated like a moron, this—the suggestion that I would celebrate when I know he threw the game, an act that wouldn't fool a pre-schooler—is the final insult. We don't see each other again.
···
The day of the tournament, I get up at 6 a.m. and bike over to the park. An hour before the games begin, the fenced-in ping-pong area is already bustling, each table flanked by competitors warming up. I rally with a man named Su, who used to work in the railway industry. He asks where I'm from, and I tell him the U.S. "You have about 200 hundred years of history, right?" he says. "Right," I say, "a bit more." He seems unimpressed.
I draw a number to see who I face first. When I spot my opponent, I'm encouraged. Phenotype aside, he could be my grandfather. The refs call our number, and we start rallying. His shots are simple, unadorned—a positive sign. Finally it's time to start. The old man serves.
At least I think he's served. My paddle misses the ball completely. Suddenly it's my first day at Shichahai and I'm getting aced. The next shot caromes off my paddle into tomorrow. It takes me several points to understand what's going on. He's got some wacky sidespin I've never encountered, and I'm not sure how to return it. I try working out the geometry in my head—if it's spinning this way, then I have to move my paddle like... By the time I calibrate, he's applying different torque, and I fail to return that shot, too. I don't even think to make a farting noise.
I'd like to say this is where I discover a spiritual reserve deep inside me or bust out some secret move I've been practicing but haven't quite mastered, only to pull ahead in a blazing comeback of furious glory. Because if that's not what happens, why even tell the story? What I actually feel as the points slip away—sorry—is the weight of failure far heavier than any single game of ping-pong deserves. A year of fears and disappointments, from language flailings to job concerns to What am I even doing here? glom together in a stomach-pit of anxiety. Months of training have produced the same results as if I'd spent that time playing Wii Tennis—possibly worse.
At least it's over fast. I lose two games in a row, 11-4 and 11-6. My opponent, victorious, comes over to shake my hand. His name is Han. He's 66. He says he's glad to see young people playing, since most of them just waste hours with video games these days. I ask how playing now is different from when he was younger. "I'm a lot slower now," he says. I empathize.
While we're chatting, the lady in charge of the tournament hands me a blue jersey with the league's acronym: DSBHQYX. (It stands for desheng binhe qiuyou xiehui, or "Victory Riverside Ball Friends Society.") It's supposed to be for the winners, but she says I should wear it anyway because people will want to take photos with me. No matter that I may be the worst player to swing a paddle on this court in its three-year history, I still receive special treatment. I wear it anyway.
···
A few days after the tournament, I take Coach Chang out to dinner at a restaurant that serves Chinese and Western food. He brings his wife and son, who, he reminds me, could thump me at a table. He tells me about the 20-plus years he spent teaching ping-pong in Japan, and the way it opened up Japanese society to him—from professors to politicians to industry leaders. I tell him I'm not sure ping-pong has done the same for me in China. As much as I've played, I still feel as if I'm treated as a combination clown-mascot-business opportunity.
Then again, that's what I am. It seems like an American tendency to insist we're exceptional, but then travel abroad with limited cultural knowledge and language ability and expect to be treated the same as everyone else. This attitude also presumes that the greatest sign of respect from a Chinese person is for him to pretend you're Chinese, too. That idea might make sense in the U.S., where for many—including many Chinese—assimilation is the goal. You can become American. But radical acceptance doesn't exist in China, I found, and to expect it is to misunderstand the place.
I try and articulate all this to Coach Chang. He looks at me through his tinted lenses. "You're white," he says. "Sorry." When he first moved to Japan, he had trouble being accepted. But once he spoke Japanese fluently and had lived there for a few years, he was just like everyone else. That's not going to happen for me, he says. No matter what you do, your accomplishments are always the numerator over the dominator of your foreignness.
There's a phrase among expats in China: LBH, or "loser back home." It refers to someone who gets undue attention here, particularly from Chinese women, but in his native country has no friends. When it comes to ping-pong, I'm the opposite: I was a winner back home. I left home in order to lose. Any self-help guru will tell you losing is instructive: It teaches patience and grace. It puts victory in context. It inspires greater effort next time. And while patience and grace may not be the first words that come to mind when I look back on a year of regular linguistic mishaps, irregular bathroom runs, and being out-ponged by people half my height (including 6-year-olds and 60-year-olds), these small failures have reacquainted me with both. They've also shown that sometimes, when facing long odds, it's not just OK to give up, it's important to. As Coach Deng said when I asked him if I had a chance at becoming a ping-pong champion: "Next life."
And so here we are, under the arc lights, under the Southern California stars, on a picture-perfect summer evening in America. The kids are arriving, headlights swinging slowly down La Brea, down Beverly. They're cruising, looking for parking, checking out the scene at the car wash and gas station on the corner.
