Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (P.S.)

by Peter Hessler

  I said, “Use the clutch.”

  There had been a distinct crunching sound, but we didn’t check the car; by now we were desperate to get home. Near the Lama Temple, as we waited to make the last left turn of the day, we were hit by another car. The driver backed into our side and then pulled away. There wasn’t time to fumble with the crutches, so I hopped out on my good leg. Fortunately, traffic was backed up, and I caught him in about seven hops. I pounded on the window. “You hit my car!”

  The driver looked up, surprised: a one-legged foreigner, hopping mad and smacking the glass. He stepped out and apologized, saying that he hadn’t felt the impact. Together we inspected the Jetta—fresh dent above the left rear wheel. The man said, “I’ll give you one hundred.” That was about thirteen dollars.

  In China, after a minor accident, people usually settle the matter on the street, in cash. This routine has become a standard part of life—once I saw two small children playing a game in which they repeatedly rammed bikes and shouted, “Pei qian! Pei qian!”—“Compensate! Compensate!”

  Leslie used her cell phone to call Capital Motors. Mr. Wang didn’t sound the least bit surprised to hear that we’d had another accident. All he said was, “Ask for two hundred.”

  “That’s too much,” the other driver said. “This is really minor.”

  “It’s not our decision.”

  “Well, then we’ll have to call the police,” he said, but it was clear that he didn’t want to do this. A dozen bystanders had gathered around the cars, which were parked in the middle of the snowy street. With Chinese accidents, the crowd is more like a jury than an audience, and a middle-aged woman bent over to inspect the dent. She stood up and announced, “A hundred is enough.”

  “What do you have to do with it?” Leslie snapped. “You can’t even drive!”

  This may have been a case of the wok calling the kettle black, but I didn’t say anything. And Leslie must have been right, because the woman shut up. But the driver refused to pay two hundred. “Should we accept one-fifty?” Leslie asked me, in English. Lao-Tzu said it best: A man standing on crutches in the snow will not bargain long over a dent to a crappy Jetta rental. Later that day, Leslie returned the car and the cash. Mr. Wang noticed that another light cover had been broken when she hit the brick wall. He said, happily, “What did you kill this time?” When I hit the dog, the same cover was twelve dollars; this time he asked for only three. It must have been a special price because we did so well at the Lama Temple.

  The fourth accident was entirely my fault. It was my last day in China, my last Jetta—the next morning I had a one-way ticket to Honolulu. On my way to return the car, I got stuck in a terrible traffic jam, and wailing horns filled the air—these were the honks that mean, “Let me out of here!” In front, a taxi-driver saw an opening and lurched ahead; I lurched after him; he stopped short; I didn’t.

  We got out. I took a look and winced: dents on both sides. “One hundred,” I said.

  “Are you kidding?” the man yelled. “This is at least two hundred!”

  Suddenly, I felt extremely tired. Ten years in China, six years of driving, more honks than the Tower of Babel—“Let me out of here!” The man jabbered angrily, talking about how long it takes to fix a dented bumper, but I couldn’t think of any response. “One hundred,” I said again.

  A crowd gathered, and the cabbie began to play to the jury—it was a bad dent; he worked long days; repairs took time. And then a tiny old woman stepped forward and touched his arm. “Take the money,” she said softly. The cabbie looked down at her—she couldn’t have been more than five feet tall—and fell silent. He didn’t say a word when I handed him the bill.

  In the Capital Motors lot, Mr. Wang ran a finger along the dent. “No problem!” he said.

  “Look, I’m happy to pay for it,” I said.

  “You’re an old customer,” he said. “Forget it.” We shook hands and I left him at the front desk, smoking a cigarette beneath the eternal sign:

  CUSTOMER SATISFACTION RATING: 90%

  EFFICIENCY RATING: 97%

  APPROPRIATE SERVICE DICTION RATING: 98%

  SERVICE ATTITUDE RATING: 99%

  Home and Away

  Little Fatty kept leaving it short. Twice he dropped the basketball on the way up, and the third time, when Yao Ming finally lifted him above the rim, he held the ball too low. His name was Sun Haoxuan; he was four years old; he weighed fifty-nine pounds; and he had been selected by an advertising firm that had recently scouted Beijing kindergartens for a fat boy with round cheeks and big dark eyes. There was a substantial talent pool. In Chinese cities, rising standards of living have combined with the planned-birth policy in a way that recalls the law of conservation of mass: there are fewer children, but often there is more child. It’s common for adults to refer to these kids as simply Xiao Pangzi—Little Fatty. “Get Little Fatty ready!” the director shouted whenever he needed Sun Haoxuan. “Move Little Fatty back two steps!”

  We were at the Beijing Film Studios, where Yao Ming was shooting a television commercial for China Unicom, a telecommunications company. The script was simple: fat child meets seven-foot-six-inch basketball player; basketball player lifts fat child; fat child dunks. What had not been factored in was Little Fatty’s behavior. He squirmed away at every opportunity; sometimes he pointed directly at Yao Ming and announced, with an air of sudden revelation, “Yao Ming!” For half an hour, the adults in the studio—cameramen, assistants, tech guys—had been silently aiming ill wishes his way, and maybe that was why, on the fourth take, Yao stumbled and accidentally rammed Little Fatty’s nose against the rim.

  The sounds came in quick succession: a soft thud, a dropped ball—bounce, bounce, bounce-bounce—and then the child began to wail.

  Little Fatty’s mother rushed over, and Yao Ming stood helplessly, shoulders slumped. He was breathing hard. Somebody wiped Little Fatty’s face—no blood, no foul. On the next take, he finally dunked the ball, and there was a thin round of applause. Yao wandered over to the edge of the set, where I was standing, and said, in English, “Weight training.”

  He had just finished a sensational rookie season for the Houston Rockets. Now, in the summer, the twenty-two-year-old center had returned to China with one clear objective: to lead the national team to the title in the Asian Basketball Championships, which serves as the regional qualifier for the Olympics. Usually, China dominates Asian basketball, but there were serious challenges this year. Wang Zhizhi, the country’s second-best player, had not come back from America because of political problems. Yao Ming had become involved in a high-profile lawsuit, which was interpreted by the Chinese press as a clash between the rights of the individual and the state. Increasingly, Yao’s world was divided: there was the sanctity of the sport, and then, off-court, a whirlwind of distractions, ranging from the burdensome to the bizarre. When I had last visited him, in July, he was staying with the Chinese team in a hotel in Qinhuangdao, a seaside town that was hosting an exhibition game against a squad from the United States Basketball Academy. Yao didn’t play—he had just received eight stitches in the eyebrow after a teammate elbowed him in practice. Before the game, a China Unicom representative with a digital recorder coached Yao through a series of phrases that would be sold as alarm messages to mobile-phone subscribers. “Wake up, lazy insect!” Yao said obediently, and then his bandaged brow dipped when the woman asked him to repeat it (“More emphasis!”).

  That evening, the Chinese nearly threw the game away—in the final quarter, they couldn’t handle a full-court press from the ragtag American team. “I think the center needs to come to half court against the press,” Yao told me afterward, in his hotel room. Liu Wei, the Chinese point guard and Yao’s best friend, was sprawled on one bed. Yao sat on the other bed, which had been crudely extended: the head consisted of a wooden cabinet covered by blankets. We spoke in English; he talked about the NBA off-season news that he had culled from the Internet. He had not spoken to any of his H
ouston Rocket teammates since returning to China. “Did you hear about Rodman?” Yao said. “He might come back. I can’t believe the Lakers got Payton and Malone. I can’t believe they only spent four million. If Kobe is OK, it’s like a Dream Team.” The names sounded foreign and faraway—Mark Cuban, Shaq, Kirilenko. “AK-47,” Yao said, using the sports-talk nickname for Andrei Kirilenko, a Russian forward on the Utah Jazz. Yao smiled like a kid at the sound of the phrase. “AK-47,” he said again.

  Yao Ming weighed ten pounds at birth. His mother, Fang Fengdi, is over six-two; his father, Yao Zhiyuan, is six-ten. Both were centers: he played for the Shanghai city team, and she was on China’s national team. Chinese sports couples aren’t uncommon—Yao Ming is dating Ye Li, a six-two forward on the women’s national team. When Yao was growing up, the apartment directly overhead was home to the Sha family, whose parents had both been point guards for Shanghai teams. “My mother and father were introduced by the basketball organization,” Sha Yifeng, a childhood friend of Yao Ming, told me. “In the old days, that’s how they took care of your life.”

  Today, Yao’s parents are in their early fifties, trim and black-haired, and they carry themselves with the physical dignity of former athletes. But they speak about basketball with distinct detachment. Neither played the game as a child; sports were a low priority for China in the 1960s, particularly during the early years of the Cultural Revolution. Later, officials began to restore the national sports system, scouting for height to fill out the basketball rosters. Yao Zhiyuan began to play at the age of nineteen. Fang Fengdi was discovered at sixteen. “To be honest, I didn’t much like it,” she told me, when I met them both in Shanghai. “I wanted to be a dancer or an actress.” By 1970, she was traveling to games around the world with the national team. “I didn’t think of it as something I did or didn’t want to do,” she told me. “I thought of it as a responsibility. It was a job.”

  In China, competitive sport is a foreign import. Traditional physical activities like wushu and qigong are as much aesthetic and spiritual as they are athletic, and Chinese historians say that “modern sport” began with the 1839–1842 Opium War. In the following decades, as foreign traders and missionaries established themselves in treaty ports, their schools and charitable institutions introduced Western competitive sports. American missionaries brought basketball to China at the end of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the Chinese were struggling to overcome foreign occupation, and soon they began to see sports as a symbolic way to avenge the injustices of the past century. The goal was to beat the foreigner at his own game. After the Communists came to power, in 1949, they established a state-funded sports-training system modeled on the Soviet Union’s. Promising young athletes were recruited for special “sports schools.”

  In first grade, Yao Ming was taller than his teacher. By the time he entered third grade, he was five-seven, and Shanghai’s Xuhui District Sports School selected him for its after-school basketball program. Recently, I visited Yao’s first coach, Li Zhangming, who, like a traditional Chinese educator, spoke of his former player in completely unsentimental terms. (“He didn’t much like basketball. He was tall, but slow and uncoordinated.”) After our conversation, I wandered around the basketball courts of Shanghai’s No. 54 Middle School, where the Xuhui Sports School holds some of its practices. I watched a group of young girls performing basketball drills; after a while, I introduced myself to the coach, a tall woman named Tao Yanping.

  “I was a teammate of Yao’s mother,” Tao said. “I went to their wedding. I remember giving them towels and thermoses—things you gave newlyweds back then. See that girl there?”—a red-faced child, the tallest on the court—“Her mother was also my teammate. That girl is in the third grade. Her mother is 1.83 meters tall, and she made the national team.”

  I asked Tao how she recruited. “We go to the schools and look at the children’s height, and then we check their parents’ height.”

  The two-hour practice consisted mostly of ball-handling drills. Tao was attentive, shouting commands at her charges. (“Little Swallow, you’re traveling! Who taught you to do that?”) At the end of the practice, tall parents materialized at courtside. “I only want her to play because it’s good for her health,” Zhang Jianrong, a woman who was nearly six feet tall, told me. She explained that basketball was a good activity for her daughter after a day in school, but homework was more important. Like the other parents I met, Zhang was middle-class, and none of them expressed a wish for their child to have a future in sports. They were basketball moms in a country that selects its basketball moms by height—China cannot yet afford to provide every public school with coaches and sports facilities.

  Instead, the key to the nation’s sports strategy has been early recruitment and focused training on a relatively small group of potential athletes. This system has proved effective in low-participation, routine-based sports like gymnastics and diving, but when it comes to basketball it may be China’s greatest weakness. In America, where community leagues are common and school coaches are plentiful, athletes emerge from an enormous pyramid of participants. Some, like Allen Iverson, rise to the top with remarkable passion and creativity—but if a recruiter had shown up at the Iverson home when Allen was in the third grade, he would have found no father and a short mother who had given birth at the age of fifteen. It’s significant that China has yet to produce a great male guard—the position requires skill and intensity rather than height. All three Chinese players currently in the NBA are centers, and two are second-generation centers. The Chinese national team is notorious for choking in key games, partly because the ball handling is inconsistent. Players rarely appear to enjoy themselves, and their character has not been formed by true competition; even as free-market reforms have changed many Chinese industries, the sports world is a throwback to socialism, with its careful planning and career stability. Once, when I asked Yao Ming how many Chinese would be in the NBA in a decade, he said only three or four.

  Throughout Yao Ming’s childhood, his parents emphasized that basketball was a hobby, not a career. As a boy, he liked history, geography, and archaeology. “When I was small, I always wanted to be famous,” Yao once told me. “I thought I’d be a scientist or maybe a political figure. It didn’t matter, as long as I was famous.” In sixth grade, he grew taller than his mother. He surpassed his father’s height in ninth grade. By then, he was already under contract to the Shanghai Sharks youth team. When he was seventeen, and seven-two, Yao Ming joined the Chinese national team. Relatives told me that it wasn’t until then that his parents resigned themselves to his career as a professional athlete.

  Once, I asked Fang Fengdi if there had been a moment when she first sensed that basketball inspired Yao Ming. It was the only time she smiled when discussing the sport. I sensed that she was talking about herself—the woman who once wanted to be a dancer or an actress—as much as she was talking about her son. She said, “The Harlem Globetrotters came to Shanghai when he was in elementary school. Tickets were really hard to get—I was able to find only two. That wasn’t just basketball for a competition or a job. I remember thinking, Americans are good at enjoying themselves! Those players took a normal sport and turned it into something else—a performance. Afterward, I could tell that Yao Ming was inspired. It made a deep impression on him.”

  The first male player to make the jump from mainland China to top-level American basketball was Ma Jian, a forward who played at the University of Utah for two years in the 1990s. Ma noticed that during Utah’s pre-game meetings, an assistant coach sometimes wrote a W or a B on the chalkboard next to an opposing player’s name. “The white players were shooters,” Ma explained to me, when we met recently in Beijing. “If he put a B there, we knew they were athletes.” Ma never saw a C on the board. In 1995, he tried out for the Los Angeles Clippers. “The first time I stepped onto the team plane in the pre-season, I saw the blacks sitting on one side and the whites on the other. I looked at myself—should I
go on the brothers’ side or the whites’ side? Finally I said, Just play.”

  In 2002, after the Rockets selected Yao Ming with the first pick in the NBA draft, it was less than a week before somebody in the league made a remark that could be construed as racist. During a television interview, Shaquille O’Neal, the NBA’s dominant center, announced: “Tell Yao Ming, ‘Ching chong yang wah ah so.’ ” O’Neal’s joke went largely unnoticed at the time, but it was resurrected in January the following year, when a columnist for Asian Week attacked O’Neal for it.

  The column sparked a media frenzy shortly before Shaq and Yao’s first on-court meeting. But Yao immediately defused the controversy. “There are a lot of difficulties in the two different cultures understanding each other,” he said. “Chinese is hard to learn. I had trouble with it when I was little.” The NBA released a statement pointing out that the league included players from thirty-four countries. By game time, the issue was all but dead. The Rockets won by four points, in overtime; O’Neal outplayed Yao, but the Chinese center had a spectacular start and held his own. Afterward, O’Neal told the press, “Yao Ming is my brother. The Asian people are my brothers.”

  That season, I spent most of a month following Yao’s games, and people repeatedly brought up the O’Neal incident. None of the black fans I talked to had anything bad to say about Yao—many believed that he brought something fresh to American sports. “It’s not like normal, where people say, well, he’s a black athlete, so he moves like this, or he’s a white athlete, so he shoots like that,” Darice Hooper, a physical therapist who was attending the All-Star Game in Atlanta, told me. “It’s like we had an alternative.”

  Juaquin Hawkins, one of Yao’s teammates on the Rockets, agreed. “It’s not just people thinking, I’m rooting for him because he’s African-American, or I’m rooting for him because he’s white,” Hawkins told me. “They’re rooting for him as a person.”