by Lucinda Ruh
China, here we come. We boarded the flight and this time with no sadness. We were so glad to leave behind the torture we endured in San Francisco. The teachers there did not feel the need to apologize and rumor has it that for years to come following my departure they said incredibly nasty things about me, my mother, my training, and my personality to many skaters who followed their teachings. I cannot change other people and I feel sorry for them that they live in so much denial. I truly hope there are no other skaters who went through what I had to go through, but we understood what we had experienced, and not wanting to be immersed in that anymore, we not only sprinted out of there but flew half way across the world.
We flew to Beijing and on to Harbin. The Chinese skater who had arranged our arrival and stay with the national team had said that my new coach would come to pick us up, but having not spoken to the coach we were still unsure if everything would pan out. One thing my mother and I always did was walk the road less traveled, or furthermore one that had never been traveled at all, and we always had the courage to leap. My parents had taken risks since they were young and they were the first and only in many scary and unfortunate situations throughout their life and travels. We were the first and only foreigners at the ice rinks in Japan and now again we would be the first and only foreigners allowed into the training center in China.
We were never hesitant or scared of a new venture, a faraway land, or a foreign culture. We never feared anything. We just picked up and went to our new destination, trusting in the universe to give us all we needed. I think it is truly remarkable of us, if I may say so. I could also say it might sound totally crazy to others, but for us it was our life and felt completely normal. It was second nature to us and when you have such a purpose you will walk through fire to get to it. You do not see anything as an obstacle. I like to see the positive side of this personality trait and I think it makes us very strong individuals. We can adapt to any circumstance, any situation, and any surrounding quickly and we make our way in the world. It is however a very lonely road.
To our nice surprise, my new coach was there to greet us at the airport, and with our many suitcases in tow we were on our way to the winter athlete national training center in Harbin, China. My coach tried to explain to us in his very limited English that the campgrounds we were going to live and train in might not be what we were used to and it would a very simple life. As his words and teachings were as simple as the life he said we would lead, I can only describe my experiences there with simple words. It was truly barren and purely simple in the most profound ways. It was not colorful. We replied, “It doesn’t matter since we were here for skating and not a party. We can live through anything.” Little did we know what was to await us. The streets departing from the airport were dirty and uneven. There were livestock along the sides of the road with their herders and open fields for miles. This was most certainly rural China. It took about one hour to get to the camp.
As we neared the camp it was getting more city-like with rugged concrete buildings. The streets were bustling with as many cars as bicycles, people, and animals, pushed by everyone and everything. It was incredibly noisy and dirty with clouds of dust every way you looked. With cars and bicycles honking, animals barking, and people yelling, it was a disorganized jumbled mess, but it all seemed to work out in its own way and we safely made it to the campgrounds. We passed by track and field training grounds, basketball courts, and huge training buildings before we came to a halt. There was a big gate that opened to let us through as if it wanted to open the gates to happiness and paradise. But the reality was that it was inviting us into a government organized facility and it felt like we had entered a military camp. These two stark contrasting images were etched in my mind and it would feel like that all through my stay here.
As we passed through the gate we drove through a huge open space that was engulfed by five buildings. The one we drove up to in the middle, was where the athletes slept, the one on the right was where the coaches lived, the one on the far right was the off-ice training facilities, and the two on the left were the ice rinks. The bigger one was just an empty hall only used during the winter months when competitions were held there for figure skating, hockey, and speed skating.
As we were helped with our luggage, feeling like we had enough clothes for all the people at camp, many of the other athletes poked their heads out of their dorm windows and peered at us with big, round innocent eyes. Some were already outside waiting to see of what all the commotion was about. Who had arrived at their camp? Who was the new face? It looked to me like their expressions on their faces were of those who had never seen such a species as us! It was kind of intimidating since I felt like I was intruding in their space, and I was all too familiar with that feeling of always being the odd one out.
It was extremely hot as well and there was a heavy feeling to the air resembling a pressure cooker. The temperatures were to reach the low 100s in the summer but Harbin is known for its excruciatingly cold winters in the single digits. There did not seem to be any sign of air conditioning in the building as we entered. Luckily our days would be spent in a cold ice rink!
My coach, his son, his other male student who I had befriended in San Francisco, and his friends, all with their shirts off and yet still drenched in sweat, carried our luggage up a few flights of stairs, down a long barren corridor until we reached the last two doors far away from anyone’s reach. He summoned my mother into one and me into the last room on that floor in the far end corner. He plopped my luggage down and said this was the best he could do and he had even managed to give us two rooms instead of one. Weren’t we truly lucky! My room had one window, a meek metal frame bed with a very thin sheet covering a very thin mattress, and a metal rectangle shaped desk on the other side of the room. That was it.
My mother’s room was the same except that in place of the table was just another bed and nothing else. They wanted to show us around the dorm, so we followed them. The floors of the hallway were filled with dirt, cigarette butts, and watermelon peels. The room opposite to mine was a communal area with a sink the length of the room and some broken mirrors on the wall.
Down the hall was a men’s toilet, a ladies’ toilet, and many consecutive other dorm rooms. We were on the second floor and the floors above us and beneath us had the same layout. The ground floor had communal shower rooms, one for the men and one for the ladies. We learned that there was only cold water throughout the building except for a specific time during the day that lasted for twenty minutes in order to shower with hot water for the athletes, delegates, and coaches. We would be naked with all ranks of the Chinese ladies affiliated with the teams. I was not so thrilled about this even though I had showered at Japanese training camps before. However, there at least different ranks and ages were not be mixed with nakedness. Here in China, the young, old, athletes, coaches, judges, cooks, all had to shower together, as one. It would take some time to adjust to since I was shy, but it also gave a feeling of unity.
Also on the first floor was a little room where a tiny old Chinese woman sat like she had been there all her life. Wrinkled with wisdom she, not delicately at all, filled hot water kettles with boiling water that each athlete got once a day. No refills here! We could use this at our leisure for tea or whatever else we wanted it for. It would be placed in front of every dorm room door around 6:00 p.m. only once a day and only one kettle full.
Attached to the main dorm building was another little building and that was the cafeteria. The first floor was the kitchen and the second was where all the athletes received their food. I was however told that I would not be able to eat with the other athletes. I was to be an outcast, for whatever reason, if only because they were embarrassed that I plainly was not one of them. I was to eat on the kitchen level. It was a little and bare room with some rickety tables and chairs and that’s where my mother and I would have to eat alone. It hurt very much since I had hoped to be part of them, but again I had to realize I
never would be part of any nation. I had learned my poker face in Japan and was a master at it by now.
Everything worked very much like the training facility I had visited in 1988 in Moscow. It was government organized and regulated and all was free for the athletes. They did not have to worry about money at all. Athletes had lessons, received food and clothes, and great perks if they had international success. They were chosen from school when very young and put into the system. Most of the athletes, about two hundred of them that included all ice athletes, speed skaters, hockey players and figure skaters, were from Harbin, so their parents lived close by. Every so often since we lived near the Russian border some Russian hockey players would stay at the facility for a few days. But they looked more Chinese than Russian, leaving me again to being one of a kind.
If the Chinese athletes succeeded in their sport they would have to move to Beijing to the national training center that had better conditions. But the federation didn’t move them there until an Olympic year because Harbin was the second biggest training Center in China and all the top athletes and coaches were there together already. Looking from the outside world many people might feel sorry for these athletes living in such conditions but being there myself I do not. In spite of living, training, and enduring the conditions there, I would have liked to have had that support, a system that provided everything for me and where money was never an issue. In one way it is a very easy life. They don’t have to worry about anything other than training hard and following a teacher’s orders. It was a much better life than all the others living outside the gates of this compound. It felt like all the people who were not allowed within our gates longed to be one of us as they looked upon us with great awe and admiration. For the athletes in China no money was exchanged, but it had been arranged through my coach’s prior famous skater that we would have to pay. And a hefty sum it was, considering the conditions. The sum had a reason behind it that we would not know until much later.
After the tour of the grounds my coach mentioned that for another two weeks there would be no ice. We would start with off-ice training slowly and I needed to recuperate from all my injuries first before I could train properly again. A secretary from Beijing from my father’s company was to meet us that evening up at the camp, and stay for a few days to translate for us and get us acquainted with everyone and the customs and rules we would have to abide by.
She arrived shortly thereafter. She was to sleep in my mother’s room with the two beds. My coach, his wife, his son, and some other coaches from the team invited us to a welcome dinner at a Chinese restaurant nearby. The courses came as they flowed out from the kitchen like there was no end and no tomorrow. The dinner was delicious even though we didn’t know most of what we ate. We had been warned about the water there so I was a little hesitant since I did not want to get a stomach illness. The atmosphere was jolly and celebratory and drinks were on the house, bringing great humor from the coaches. Their cheeks turned red and all their troubles were drowned, making them look like little Buddhas wanting their tummies to be rubbed for good luck! Laughter passed around the table and it felt like good things were to come.
Since we were utterly exhausted mentally and physically, my coach took my mother, the secretary, and me back to our rooms to rest and settle in. Not more than five minutes after my mother and I sat on the beds, we broke down crying. The conditions were harsh. The rooms and the common areas were filthy. The food was different and interesting but I already missed the diet I had been on. The bed was so uncomfortable and hard. There was no television, no radio, and no privacy. We could not believe what we had gotten ourselves into. Again we were in a land far away with no familiar faces and we had to succumb to being total strangers. We felt like we were the only foreigners for miles and miles and we just cried. Even by the second night the secretary was crying for us. She asked us in bewilderment and confusion, “Why are you here?” For us it was just too drastic a change. Was skating worth it? Maybe it would build character? Maybe here we would learn the true necessities of life? Perhaps we would learn how little is needed to just live. Of course we stayed and we endured. I was a skater; I had to.
Just two months into our stay, my mother had to return to Alameda because our apartment lease was near its termination and it was time to clear things up. My poor mother was always cleaning up after me. She had had to do it all over the world for the family but usually with my father’s company’s help. Since we had left Japan she had been on her own cleaning up the mess her daughter had created in Toronto, then in Alameda and many more to come. I felt so guilty but my mother knew how important skating and training was to me and she never asked anything from me like that.
Not wanting to leave me all alone, my father came to replace my mother for a month or so. He enjoyed the hustle and bustle and he loved my new coach. I knew he loved him more than my mother did. They even went fishing together and had many evenings of enjoying beer and life stories together. My father did not speak Chinese and the coach spoke little English, but here language and culture did not matter and there were no boundaries. Two men of even more diverse backgrounds than could ever be described, bonded through life experiences. They saw something in each other that they found within themselves and my father trusted him immensely as a coach.
But even though my father had been in the military when younger he confessed he had never seen conditions like this. One time as my father and I were eating dinner in our dining area, a rat came over near our feet and just plopped down dead (hopefully from rat poison). The chef came to pick it up with his shovel and threw it out into the open space. That’s all. No drama, no squeal, not even putting it in a trash can. And I have no idea for what other purpose he used that shovel and I don’t want to know. But the others either did not see the dead rat in the middle of the campgrounds or it was just too common an incident to make a big deal out of it, but my father and I shuddered with disgust. We could not finish our meal.
There were cockroaches everywhere as well and they were humongous. The whole building was infested with them. They were behind all the mirrors in the common sink area. They were in our bedrooms. We used to skate late at night after the hockey players and sometimes came back to our rooms around 1:00a.m. The minute I switched on the light in my room I would see hundreds of them scramble to the cracks at the edges of the room. It would sicken me but I had no choice but to go to my bed to get some sleep.
One night I decided that I would take the hot kettle of water that we got every day and pour it on them as I switched on the light. I followed through with my plan and tried with all my might to kill them, but to absolutely no avail. I don’t think I managed to even debilitate one of them! But what I did manage to do was enrage my mother. She was furious because I had wasted the only precious water we had on cockroaches. We never knew if the next day would bring more hot water and I apologized for my stupidity.
There was much more this new life brought to me. First I had to get used to the smell of smoke everywhere I went. All the coaches smoked. They even smoked at the ice rink while teaching. Admittedly it did in fact give a relaxed atmosphere to the otherwise fear-ridden air looming above the skaters at the ice rink. Then my mother had to wash our clothes in the sink with a washing board as they did in the “olden” days. She bought some soap, washed and scrubbed the clothes, and hung them up in our bedrooms. I felt like I had gone back in time and did not know what year it was anymore! Most of the people would go into the shower with their underwear and bras on and take them off and wash them as they washed themselves. It was incredibly hard to get used to the new life we were in, but once again it was better than any history lesson or book could teach me about life.
During the heat of the summer that I was there, for a few days the city had suddenly no water whatsoever. The temperatures were very, very high and no water for the whole city, meant literally no water. No water for showers, for the toilets, for brushing our teeth (my mother and I actually brushed our teeth
with bottled water in fear of water borne diseases) and for the Zamboni to clean the ice surface. So we trained on ice for almost a week with not one Zamboni run. But the skaters still did quads left and right. Because it was so scorching hot and all the toilets had not been splashed down for days, the biggest problem was that the air started to reek of urine and feces. I even tried holding everything in and refused to use the bathroom for the duration, but no such luck. Mother Nature is stronger and I found myself scouring the grounds for toilets not yet used!
My mother thought we would have to leave the city but we somehow endured it like everyone else and about a week later the water came back on. It was truly disgusting to all the five senses. But we survived. All in the name of ice skating.
The food was not to my liking and my mother searched outside of the gates of the compound for a Western supermarket to buy me some essentials. She found one and bought fruit and boxes of cereal and cartons of milk for me. She even bought a hot-pot that cooked with electricity and she made me soups and stews.
When survival becomes your main concern, bonds become tighter and my mother and I bonded together. My mother still lashed out at times and I was still frightened of her, but the fact that she had to look out first for my safety and health overrode all else. Also my coach was so incredibly supportive of me that some pressure was lifted from my mother. My coach was with me twenty-four hours a day. He made sure when I went to sleep, when I woke up, what I ate and when, and since he only had one other student besides me, he was our personal coach at our service. He did off-ice and on-ice training with us, and the whole time we were on the ice it was lesson time. It was wonderful and amazing. I felt looked after. I felt his method was not erratic but studied and mastered. It was being in presence of truly a guru in his own right. My care from my coach helped my mother, and my coach made sure my mother did not beat me as much anymore. His other male student and I bonded and we shared great experiences with each other. It was wonderful to train with him and laughter and smiles conquered the training sessions.
