by Jim Yardley
He took another bite.
“But at the same time, we are so culturally different. It is a weird push-pull.”
He was baffled that Weiss had been sidelined by the owner. “If you went through the Top 50”—the NBA had once released a list of the 50 greatest players in league history—“I bet 90 percent of these guys he has either coached, prepared for, or played with. Yet Liu Tie knows more than him? Why would you have a guy like him and then not use him?”
Turner was offended by Liu Tie’s arrogance, and didn’t think he knew much about coaching, as far as diagramming plays or organizing practices went. But he did not dismiss him. He could see that the Chinese players responded differently to him than to Weiss. “They weren’t afraid of Bob,” he said. “They fear Liu. Personally, I don’t think that is good. To rule by fear is not really ruling. You don’t have the will of the people. I’m not trying to get political about it.
“And then again, coaching is not really a democracy.”
We finished and started walking back to the World Trade. We turned down a side street, away from Little America, and passed a block of six-story walk‑up apartments. It was a sunny day, and we came to the gate of an elementary school. Throngs of kids in matching yellow caps were cramming back through the gate after going home for lunch. We walked through them, giants wading through the Lilliputians, and they peered up, blushing and smiling their glorious smiles at the unexpected sight of two foreigners, everyone shouting happily at us in their primary school English.
“Hello! Hello! Hello!”
“Hello!” we shouted back.
Winning had been rare enough for the Brave Dragons that paying bonuses was an unusual event. But now a victory had been achieved, and bonuses were due. Liu Tie had taken control of bonus money, too. For foreign players and coaches, bonuses were specified in their contracts, with different amounts for home and road wins; Olumide now got $1,200, the biggest bonus on the team.
The Chinese players existed under a more arbitrary system. Their bonuses were smaller and calculated at the discretion of the coach. Liu reserved the biggest bonus for himself and Zhai Jinshuai, who had 22 points as the team’s high scorer after Olumide. The bonuses got progressively smaller as Liu doled out different amounts to different players, depending on playing time and his assessment of their performance. He placed Little Sun near the bottom. The trainer was given the next to lowest bonus. Beneath him came the translators. Joe and Garrison were told to split the same amount given to the trainer.
Joe accepted it. Garrison was furious. He had signed a contract before the Liaoning game and was working twelve hours a day as an intermediary between the foreign players and the team. Joe advised him not to complain. Liu was young and insecure, Joe argued; this was how he exercised power. But Garrison was young, too. He approached the coach about a bigger bonus. He thought he had earned one.
The bonus stayed the same.
“All you are doing is talking,” Coach Liu told him.
Garrison Guo estimated it took him about a week to learn what he calls the fundamentals of English. He was entering middle school in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province, one of China’s biggest and most backward provinces. His teacher announced that any student who tested well on an entrance exam could qualify for one of the city’s top schools. Garrison’s parents were workers with only a basic education. His mother was an administrator at a shopping mall; his father had kicked around different jobs before landing one as a manager at a gas station. They wanted better for their son. It was the middle of the 1990s, and China was taking off. The depression that had settled like a cloud over the country after the Tiananmen massacre began to lift and China began to develop faster.
Sons and daughters of farmers would be the mules of Deng’s vision, pouring off the fields to work as laborers in the new generation of factories opening along the coast. The ancient yoke to the land was irrevocably broken; the countryside was dying and millions of peasants saw the factory as a first, grueling step toward a toehold in the city and, from there, a chance to scratch out a better life. China’s race to the city, still gathering speed, would become the greatest migration in history, with hundreds of millions of people on the go. But families already in the cities aspired to more than factory jobs for their children; they had already made it off the farm, and moving up in the city required skills and education. Garrison’s father wanted his son to get into the better school, but the entrance exam posed a problem. English was a required subject, and Garrison had never paid attention to English.
“I didn’t even know A, B, C, D,” Garrison recalled.
His father hired a tutor and Garrison turned out to be a natural, scoring 27.5 out of 30 on the entrance exam and earning a placement in the Foreign Language School of Zhengzhou.
Timing can be ruthless in China. Had Garrison Guo shown an aptitude for English two decades earlier, his family might have been persecuted in the final, angry eruptions of the Cultural Revolution. Had he come of age a decade earlier, when China was just opening its door, he might have met the same confused uncertainty that pushed Joe to go outside. But when as a teenage boy he arrived for his first day at the Foreign Language School of Zhengzhou, his timing was absolutely sublime.
When I first met Garrison, he was still working as an agent; we shared a taxi back to practice one afternoon. As the dented red cab rattled through Taiyuan traffic, dust and noise seeping through the cracked window, I asked Garrison what he thought of the experiment the team was undertaking by hiring an NBA coach. I had spent only a week with the team and was still trying to make sense of what I was seeing. Garrison had an outsider’s perspective, I figured, and was familiar with the culture of the Chinese game.
He had nodded out the window, toward the rising dust.
“An American coach is like a seed of a very good American plant, an American species,” he said. “But if he wants it to grow a flower in the soil of China, it is very tough. Other seeds from other countries have a hard time growing here.” It was an unexpectedly poetic response.
The taxi kept pushing along, detouring past construction sites or veering onto and off of dirt roads, and the noise was loud enough that we were shouting as much as talking. Garrison was curious about me. Why had I come to such a crappy place to follow such a crappy team? I explained that I was interested in the interaction between Americans and Chinese, playing a game both countries loved. I wanted to see the cultures entangled.
I had thought it a benign answer. Garrison responded by bringing up the Opium War. Every Chinese child is taught that China’s defeat by Britain in the First Opium War of 1839–42 marked the beginning of a “century of humiliation” that would render China too impotent to resist trade demands and military aggression by European powers and Japan. Decade after decade, the Western powers and Japan came to plant flags on Chinese soil, claiming concession districts in port cities like Shanghai, Tianjin, and Canton (later Guangzhou), as China lay prone and exposed, unable to resist. This legacy of foreign exploitation and Chinese weakness would shape the coming century in China, propelling the rise of the Communists and Mao. Today, many younger patriotic Chinese invoke this history as proof of Western hypocrisy and are eager for a powerful, globally respected China, if partly out of a desire for some historical score settling.
As the taxi puttered forward, I braced for a lecture on American arrogance. But Garrison had taken different lessons from the Opium War. He thought it had demonstrated Chinese arrogance and exposed the unwillingness of the imperial rulers to adapt to the modern world. Because the Qing rulers had assumed Chinese superiority in all endeavors, they were blind to the modernization under way in the West, including in developing weapons of modern warfare.
“That’s why we had lost to the foreigners 100 years ago,” he said. “The Chinese people didn’t believe that other nations were better. We still believed that we were the best.”
The Opium War confronted China with the undeniable fact that global power, and
global supremacy, were shifting rapidly to the West. How to respond was the question. Violent resistance to Western influence would periodically boil over in movements such as the Boxer Rebellion, but the broader response would be an attempt to strengthen the country, to catch up, by appropriating Western expertise. Yet learning foreign technical knowledge required learning foreign languages, especially English, which was becoming the global language of science. Introducing English meant introducing Western culture itself, Western beliefs, religions, and, eventually, entertainment. No wonder that English would often be regarded as a threat to traditional Chinese culture.
Long before the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, the Chinese aristocrats of the late Qing era showed only faint interest in foreign languages, as a means to facilitate trade. When the Qing established the first foreign concession district in Canton in the early 1800s, the foreigners were barred from studying Chinese with Chinese teachers. By mid-century, having suffered defeat in the Opium War, the Qing opened language schools in Beijing and Shanghai that ascribed to the maxim of zhong xue wei ti, xi xue wei yong, or Study China for Essence, Study the West for Utility. The initial students were louts and sharpies looking for a piece of the trading business but English steadily attained greater cachet, especially toward the end of the century, with growing numbers of Christian missionaries. The very first missionary, the Scotsman Robert Morrison, had lived in Canton at the opening of the nineteenth century and dedicated himself to translating the Bible into Chinese and producing the first Chinese-English dictionary.
Foreign concession districts soon spread to other ports, often as a result of treaties pressed on the weakened Qing, and English spread with them beyond Canton to Amoy (now Xiamen), Shanghai, Shanhaiguan, Tianjin, and Qingdao. In some cases, Chinese elites whose fortunes were dependent on trade bankrolled missionary schools to teach English to their children. Shanghai would become the sinful embodiment of the conjoining of East and West.
After Mao took power in 1949, Russian became the dominant foreign language, given China’s political alignment with the Communist big brothers of the Soviet Union. In the 1950s, the country’s few English linguists were dedicated to translating scientific and technological manuals; by one official estimate, China had only 450 secondary school English teachers in 1957. When Mao broke from the Soviet alliance in 1960, language teachers were retrained to teach English rather than Russian, but the revival was short-lived. Amid the chaos and destruction unleashed in 1966 by the Cultural Revolution, English was stained as a bourgeois tool of capitalism. Schools were shuttered across the country and all teachers became targets of the Red Guards, the groups of marauding students mobilized by Mao to carry out his ideological terror campaigns. Teaching English was regarded as an especially grave offense.
“I am Chinese,” read one banner from that era. “Why do I need foreign languages?” Another declared: “Don’t learn ABC. Make revolution!”
Schools reopened in 1968, and Mao signaled a new acceptance for English by expressing his regret that he had not studied foreign languages as a youth, commenting, “It is good to know English.” Even then, English curricula were infused with propaganda and politics, as students memorized stilted phrases glorifying Mao and the superiority of class struggle. It would take the end of the Cultural Revolution, and the death of Mao, to liberate English from the confines of propagandizing. Under Deng, English became a tool for doing business—and for getting rich.
Like so many Chinese coming of age in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Garrison Guo was interested in getting rich.
When Garrison enrolled at the Foreign Language School of Zhengzhou, his textbooks contained the usual stilted English passages to memorize and recite. But Garrison’s education in English would be primarily shaped outside his textbooks. The school had foreign teachers who listened to foreign music, and Garrison began to hang out with them. He studied the lyrics to “Everybody” by the Backstreet Boys and started singing karaoke with friends.
“I felt very cool,” he said. “If a student could sing in English, he would be very popular.”
In high school, at age sixteen, Garrison had befriended two foreign exchange students who taught English, one from the United States and the other from Poland. They dedicated themselves to providing him with a broad-based immersion course in global youth culture. The Polish boy offered him marijuana. (Garrison says he refused.) The American taught him CPR. Both of them taught him to speak with the same kind of English that many Americans use.
“They taught me all the dirty words like bitch, eat it, nuts, slut, prostitution, hooker, whore, son of a bitch, and asshole,” he said. “That’s when I started talking slang. I would say, ‘What’s up, man?’ I was a very typical teenager. You wanted to be cool, fashionable, and modern. You wanted to do things so that people will like you.”
He enrolled in a local university in Zhengzhou, the first person in his family to attend college, and English quickly thrust him into the spotlight. He competed in English-speaking competitions and became a songwriter and rapper. When he entered a national rap contest, he wrote his own music, created his own elaborate outfit, and won his regional competition. He went to the finals in Beijing prepared to perform a number that somehow combined a saxophone, a basketball, and nunchakus. The producers told him not to bother. They said the only thing that mattered was how he looked. It seemed plausible; most of the performers in the regional competition had been male models. But when he showed up for the Beijing competition, everyone had a gimmick. He bombed.
“I saw all kinds of things,” he said. “People were dancing with snakes. Even a soldier was marching in front of the judges.”
He kept bouncing from thing to thing. He tried to study overseas in Sweden but his financial aid package fell through. He was probably too restless for the classroom, anyway, too eager to get out into the world. He had worked as a summer counselor at his university’s basketball camp, which had led him to a job offer as an interpreter in the CBA.
Basketball had found him even before he had found English. At age eleven, he would play by himself at night on a court near his house. “There was nobody there,” he said. “No lights. I worked on my hook shot and my dribbling, over and over. I was never tired. Later, when I was depressed, as I quarreled with my family, basketball was with me. Every time I was sad, I would take my basketball to the court.”
His mother fell sick when he was a child. Arthritis left her unable to continue working, bedridden and angry. He rebelled, often fighting or arguing with his parents, and would flee to the basketball court, even when it rained. But basketball would also push him to English.
“I watched the NBA for the first time,” he recalled. “I saw Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley. I thought, Whoa, how amazing are they? I want to be like them. I want to play basketball. I was so small and skinny. But I tried harder than anyone else. The ball was so heavy. That’s why I learned the hook shot.”
The bonus infuriated him enough to spark a small rebellion in Garrison. The evening before the home opener against Bayi, he spent the night in an empty bedroom in Olumide’s apartment, a jailbreak from the dorm. We sat at the kitchen table, eating bananas as Olumide was taking his morning nap in his bedroom. I mentioned that I was soon having lunch with Boss Wang and asked Garrison if there was a question he wanted me to ask.
“Ask him if he would like his daughter to marry Garrison,” he said, joking. Boss Wang didn’t have a daughter. It was a little example of why Westerners sometimes think Chinese have a tin ear for humor. Garrison was trying, with humor, to say that he wanted Boss Wang’s money. But then he corrected himself. He didn’t want the owner’s money. He said he wanted to earn his own.
When he studied English, he was expected to memorize famous aphorisms. Now he cited Charles Chaplin, as he called him.
“People have to believe in themselves. That is the secret to success.”
He moved to Lincoln. “Towering genius disdains a beaten path. They see
k regions hitherto unexplored.”
He paused, frowning. “Hi-ther-to? Is that word right?”
He began again. “What I believe in is there is greatness asleep in every man. When that greatness awakens, miracles happen.”
He pointed to his chest. “It’s true everyone in the world is unique. They just don’t realize it. When they realize it, they can do great things.”
I had lost track of the authors of his epiphanies. I asked him who deserved credit for the last one.
“That is Garrison Guo,” he said, grinning a wide grin.
Olumide Oyedeji spoke English with a British accent. The issue of his accent arose a day or so after I moved in. Olumide’s wife and infant daughter were arriving in a few weeks, and in the interim Olumide was letting me live in one of the empty bedrooms. Olumide would say something to me in his deep and mellifluous voice only to quickly detect, perhaps from my frozen, uncertain reaction, that I hadn’t understood him, or that I was pretending I had as a way of being polite, which he considered merely frustrating. “Do you understand?” he would ask me, his eyes widening, his chin tucking back into his neck. He loved to talk, and the thought that I might not precisely understand him was frustrating because it impeded conversation. He concluded the issue was his accent, his Breee-tish accent.
I had never encountered a British accent quite like it. China conditioned a foreigner to different permutations of English, the same way Chinese were conditioned to the hackneyed Mandarin spoken by most foreigners. But Olumide’s words seemed subject to an unpredictable chemical reaction upon contact with oxygen. It was as if they arrived a long moment after they left his mouth, as if the sound were lingering in the air, vibrating, deliberating whether it would coalesce itself into something recognizable or collapse into something melodically incomprehensible. He said PREEE-zun for prison, when he explained that one of his rivals in the Chinese league had spent some time in preezun. He said ohpe instead of hope, as when he warned that Coach Liu must be careful not to grind the Chinese players into sand or they might lose ohpe.
