by Jim Yardley
Though the vast majority of Chinese knew nothing about the Olympics, and continued to know nothing for decades to come, Robertson’s challenge had sparked a sports movement that gestated among a small but influential group of Chinese nationalists. Some ultimately embraced the Olympics as a way of joining the world. Others saw the Games as a way to beat the world. But all regarded the Olympics as an arena in which to restore China’s national dignity.
To truly spread its movement, and the word of God, the YMCA needed to become a Chinese organization. This was central to the YMCA vision, and the localization process was under way in 1914 when the Tianjin Y opened a new three-story brick headquarters with the country’s first indoor basketball court. Three years earlier, Zhang Boling had been elected chairman of the YMCA board, while Chinese physical education directors were being trained in athletics, anatomy, physiology, hygiene, and Bible study.
Inevitably, given its ambitions, the Y became entangled in the politics of the era. When the Qing Dynasty collapsed in 1911, ushering in the tumultuous republican era, China began making halting steps toward a more democratic political system. Lecturers at the Tianjin Y advocated progressive campaigns promoting public education or warning against smoking opium. When the American educator John Dewey toured China, lecturing on democracy and education, he also spoke there. For a moment, the Y even had the support of Sun Yat-sen, the revolutionary who became the first president of republican China. He was a Christian who spoke at the Shanghai Y in 1915 and later encouraged the Chinese YMCA to emulate Joshua and lead the Chinese people to Canaan. Sun promoted his Christian faith as essential, rather than antithetical, to his revolutionary beliefs.
“The revolution is just like fire and the religion is oil,” he once said. “People just had noticed my revolution, but ignored my belief. If there is no oil, there will be no fire.”
Having sought to woo the new Chinese elite, the YMCA now had the opening it had so carefully cultivated, except it closed very quickly. Sun struggled in vain to unify the country until his death in 1925. The underground Chinese Communist Party had grown into an insurgency against the ruling Nationalists, who were proving no better than the Qing at fending off foreign encroachment. Japan had created a puppet regime in Manchuria and was claiming more Chinese territory, including, eventually, Tianjin. When full-scale war broke out with Japan in 1937, the Tianjin Y was impressed as a Japanese military headquarters. Other Y buildings in other cities were seized and American secretaries were forced to flee. More than a decade of war, deprivation, and upheaval would end with Mao founding the People’s Republic in 1949.
The Y was a rare exception to Mao’s campaign to expunge foreign influence from China, partly because of its success in becoming a Chinese organization. Zhang Boling became a leading figure in China’s new sports bureaucracy. But although it survived, the Y was effectively gutted, severed from the YMCA in the United States, as Mao ultimately placed religion under state control. What did remain, if now no longer intertwined with Christianity, was the concept of sports as a tool of nation building. And basketball.
Luo Shilong had heavy-lidded eyes and the faintly stained teeth of a dedicated smoker. When he shambled through the door, I was struck by his size. He was tall and thick; he’d once played in Tianjin’s local basketball league. He also was an atheist, which spoke to how much the Tianjin YMCA had changed since the days of David Willard Lyon. Luo now ran the Y.
The Y was in the suburban district of Wanglanzhuang, inside a faded pink villa in a housing compound of other pink villas, across the street from a depot for city buses, and distinguished only by a sign reading “Tianjin Young Men’s Christian Association.” Downstairs, in what should have been a living room, there were a few scattered pieces of furniture and a Ping-Pong table covered in bound stacks of paperback books. In an upstairs bedroom, a middle-aged woman was doing paperwork and answering the phone. In a city of 11 million people, the Tianjin Y now had five employees and about 300 members. The pink villa was empty and silent, without any sports facilities and without a basketball court.
“We have a very limited budget,” Luo said, smiling. “If you want to donate some money, I’d love to have it!” Luo’s connections got him the Y job about a decade ago. He had worked as a vice party secretary in the Association of Chinese Youth, a government umbrella organization representing state-recognized service groups, including the YMCA. I suspected the job was a sinecure because there didn’t seem to be much work to be done. The group owned another villa where old people gathered for poetry readings, singing, and knitting classes. His staff also coordinated a network of volunteers who visited the sick and elderly. “We want them to feel that someone still cares for them,” he said.
He had invited me into a second-floor bedroom converted into a room for receiving guests. The woman answering the telephone arrived with cups of tea as I asked Luo about Christianity. Tianjin has about 100,000 Christians, he said, citing official numbers, and the Y now had twenty Christians who were allowed to meet for Bible study, if not for worship. For that, they must attend a state-sanctioned church. “We’re not a church,” he said. “We’re only a club.”
Splintering the Chinese Y from Christianity was a precondition of its survival. When Mao took over, the Y was placed under the sphere of the party’s youth organization, the Communist Youth League, whose followers studied the writings of Mao as a secular religion. “All of the young people at that time were members,” Luo said. “You were considered bad if you were not accepted by the Youth League.” I mentioned to Luo that a Y diluted of Christianity didn’t seem like a real Y. He disagreed. He said the Y’s purpose was never strictly as a proselytizing organization in China but that “the Christian ideology, the Christian spirit, the spirit of God” were part of why the Y still existed. “No matter what the initial agenda that pushed the YMCA to China, they brought good things: modern civilization, modern education, and modern sports,” he said. “Maybe from a religious perspective, God is happy.”
Luo sipped his tea.
In 2005, Luo organized a celebration of the 110th anniversary of the Tianjin Y. Now fifty-two, Luo had grown up in Tianjin; as a boy, he was taught nothing about the city’s colonialist legacy or about the Y. When Luo and others began pulling together materials for a commemorative book, they were startled by what they discovered. The Tianjin Y had helped shape modern China. “In the past 100 years, China had such a chaotic history,” he said. “It is rare that you can find anything that has existed continuously during that history. The YMCA has existed during the whole period, or at least the Tianjin Y has. There has to be a reason. We want to figure out why.”
Materials had been sent over from the YMCA archives in Minnesota, including letters from Americans who established the Y and other documents. Graduate students in Tianjin were translating the documents into Chinese, and Luo had organized annual seminars on different themes: the Y and Modern Education in China; the Y and Modern Civilization; the Y and the Creation of Modern Sports in China. The stacks of paperbacks downstairs were the written records of these seminars. I complimented the scholarship but suggested that the YMCA’s ambitions were never fulfilled in China, as history and Mao got in the way. Luo again disagreed. He believed the Y helped deliver modernity to China.
“We call it the Western wind blowing East,” he said. “All the Christian groups brought their beliefs here. But China has its own civilization. If you want things to take root, the organization has to be localized.”
Luo’s other project for the Y was more ambitious. He wanted to reclaim the original three-story building, home to China’s first indoor basketball court. It had been under lease to a government preschool since 1958, on less than advantageous terms, despite the building’s prime location in the Nankai district, one of the city’s most desired addresses. Luo thought he could make a killing by renting the building to a bank. Or, possibly, he could renovate it for use as a real YMCA. I asked if we could visit the building. Luo agreed, after we stopped
for lunch.
Lunch was in the Heping District, once the city’s colonial quarter, a quaint collection of colonial era buildings, a time capsule and historical dollhouse preserved inside Tianjin. Our restaurant was inside a nineteenth-century building now called the Garden Hotel, and the old wooden staircase creaked under our feet as we walked past period photographs of the old British opera house, the trolley route, and other colonial landmarks. The owner was a friend of Luo’s who was trying to evoke Victorian England to attract tourists. We sat on dining chairs with needlepoint seat cushions as the waitresses brought us a steaming pot of tomato soup. A Nationalist agent once lived in the building, Luo mentioned, smiling, a spy against the Communists.
We sipped our soup. Luo was a student of history and had earned a master’s degree in Ming and Qing history at Nankai University. In his job with the Association of Chinese Youth, he traveled widely, visiting thirty countries and studying service organizations to learn what could and could not be applied to China. He had a good impression of Americans as well intentioned and charitable, though he learned not to discount the cultural differences, even the small ones. On his first visit to the United States, he attended a dinner in San Diego. The guests had finished eating when the hostess circled the table, asking if anyone wanted second helpings. Luo smiled and declined. In China, a hostess would have understood that Luo was merely following custom, demonstrating humility and deference, and the hostess would have kept insisting that he eat until he relented, each person fulfilling social expectations. But the American hostess took him at his word, assuming he meant what he said. He never got a second helping during the entire trip.
“The first time I went to the United States,” he said, laughing, “I was always hungry.”
He visited the United States five more times and visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York during an exhibition of photographs of Shanghai taken during the 1920s. The Shanghai photographs were part of a larger exhibit on different world cultures, and it worried him that they were the ones selected to represent China. “I realized why Americans don’t understand China at all,” he thought at the time. He began to draw his own conclusions about the differences between China and the West.
“Western people talk about love in a Western sense,” Luo said, putting down his spoon. “You give your heart to somebody. You use love to get close to someone. Chinese talk about love, too. But we also talk about respect. We use love and respect together. But in a sense, respect means: I’ll keep a certain distance from you.”
Waitresses arrived with vegetables and a meat dish. “Western people talk about tolerance,” Luo continued. “If you make a mistake, and you realize it, you are forgiven. It is a gesture of generosity, evidence that the person doing the forgiving has an open heart. Well, Chinese people talk about being restrained. They say, Yes, you are making a mistake, and you are hurting me. But I won’t get mad at you.”
The difference made me wonder if the West can possibly change China, as so many Westerners have tried to do, as the Tianjin Y once tried to do. “We have changed, and we are learning from Western culture all the time,” Luo said. “A lot of Western values are already adopted by China. But the influence is always mutual. It’s like you open a door between two rooms. Air will naturally flow between them.”
Luo’s mobile phone suddenly awakened with a musical ringtone. It took me a moment but then I placed it: the Village People singing “YMCA.” On one of his American trips, Luo visited Los Angeles and bought Lakers souvenirs for his daughter. She was a teacher at Peking University in Beijing, the nation’s most prestigious school, and a member of a Chinese fan club for Kobe Bryant. Like his daughter, Luo preferred the NBA to the Chinese league. When I mentioned that the NBA wanted a league in China, but was having problems, he smiled faintly. During the anniversary of the Tianjin YMCA, Luo asked his Y counterparts in America to make an overture to the NBA about participating. He thought Tianjin would be perfect for an NBA-affiliated camp for talented Chinese high school players; the Tianjin YMCA could easily have gotten the necessary licenses, given his government contacts. But he never heard back from the NBA.
“The most important strategy in China is to cultivate your own community,” he said. “You’ve got to have your own people first, especially in China. The NBA should learn from the YMCA during the past 100 years. You seep through the grassroots level. The YMCA was pretty smart about that. They were pretty practical.”
He neglected to mention a relevant fact: The international YMCA no longer ran the YMCA in China.
The Y building was in the Nankai District, which had a few scattered period buildings but was now another construction zone of the New China. Tianjin was booming, with an economy that grew last year at 18 percent. A half dozen skeletal yellow construction cranes clustered over the downtown. A new residential compound called the Courtyard Above Tianjin was rising near the frozen Hai River, a forest of half-built high-rise towers. Nearby, workers were finishing a shopping mall that covered a city block on East Street. The Y was a tidy brick structure with a white marble entrance and windows with flower boxes, not far from a Carrefour hypermarket. Luo parked in a small lot and we entered through the basement. I heard children.
“The building was designed by the YMCA in the United States,” Luo said as a line of preschoolers straggled into the basement hallway behind a teacher, everyone giggling at the unexpected sight of a foreigner. “You can see similar buildings all over the world. Japan’s is very similar.”
I followed Luo upstairs and noticed the hardwood flooring. Wood was a scarce enough resource in China that nearly everything built in the last half century was made of brick, concrete, and steel. In Beijing, an earthquake zone, houses were built with concrete roofs. But this flooring was made of the thin hardwood strips of a basketball court. At the second-floor landing, Luo pushed open a door to a large room that was now a cafeteria. Preschoolers were sitting on tiny plastic stools, sipping juice and having an afternoon snack. They looked up, adorable, another Chinese generation.
When the Y was built, it was the tallest building in Tianjin and a social center for wealthy Chinese and expatriates. The cafeteria was once a social hall. The first movie shown in Tianjin was screened here.
“This was the best nightclub in Tianjin a hundred years ago,” Luo joked.
One of the administrators of the school, Yang Yuqiang, led us into another room, which seemed strangely familiar. The ceiling had been lowered and a small stage had been erected at the far end, with large posters from the last performance: the October 1 celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. The preschoolers had staged a patriotic show for their parents.
“Little Flower, One by One, Our Hearts Point Toward the Motherland,” the posters read.
The room was narrow, a rectangle less than half the size of an NBA court, and then I realized why it was familiar: the running track. Anyone who has belonged to one of the older YMCAs in America knows the elevated, cantilevered running track built above the basketball courts. I once belonged to a Y in Alabama with the same kind of track. This was where YMCA secretaries once taught Chinese boys to toss a ball into a basket, where basketball in China was born.
“We call it the multifunction room,” said Yang Yuqiang. “The ceiling used to be taller than this.”
Yang walked onto the floor and motioned toward the opposite ends of the running track. Baskets were once bolted on each end. We stood silently for a minute and a custodian arrived with a plaque, written in Chinese. Yang said it would soon be affixed to the wall as part of a dedication ceremony. It read:
Basketball was created in the United States in 1891. Four years later in 1895, YMCA missionaries introduced basketball in Tianjin. Here the first Chinese indoor basketball court was built in 1914.
We admired the plaque and took another moment in the room. I wondered what those YMCA missionaries would have thought of what they achieved, and what they did not, having come here preaching th
at strength of body equaled strength of nation, that a nation knocked to its knees by modernity could stand itself back up. They aspired to build red-brick YMCA buildings across China and bring the Chinese people closer to God. They traveled to a country that defied their understanding, propelled by their faith and their belief in the power of that faith.
Yet it was the practicality embedded into their vision of faith that appealed to many Chinese, a path to rebuilding a country as much as saving souls. The Communist Party appropriated their ideas, and China did stand itself up again, if not in the name of God. Like the NBA a century later, the Y had come to China selling something intangible, and if the Y had no interest in money or profit, it did want to change China, to make it more like us. It had built its own network of basketball courts across the country—a precursor to the NBA’s plans for new arenas around China—and had hoped those YMCA centers would radiate as beacons of Christianity and tools of a Chinese rebirth. In the end, that would be too much to ask for; I wondered if the NBA was also asking for too much.
It was time to go, and I followed Luo onto East Street. He was still fascinated by the NBA.
“I suggest to the NBA that they should learn from their ancestors, the YMCA secretaries,” he said. “You can’t focus too much on making money. That is too nearsighted. You should have a long-term plan. Then, one day, you’ll see the flowers bear fruit.”
Bob Weiss was standing on the sideline, near the scorer’s table, a good fifteen feet from the bench. He was coaching now. The distance was a statement of independence. No more whispers to stand up and call a timeout. No rubbernecking when someone else made a substitution.
Outside, snow was still coming down, which had deflated the national debut of Bonzi Wells. The expected sellout had been reduced to a few hundred diehards, including about fifty men who were beating thunder sticks for Bonzi. The arena was large, frigid, and mostly empty, with an oval concrete floor, an awkward configuration for the rectangular court. It was like watching a basketball game inside a very large indoor rodeo, minus the fans and cows.
