Beautiful Country (9 page)

The next day I arrived at practice early and found the courts empty. A few minutes before practice was scheduled to begin, all the boys except Bowen came in. They walked in a tight group and spoke in hushed voices. They looked upset. I went over and tried to listen in to their conversation, but I didn't catch enough to understand what they were talking about and none of them offered to clue me in. I pulled Random aside and asked him what was going on. He said Bowen had gotten in trouble, and now we were going to have a hard practice. “
Bowen yinggai huidao Tianjin
(Bowen should go back to Tianjin),” Little Mao blurted. I asked Little Mao what he meant. I thought he said something about how Bowen had been on the Tianjin team, but I didn't hear him clearly and when I asked again, none of the boys would clue me in on what he had said. A few minutes later Bowen came in with his head held high. He seemed to be looking over all of us.

Madame Jiang arrived and ordered us to stand in a row. She walked back and forth with her hands behind her back. We felt like convicts awaiting our sentencing. She said Bowen had, against permission, slipped out to watch Peng play her exhibi
tion match and was caught in the high bleachers of the indoor facility. So, as punishment, he and all of us would have to run the bleachers. The boys all looked back at her and showed no emotion. No one made a sound. She lifted her chin toward Bowen and said he was going to lead. Bowen looked at her and smiled condescendingly.

“
Keyi, mei guanxi
(Sure, no problem),” he said with the same nonchalance as if she had asked him to hand her a tennis ball.

Bowen had not even had time to put down his tennis bag. He started walking toward the indoor courts. The other boys hoisted their tennis bags onto their backs.

“Aren't we coming back?” I asked.

Random answered, “Bags might get stolen.” It was as Victoria had warned, everything in China was vulnerable—even at a state-run athletic facility that had a guard posted at the entrance and several who patrolled the grounds.

As we walked toward the stadium, Little Mao repeated, loud enough for Bowen to hear, “Bowen should go back to Tianjin. He only thinks about himself.” Dali didn't say anything but he looked at Little Mao and nodded in agreement.

“He doesn't have a choice,” Random said.

“Madame Jiang didn't have a choice either,” Little Mao snapped back. “And now we have to pay for that.”

I sped up my pace so that I walked just behind Little Mao. I hoped that his temper would cause him to drop his guard and reveal more about why Madame Jiang had such an intense dislike for Bowen. But he said nothing further, and we marched toward the stadium in silence. I wanted to ask Little Mao what he meant when he said Madame Jiang didn't have a choice, but I knew there was no point. All direct questions I asked my
teammates were met with cryptic answers and subtle remarks that seemed to reveal little, if anything. As my time in Beijing progressed, I came to realize that it was hopeless to wait for a clear, direct answer. To find answers to my questions, I would have to learn to pick up the subtleties in what my teammates said, how they said it, and perhaps most importantly, what they did not say.

I could never get any of them to explicitly tell me why Madame Jiang had it out for Bowen, but I came to understand that she had never been consulted about Bowen joining the team. He had been imposed on her. The cities are autonomous in China, and the officials wield a lot of power. My guess was that a superior had informed her one day that Bowen would be joining her team. She had to accept it, but she didn't have to like it, and she didn't have to treat him well. And when he was defiant and refused to submit and be broken by her training practices, it infuriated her all the more, and eventually the dislike grew into something stronger.

The facility was locked, and we had to wait for Madame Jiang to open it. Bowen stood facing the door, not wanting to look back at us. Hope stood directly behind Bowen and patted him on the shoulder as if to say, “I'm with you.” He left just enough room for Madame Jiang to get by to open the door without him having to step aside.

The building was cold and dark, and Madame Jiang disappeared to turn on the lights. Three loud thwacks echoed across the courts and the lights came on. She returned and pointed where we should run. Up the steps of the first aisle, over thirty feet, down the steps, over thirty feet, up the next aisle, over thirty feet, down the next aisle. She waved her hand in a circle indi
cating that we should continue all around the stadium until she said stop. She said something abrupt that I did not understand, and then she clapped her hands, her white gloves muting the sound. Bowen took off and went up the bleachers three steps at a time. We followed—Hope, Little Mao, Dali, then me, and finally Random. Hope set a conservative pace. He didn't skip any steps. Little Mao and Dali continued to gripe under their breath. I couldn't make out what they were saying, but after twenty minutes of going up and down hundreds of stairs, no one could spare any energy to complain. Everything had to be saved for the ordeal that lay ahead of us.

After forty minutes I thought I had nothing left. After an hour I was sure that I couldn't go any farther. I had ditched my hat after the first lap and sweat ribboned down my forehead and over my eyebrows and into my eyes. It stung but I had nothing to wipe the sweat away with. My light gray shirt had been turned a shade that was closer to black and it clung to my skin. I doubted there was a dry patch of skin anywhere on my body. My lungs burned and my breath came in gasps and my calves began to cramp. But even though our bodies were beginning to rebel, we kept running, lap after lap around that damn stadium.

Madame Jiang had not moved from her position at the net post. I kept hoping that she would call time at an hour and fifteen minutes. There was a large clock at the end of the courts. I began to stare at the second hand, willing it closer and closer to the top. On the ascents, my legs had begun to feel uncoordinated and even the descents were getting difficult. We were all struggling by this point, all of us except Bowen. He was about to lap us a third time. His face showed no pain, only focus. Bowen would never let anyone, especially Madame Jiang, know. Each time he
lapped me he said first in Chinese and then in English, “
Jia you wai guo ren
(Come on, foreigner).”

By the fourth time he lapped us, he didn't say anything, and I caught his eye as he passed, and I saw he was hurting and struggling to finish with the pace he had started. My legs were numb, and I didn't even know where I was putting my feet anymore. Black and yellow smudges floated across my field of vision. Dali and I were lagging, and Madame Jiang clapped her hands again and yelled at us to speed up. 1:50. I watched the minute hand of the clock shudder and then click closer to the number 12. At 2:00 all of us, except Bowen, collapsed. Bowen kept going and then turned and looked behind himself at his fallen teammates. He stopped and walked back to us with as much of a jaunt in his step as he could muster. Little Mao held his side and was sucking in huge gulps of air with his mouth wide open. I bent over and threw up. Bowen stood while all the rest of us had crumpled over on benches or steps. He looked at Madame Jiang, and I was fearful he would challenge her with a statement like, “So what's next,” and she would rise to the challenge and make us do something more. But he didn't—whether out of self-preservation or regard for us, I couldn't tell.

Madame Jiang didn't like the fact that she hadn't broken him, but she wasn't going to let us know that. She pointed to the indoor courts and told us to start warming up. Needless to say, practice was without any energy. We were all there physically, but everyone had checked out mentally, even Bowen. At the end of the practice she ordered us to play tiebreakers in a round-robin pattern. Normally tiebreakers were extremely competitive because it was your one chance to beat someone better than you if you had a fast start or got a few lucky breaks and, usually, ev
eryone took a shot at Bowen. But on this day we played points expecting the customary outcome: Bowen was expected to beat us, and Dali would beat everyone except Bowen. Even Little Mao and Hope didn't seem to care. Somehow while we were running up and down those steps the resentment toward Bowen had been transformed into anger at Madame Jiang.

When practice was over, she ordered all the boys to leave except Bowen. He was told to pick up all of the balls and lock them away. She left quickly, and the other boys slotted their tennis rackets back into their bags and, exhausted, walked slowly back to their rooms. There was none of the ribbing or jabbing that often followed them home. I offered to help Bowen, but he said no, he could do it. The balls were spread across three courts, and he walked slowly back to the far side to begin rolling the balls to one side of the courts. I started picking up the balls on the first court, but when Bowen saw me helping, he yelled at me to stop. The frustration in his tone surprised me, and I shrugged and went to pack up my bag. I collected my things and walked out to the parking lot where Victoria and Driver Wu were waiting.

“Where's your hat?” Victoria asked.

I touched my head and checked my bag and then remembered that I'd thrown my hat at my bag during one of the laps. I walked back to the courts and saw Bowen sitting on the bench. He didn't hear me approach; he was slowly peeling his socks off his feet, which were red and dripping in blood. “Bowen!” I exclaimed. He looked up, not acknowledging that I had seen the condition of his feet. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, it's nothing. Just cheap copies,” he replied in Chinese, too tired for English. He pointed at his shoes, and I saw the ghost of a Nike swoosh where the logo had fallen off.

The following day the only sounds at tennis practice were the sounds of tennis balls being hit—no skidding of rubber tennis shoes, no exhalations as someone nailed a serve, no emotional outbursts when a ball didn't go in, no joking around. Madame Jiang may have sensed that she had gone too far, but she also sensed that she had won. We were all sore beyond belief and had blister-ravaged feet, but the thing that hurt the most was the knowledge that we were unable to stand up for ourselves. I knew that the other boys blamed Bowen, but they also hated Madame Jiang for being so unfair and punishing them for something they had not done.

Good tennis coaches are tough, and the best are brutal—they have to push their players beyond the level even the cockiest and most arrogant one thinks he can achieve. And great coaches are never satisfied. They must prepare their players for exhausting physical battles, and more importantly, for taxing mental challenges. Tennis is like a boxing match: you go out on the court and engage in a physical battle to beat the other player—one on one, no one there to help you in a fight that can last over three hours in 100-degree heat.

And how does a coach prepare you for the moment when you choke and dump an easy overhead into the bottom of the net on match point? How does your coach teach you to erase the thought that had you not gotten that bad bounce, or had the net been half an inch higher or lower, or worse, had you not been cheated—you would be walking off the court the winner instead of the loser?

The answer: the coach creates situations on the practice court to replicate those moments, again and again, until you begin to hate losing so much that you teach yourself to block out all the emotions of a match—the joy, the disappointment, the hope, the despair, the guilt, the sense of unfairness, and the anger—until your mind is devoid of everything except a cool, intense focus. It takes a long time, but eventually you get there. Great coaches push you to the point of almost breaking. But they do it to help you, not to punish you.

Madame Jiang was the opposite. She made us run those stadiums because she wanted to punish us, not because she wanted to help us. She made her point. But that day she lost our hearts, because we realized that she had never been on our side.

At the end of practice, Bowen sat down next to me on the bench. He hadn't said a word all practice. We waited while Madame Jiang finished drilling Hope. She was getting irritated that his glasses kept fogging up, and he constantly had to take them off and wipe them. As I leaned down to zip up my tennis bag, I noticed Bowen's white tennis shoes were stained pink around the point where the soles joined the leather.

The following Monday, Bowen didn't appear. I asked Random where he was, and he said, “
Ta sheng bing le
(He's sick).” I asked if he was in the dorms and Random grunted, “
Dui
(Yes).” I asked
if I could go and see him. “
Bu keyi
(You can't),” he said. “Guards don't let you in.”

With Bowen absent, Madame Jiang started to pick on Hope. Over the past weeks, Hope had seemed to lose focus. He had started coming to practice late, tanking when we played points, and developing a new “injury” every other practice. Even at the age of fourteen, I had been around tennis long enough to recognize the signs of burnout.

I watched Madame Jiang drill Hope on overheads. Start with racket on the net, run back, scissor kick into the air, smash an overhead, sprint back to the net, slap the net with racket, backpedal to hit another overhead, thirty in a row—nonstop. In the middle of the fourth set of this drill, Hope stopped and held out his hand. He took his glasses off and wiped them on his shirt. His hands shook. Random said, “She is supposed to buy contacts for him, but she won't so he has to play with those lousy glasses. They are too big, and they keep slipping.”

“Why doesn't she?”

“Where do you think she gets the money to buy those sunglasses?”

We were silenced by another outburst from Madame Jiang.
“Luxi, ni zenme zheneman? Ru guo ni bu jinbu, wo hui song ni hui jia
(Hope, how are you so slow? If you don't improve, I will send you home).
”

“Can she do that?” I asked Random.

“
Ta shi. Dang ran laoban
(Of course. She's the boss). She can do what she wants.
”

When players burn out, their minds and bodies go stale. They stop trying as hard in practice and start losing more matches. And without the joy of winning, they are left only with the anxi
ety and depression that accompany loss. They spiral further and further down until the sport they once loved becomes a chore they resent or even hate. I had seen burnout among countless players at the academies in Florida, and I could see it happening with Hope.

A wise trainer would notice the signs and see that there was little left and give the player a week or two off. Let the body rest and the mind recharge. But Madame Jiang became harder than ever on Hope. For three days in a row, she spent the entire practice on Hope's court, standing behind him and shouting at him whenever he missed an easy overhead or volley. During a water break I heard Random whisper to Hope, “Just pretend she isn't there.” I could see that Hope tried to block her out. He pretended she wasn't there and gazed ahead into nothingness. But I could also see that she made him nervous. He played far worse whenever she was watching. The worse he played, the more she screamed.

So much of my time in China seemed detached from the world I had left behind. Here I was on the other side of the globe, almost seven thousand miles from home, twelve hours ahead, and no one knew where I was or what I was doing. I could disappear, and no one would notice. I could play extremely well or extremely poorly, and no one would care. I wondered how these boys sustained themselves. They had followed the same routine every single day, year after year, since they were seven or eight. I had an escape. I knew that this was only temporary. With each day that passed, I came closer to returning home. And that gave me something to look forward to. But for my teammates, this was it. There was no end in sight for them.

Hope kept himself contained longer than I could have, but Madame Jiang stayed on him, even after Bowen returned, and a couple weeks later he snapped. During a practice set with Random, he missed a put-away overhead right on top of the net on set point. From three courts away Madame Jiang screamed for everyone to stop. She ran over to Hope's court and started shouting at him, telling him what a useless player he was. At first he stood there and took it. As she yelled at him, he kept his eyes focused on the ground. Then without warning, Hope let out a yell and smashed his racket on the ground, breaking it in half. The courts were suddenly silent. Hope walked off the court, leaving the broken racket behind him.

I only saw him again once after that day. A few weeks later as I was leaving practice with Victoria, I saw Hope across the street sitting on the curb staring at the entrance to the sports complex. He removed his glasses and wiped his face with the dirty gray T-shirt he was wearing. When he pulled the shirt away I saw that he had been crying. He put his glasses back on, and we made eye contact for a second. But then he looked away and walked off with his head bowed. That was the last time I ever saw him.

Before coming to Beijing, I had a bad habit of cracking rackets when I wasn't playing well. I wasn't the only one to do it. Most of the kids I played with in the States had broken at least two or three rackets out of frustration. We did it because we thought it looked cool, because we saw players like Marat Safin do it on TV. It was a way of saving face when you were losing. A way of letting everyone know that you should be winning, and that you were losing only because you were playing badly.

After what happened to Hope, I made myself a promise that I
would never again break a racket. I remembered the old beat-up equipment that Hope had to use. What had seemed cool to me before suddenly felt spoiled and entitled. From then on, every time I raised my racket in thoughtless anger, ready to bring it down hard on the cement, I would see that image of Hope sitting on the curb with tears in his eyes. And I never broke another racket.