Chinese table tennis defectors go in search of acceptance

Among the many instructions issued to the people of Beijing for the next two and a half weeks, there are very specific guidelines on in-stadia behaviour and how to cheer their own athletes. The glaring omission, though, is that they have not been informed how to respond when they see a Chinese player representing the United States. We refer here to the American table tennis team, all four of whom are defectors.

Theirs, however, is not a tale of undercover escape operations; far from it, they are all proud to be back here. David Zhuang is 44 and he says that it was only the magnet of his former homeland that kept him in the game. Jun Gao won a silver for China in 1992 and would have been primed for gold in 1996 but fell in love and gave the game up to follow her heart to America instead. This is her last chance.

No, theirs is, collectively, an epic tale about pursuit of destiny, about crossing the world and back to find fulfilment. None more so than Chen Wang who was born just three bus stops from Tiananmen Square, emigrated in 1998 but has been back staying with her parents in Beijing to prepare where her father has been fretting that the “Olympic food” her mother has been serving is not up to scratch.

Remember, here, that table tennis is the national sport, that they have tables in parks for the public to play on and that businesses and factories often have a table tennis room rather than an employees’ gym. Wang has been practicing on the table in the machine factory where her father used to work and her father’s friends have been calling round to ask if she will give them a game.

This has been some homecoming. Her journey here began aged seven when the talent spotters pitched up at her school asking the pupils to see if they could throw three tennis balls ten foot into a small basket. “It was not easy,” she recalled yesterday, “but we knew what it was about. I tried really hard.” Wang sunk all three and was immediately put on a three-hours-a-night training regime. At the age of 11, she turned pro, was moved into an apartment with three peers and the hours-per-day went up to eight. Do not, though, take this as a case of Chinese slave trade; Wang says she loved it and that as others around her failed to keep pace, her competitive spirit rose and soon she was playing live every Saturday night on national television.

By the 1996 Olympics, aged 24, she was ranked fourth in a Chinese squad that could only select three. So she missed out and, watching a battalion of youngsters then moving to usurp her, she quit two years later.

This is the point about the Chinese: strength in depth. So much so that defecting table tennis players are commonplace; around a third of the rest-of-the-world’s competitors here in the Olympic tournament are China-born and China-trained. Indeed, it has got to the stage where the international federation recently brought in strict rules effectively ruling out nation-swapping, meaning that Wang and her likes will not be seen again.

Wang can only be seen here because of the investment of another of life’s travellers. In 2000, she moved to New York to help her sister who ran two leather goods stores but she also started giving table tennis lessons. One of her students, Jerry Wartski, is a Polish Jew who survived Nazi concentration camps and then three years at a displaced-persons camp outside Frankfurt. Wartski now owns properties in New York, among them table tennis clubs and he was soon bank-rolling Wang’s comeback all the way into the American team.

So Wang and her team-mates are not using the US as a flag of convenience. She feels she is both American and Chinese and hopes to be allowed to march in Friday’s Opening Ceremony with the Stars and Stripes painted on one side of her face and the star of China on the other.

And she is confident the Chinese crowd will respond well to her. The Chinese, she explained, are more interested in close competition, and anyway, “I have a lot of friends in Beijing; they will all cheer for me.” As for Gao, her marriage failed and she has been back in China for eight years training to play for the US. She is undecided whether she will return to America after the Olympics when her table tennis career is done.

For Wang, there is first the commitment to play those games she has promised her father’s friends. Then she will return, once again leaving half of her life behind.