Ping Pong Diplomacy II
As the 2022 Winter Olympics were about to get underway in Beijing last week, I had an intriguing text that took me back forty years to my first trip to China. Our neighbors Carol and Jim had moved their cars out of their garage and set up the family’s substantial ping pong table in their place. The weather was warming up, the light in the high beamed space was bright, and Carol wondered if I might be interested in an early afternoon game.
How long had it been, I wondered since I’d last picked up a ping pong paddle? When did I play my first game? Could I possibly retrieve the skills I once had and hope not to embarrass myself too badly, even in a friendly, non-competitive match? Intrigued, I said yes, and the following day I showed up at their house at 1:00 sharp with a Chinese Meteor Brand ping pong paddle and my travel journal from the first trip Kit and I made to China in September 1982.
One of the highlights of that tour was a two-day cruise on the Yangtze River from Chongqing to Wuhan. The passengers aboard the Yangtze River Cruiser included our group of 21, our national guide Jiang Hong-ren, and a local guide; a Smithsonian tour group; and China’s National Men’s and Women’s Ping Pong teams. As I always do, I kept a travel journal. When Kit and I left Missouri last April, I packed it along with all my travel journals from decades past.
Leafing through that journal before my match with Carol, I discovered a detailed recap entitled “The Ping Pong Match” that follows—
“Surely the single most memorable event on the 2 ½ days on the Yangtze was an arranged Ping Pong demonstration put on by the Chinese National Men’s and Women’s Ping Pong teams who were then touring the country. Jiang, our national guide, had a friend on the men’s team from Liaoning Province where they’d both grown up. Before long, the seeds of a little Ping Pong diplomacy were planted. Miss Yang, our soft-spoken, bespeckled local guide persuaded the captain to clear out the captain’s dining room and set up a ping pong table for the matches.
“That evening, we were led down to one of the cruiser’s lower decks where Robin Yeats—a member of our UCLA Extension tour group—was about to lecture to our group in an interior lounge on ancient Chinese poetry and its significance in China’s history. Out we trooped and downstairs we snaked past what felt like a sea of humanity before being led into an oval-shaped room with a low ceiling. The room was encircled with Chinese boat employees—some seated, some standing. That circle was surrounded by faces of Chinese passengers/crew peering through the interior cabin’s windows.
“The demonstration began with the Women’s singles matches, unbelievably fast and accurate, their bodies twisting in constant motion from shoulders to waist. I was talked into playing a few rounds with Wang, captain of the Men’s team for comic relief, and then Gary Stabile was pulled to the table by one of the Women’s team players. Playing in his bare feet (it was that or a pair of Chinese plastic slippers) Gary picked up a paddle and did his noble best to defend our nation’s honor.”
A decade later when Kit and I lived in the country south of Columbia, Missouri, our son Hayden and daughter Heidi would come to Breakfast Creek over the Christmas holidays. We took long walks in the snow with our walker hound Sam, lounged in our flannel PJs by a log fire that we kept burning all day, and played endless games of ping pong in a small, unheated outbuilding next to the barn. Bundled up in wool jackets, we warmed our hands with cups of hot chocolate and took turns playing each other or from the sidelines.
Last week when I agreed to take up Carol’s friendly challenge, I realized it had been 30 years since I’d picked up my Chinese paddle and 40 since I’d earned it aboard the Yangtze River Cruiser. I’m happy to report that after getting my aging hand-eye coordination figured out and retrieving memories long buried on how to hold my paddle and how far back from the table I should stand, we played non-stop for an hour and a half.
Next time the garage is ready for some serious spring cleaning, little white balls will appear behind dark recesses where spiders love to hang out or overhead where wild shots ricocheted off the walls and ended up in the rafters. After the 2022 Olympic flame is extinguished in Beijing, the sound of ping pong matches will be heard in our neighborhood. Four decades after my Ping Pong diplomacy footnote on the Yangtze River, it’s Game On once again here in the Sierra Foothills.