Say What?

If you hear it enough times in one day, it means you’re doing something right.

The weather is spectacular as I stroll out of my apartment on March 11. It’s a sunny 60 degrees with little smog – which along with wind-chill and clouds and precipitation must be considered a meteorological factor in China.

There are people playing ball all over when I arrive at Shandong Normal. I stop to see refreshment man (above) – his name, I’ve learned, is Wang Sheng Heng – and buy a Gatorade and a bottle of water. Before I have stuffed the change into my pocket, a guy in his early 20s has stealthily approached me and is inviting me to join his game. This is the second straight visit to the courts where I’ve been invited to play with someone before I’ve left the refreshment stand. And the second time I’ve accepted.

He is shorter – maybe 5-7 – and muscular and is wearing a slick pair of adidas kicks, the 2010 Derrick Rose shoes. I had Roses last year and I loved them, and I expect, based on the quality of his sneakers, that I am being lead to a more serious game. I also expect, based on the fact that he invited me within seconds of my arrival, that I am being led to a nearby game. I am right about the first part and wrong about the second. We traverse three or four courts before we finally get to our destination. I have no idea how this guy saw me. Alas, I’ve no idea how to say, “How did you see me from so far away?”

(This picture on the right is of me guarding the dude with the Derrick Rose kicks. It was taken after a few games, and after this guy had already made me look bad on multiple occasions. Notice I'm face-guarding him even though he (a) just inbounded the ball and (b) the ball is nowhere in sight. I'd had enough...)

I happily peel off my pants, noticing that for the first time in a long time I am actually warm despite being outside. One of the other dudes at the court, the oldest guy, says some stuff to me in a disgruntled voice. Of course I don’t know what he’s saying, and I tell him “I don’t understand,” which has been my go-to phrase for the last six months. (The sentence is, “Ting bu dong,” the literal translation of which is, “Hear no understand.”) Other players hear this and they laugh. This older guy, though, just keeps right on talking. I say “Ting bu dong” again, and he gives a dismissive hiss. He has a grizzled appearance, buzzed hair and is wearing a brown sweatshirt and brown sweatpants. I hope he doesn’t guard me.

We begin playing on the western-most court, which bumps up against a track. There are people jumping and running on the other side of the fence; soon there are people gawking and staring on the other side of the fence. They are apparently baffled by my presence, which is nothing new.

After about 20 minutes a friend of mine, Jonathan (right), shows up too. He is a fellow teacher, and he only lends to the spectacle. He is taller than me, about 6-foot-3, and his shorts reveal a pair of milky white legs. Now, I’m pretty pale, but Jonathan’s legs are like pegs of a picket fence. This, coupled with the fact that he’s the second-tallest person in attendance, intensifies the gazing and swells the audience. At one point when we’re both playing, there is an unbroken row of onlookers on the other side of the fence stretching from the baseline to almost halfcourt. People are conglomerating on our side of the fence, too, lining the left sideline and wrapping around the left corner and along the baseline.

We play for a few hours. Nothing of great significance in terms of basketball. Jonathan gets popped pretty hard in the face by that short dude wearing brown sweats – you know, the one who greeted me so inhospitably. No idea if it was less than totally accidental. And the guy who first invited me to play turns out to be a freaking stud. In one game to five, I am guarding him as he scores the first three points of the game. Nothing I can do.

Aside from that, there are a few interesting linguistic points worth noting. In American basketball, you will often hear the phrase “My bad.” It is a sort of apology and acknowledgement that, yes, I made a mistake. If someone commits a turnover, they may say, “My bad.” If someone isn’t guarding their man, and their man ends up scoring, they may say, “My bad.” If someone takes a stupid shot – and they know it’s a stupid shot – they may say, “My bad.”

Linguistically, it doesn’t make a ton of sense. “Bad,” after all, is an adjective, yet the way the sentence is constructed – My bad. – it should be a noun. My high school coach used to berate us for using the phrase. “Yeah, I know it’s your bad!” he would say with a donut-shaped mouth and squinted eyes. “No shit it’s your bad. Maybe I’ll just start saying, ‘I’m pissed!” How would that be?”

Well, the Jinanese have an equivalent to “My bad” – both in meaning and grammatical unsoundness. Here, when someone commits a turnover or has a brain-lock on defense or botches a shot, they say, “Wo de.” Wo de literally translates to “My.” They use the phrase liberally, just like players in the States say my bad, and they use it for the exact same reasons. It’s interesting that there is a Chinese equivalent to “My bad.” that, just like its American counterpart, makes no literal sense.

There is also an analogous quasi-trash-talking phrase that the Chinese use. In the States, when someone takes a shot that the defender is certain won’t go in, you’ll hear phrases like “Broke!” or “Off!” or, one of my favorites, “Live with that.” – as in, I’ll live with you taking that shot because there isn’t a chance in hell it’s going in. Well, here they say “Mei you,” which is pronounced like mayo, you know, the condiment.

“Mei you” literally means “Don’t have.” If you want a certain dish at a restaurant but they don’t make it, they’ll say “Mei you.” If you are looking for shoes that are slightly bigger than your average Chinese man wears – and this happened to me for about five hours one day – the clerk will say “Mei you.” (It’s not like my feet are gargantuan; I wear 12s. But I had to stop by literally two dozen shoe stores before anyone had my size. And even then I was stuck with these goofy blue-and-silver adidas running shoes. I digress…)

On the basketball court, “Mei you” is something you hear when someone wants to give you a little barb, when someone wants to get inside your head because they are confident that you’ll miss a shot. A few times today opposing players call out “Mei you” while I am shooting, and the first two times they are right: I “don’t have” a bucket. The payoff comes in a particularly tight game with the score knotted 4-4. I shoot a jump shot from the left side, and one of the best players from the other team – the tallest guy on the court; he had to be 6-5 – shouts Mei you! with the ball in the air. The shot slides through the net, and as annoying it is when someone calls that out and you do miss, it is tenfold more satisfying when someone calls that out and you make it.

Finally, “Hao qiu.” Hao, which means good, is pronounced like the first syllable of Yao Ming’s name; qiu is pronounced like – well, I still can’t pronounce it quite right. The word “basketball” is “lan qiu.” Lan is basket, qiu is ball. Hao qiu, then, literally equates to “good ball.” You’ll hear this when someone does anything good – a good shot, a good pass, a good block, a steal, a rebound. Hao qiu! Hao qiu! Hao qiu! It’s a utility term for granting approval.

There really is no American equivalent, at least none that I know of. You’ll hear any number of things on an American court. A good shot could inspire someone to blurt “wet,” as in the ball splashes through the net. If someone gets a steal, you could hear the word “cookies,” as in someone just stole your cookies. Sick and nasty and pure are all other words you hear that seem to translate, at least roughly, to “hao qiu.” I like the ubiquity of hao qiu, how it is so all-encompassing, a true blanket statement. If you hear it enough times in one day, it means you’re doing something right.

I’m not sure how regional all these phrases are. Maybe they’re more Jinanese than Chinese. In his book Oracle Bones, which amounts to a narrative-driven history of China, author Peter Hessler talks about some trash-talking in the south-central province of Sichuan.

In basketball games, if an athlete shot and air ball or made a bad play, the Sichuanese fans chanted yangwei, yangwei, yangwei – impotent, impotent, impotent. After I played basketball with Willy’s classmates, he would often say, in mock earnestness, “I see that you still have a big problem with impotence.”

In a New Yorker article, Hessler added: To encourage the home team, they chant “xiongqi” (“erection”).

I don’t know if hao qiu and wo de and the like are phrases that you’ll here at courts around the country. But I know that they’re phrases you hear here, and phrases that may slip out of my mouth for a while when I get back to the States.

They're Mad Here, Too, I

All sorts of animals have season-triggered rituals – some birds migrate south, some penguins huddle up and breed, and some people can’t keep their minds off college hoops.

The nice weather last week can now officially be called a tease. It was brutally cold this weekend, horrid yesterday, and today, Tuesday, I wake up to find everything pasted with snow. I am sure there will be no basketball today, for even if this predicted high of 32 degrees manages to oust the snow, everything will probably be wet. And if it’s wet in Jinan, then it’ll likely be a nasty wet, a crud-filled wet.

Dirt has a way of spawning here, multiplying like a cancer and seeping into everything – clothes, desktops, eyes, everything. Because of all this sediment, you will be hard-pressed to find a post-rain or post-snow surface that isn’t grimy. It’s funny – cars actually seem to get dirtier after a rain because all the airborne crap starts to stick. This will probably happen to the courts today: they won’t be cleansed by the wetness, they’ll be sullied by it. And regardless, it’s damn cold. I am thinking about going over to the Shandong Normal courts, just out of curiosity to see if any crazies are playing despite the elements. But I seriously doubt it. Too snowy, too wet, too dirty.

Thus, let’s talk not about basketball in China, but basketball in America – or rather, watching basketball in America from China. It is, after all, early March, and early March carries with it an almost religious significance for myself and the American basketball community at large. Religious significance might seem like a melodramatic exaggeration. It’s not. (I just came across this from a recent Sports Illustrated article by Joe Posnanski: “In Kansas – not unlike in Indiana, Kentucky and North Carolina – college basketball is religion.” True fact.)

Now, I promise that this blog will never devolve into a “What am I doing today?!” type of thing. I’m not going to write about where I am traveling to or what my stilly students did in class or how tasty (or nasty) a recent tofu dish was. This is an analysis of how and why basketball is played and enjoyed here in China, and what can be gleaned about Chinese culture via basketball.

But per weather, today does not look like much of a day to play basketball. And per the date – March 9 here, March 8 in the U.S. – it is a perfect day to discuss March Madness. March Madness, after all, is a month-long holiday that has defined early spring for as long as I can remember, and this is the first time ever that I am not Stateside to witness the proceedings. The only other time that I spent months away from America was when I studied abroad as a college junior. Alas, I did that in the fall semester; not wanting to miss the NCAA Tournament was a serious consideration in choosing the fall.

Despite being thousands and thousands of miles away, I’m finding myself, as always, infected by March Madness. All sorts of animals have season-triggered rituals – some birds migrate south, some penguins huddle up and breed, and some people can’t keep their minds off college hoops.

I may be in China, but I have nonetheless kept painstaking tabs on college basketball this season. There is a network of Web sites that have allowed me to watch as many games as I please. Now, I don’t know exactly how it works, but somehow or another basketball nuts are connecting their computers to their TVs and streaming – in sometimes startling clarity – the goings-on of all sorts of sporting events. Sites like ChannelSurfing.net and Justin.tv and DailySportsLive.com have allowed me to indulge in online broadcasts of the same games that I would be watching back home. (And the fact that newspapers are all online, and for the most part all free, allows me to ingest all the news and analysis I care to. It’s ironic, in a way: newspapers’ irrationally charitable attitude about giving away content on the Web helped kill them financially and is one of the factors that prevented me from ever getting a job. Now it’s one of the things that keeps me sane.)

Indeed, this is a golden era of online media: technology has raced past the laws governing it. After all, I can watch the obscurest of contests and not have paid a single cent to the cable companies that are broadcasting them on television. Nor, for that matter, am I paying subscription fees or giving traffic to Web sites that broadcast games online on the up-and-up, like ESPN.com or BigTenNetwork.com, each of which has extensive, quality options for watching their programming. Think about it. Pretty much every game you watch has that disclaimer about how “The rebroadcast, reproduction or retransmission of this program is prohibited without the express, written consent of the NCAA (or NFL or NBA)…” You may have developed the ability to block out that tired announcement, but it’s there, and it tells you in plain English that circumventing the conventional, licensed television-watching methods is prohibited and indeed illegal. Translation: you aren’t supposed to put this stuff on the Internet.

Well, having those laws is like having a speed limit on some nary-driven gravel road in the vast outskirts of Kansas. The rules aren’t followed, and because the Internet is even more vast and ungoverned than that road in Kansas, they can’t be enforced. (Luckily the Chinese government has let online sports slip through the ever-expanding Great FireWall of China, which restricts access to more than a few Web sites...including this one.) And it’s not just big-time NBA games and the Super Bowl that get broadcast; college basketball abounds. I’ve watched Kansas versus Cornell, Northwestern versus North Carolina State, Missouri versus Vanderbilt. Games litter the Internet, even offbeat, meaningless games with teams like Canisius and Harvard and East Tennessee State.

But what really makes this time of year so great, and what I’m finding I love even though I’m in Jinan, is that there are no more offbeat, meaningless games. The month-long climax of college basketball essentially begins today – well, yesterday in the States – with the first round of conference championship games, and by extension the first round of automatic NCAA Tournament bids. If there are games on TV (or the Internet) that feature obscure teams, those teams are vying for guaranteed berths to the NCAA Tournament.

My morning starts by watching Siena take on Fairfield. Fairfield leads by 15 at one point, but Siena nonetheless forces overtime and punches its third-straight ticket to the Big Dance. After that I write for a while and catch the end of Appalachian State versus Wofford; Wofford prevails (despite almost blowing an 18-point lead), and they, too, are tourney-bound. I love that huge comebacks were staged in each game. It speaks to the fact that these contests are so outrageously important to the players, players who almost certainly won’t play in the NBA, and who almost certainly will get pasted in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.

When you watch, say, App. State take on Wofford, you are seeing these 18-to-22-year-olds at the most dramatic moment of their lives. The players will graduate and become bankers and real estate agents and high school coaches. Yet here they are on national TV, being eagerly watched by basketball nuts all over the country – and world. These games epitomize the transcendence of college basketball – so transcendent, in fact, that an American living in China can’t get enough.

My favorite team isn’t one of these upstarts like Wofford or Siena. Rather, I am pulling for the Kansas Jayhawks, one of the most haughty, tradition-rich programs in the nation. This week the Jayhawks reassumed the No. 1 spot in the polls after a pair of thrashings over archrivals (No. 5 Kansas State and at Missouri). As was the case when KU won its last national title, in 2008, this team is loaded with experienced, NBA-caliber talent. Junior center Cole Aldrich is a surefire top 10 draft pick. Senior point guard Sherron Collins will probably get drafted in the second round (or go make boatloads of dough in Europe). Sophomore forward Marcus Morris is looking more and more like a first-rounder, and freshman wing Xavier Henry – while young – is one of those NBA-ready teenagers whose age belies his talent.

I could go on all day about Kansas. So I’ll just close by saying this: With the madness of March officially starting today, I realize that the distance won’t damper my excitement. Which, depending on how Kansas fairs, could be a blessing or a curse.

They're Mad Here, Too, II

The peach-basket goals that Dr. James Naismith fashioned in basketball’s primitive days may have been better than this piece of crud.

I write and watch basketball until about 1:00 and then eat lunch (yogurt and rice with Tabasco sauce), at which point I head out to run some errands. To my shock, the snow has been zapped by a surprisingly feisty sun, and I get to thinking that people will be playing basketball after all. It’s still chilly – right at freezing – and when the scattered clouds float in front of the sun it is downright frigid. But there is something in the back of my mind telling me that people will be playing over at the university. If they are, then that kind of vouches for the whole premise of this blog. Playing basketball on a day that begins with snow on the ground? Yeah, that’s pretty dedicated. Should people be at the university, I’ll stop by and shoot some hoops. And if not, good riddance. It’s cold.

I plod onto the exceptionally crowded 123 bus at about 2:30. There are no seats. I end up sharing a tiny area with a man’s massive suitcase, which is so egregiously big that it should have paid bus fair. I lean forward and cling to a railing that hovers over a woman who, per the sardine-tight surroundings, is stripped of the comfort usually afforded to those who have seats.

The bus ride mercifully ends about 30 yards from the main entrance to Shandong Normal, and I mosey on in. As is usually the case, the campus offers a respite from the bustle of the streets. The groan of buses (punctuated by incessant honking) is replaced by the welcome quiet of campus (punctuated by birds chirping). I am eyed long and hard by a cute college girl who seems baffled by my presence as I walk toward the courts. My curiosity about whether or not people will be playing today is answered with the faint patter of basketballs. It turns out that, yes, people are playing ball today.

Where there is shade there is snow, but the basketball courts at SNU have very little shade. They are located on the far west side of campus, beyond all the school buildings and student housing. In fact, the courts are so devoid of shade that it’s not only not snowy, but also not wet. Maybe the snow that seemed so prohibitive this morning wasn’t actually that bad, or maybe the sun has simply had hours to do its thing on the courts. But regardless, it’s dry and sunny, if cold.

I am greeted, as always, by the refreshment man. “Hello!” he says from behind his zipped-to-the-top coat and stocking cap. “Hello!” I reply in kind. I didn’t bring anything to drink – after all, I didn’t really think I’d be playing – so I stop to buy something. All I have are 100 Yuan notes, and all I want is a 4.5 Yuan Gatorade. “Sorry,” I say in Chinese, “I don’t have 4.5.” He shoots back, also in Chinese, “No problem!” For this I am grateful, because often times you will catch grief for pulling a 100 Yuan bill out of your pocket; people are prone to whining about having to break a 100. This is especially annoying because 100s are the only denomination you can get from ATMs. I’ve had cabbies make me run into supermarkets to break 100s so I can pay them with smaller bills, and I’ve had supermarkets roll their eyes about having to break those 100s. Refreshment man, though, takes it in stride.

Before I have put away the wad of change, a guy who is actually older than refreshment man – who is usually the elder statesman of these proceedings – approaches me with ball in hand. He wants to play with me, and he points to the furthest goal from where we’re standing, a good 100 yards away. He is wearing slightly puffy snow pants, like what a child might wear to go sledding, and what appears to be about five layers of shirts, topped off with a loudly colorful vest. Thinking this should be pretty funny, I don’t even consider turning him down to join a court where college-aged kids are playing games. I open up my hand and arm toward his selected court, like a hotel doorman giving the non-verbal “After you!” to a guest. We walk over.

As we approach the basket, I realize that it is totally decrepit – even by Chinese standards. More often than not, the buckets at Shandong Normal have defects. They’re too high or two loose or titled up or down. This goal, though, is downright archaic. It is leaning hard to the right, like a drunk haplessly trying to stand upright. The peach-basket goals that Dr. James Naismith fashioned in basketball’s primitive days may have been better than this piece of crud. Despite the other vacant courts surrounding us – there are people playing, but it’s not crowded – this is the hoop the old man has selected. Out of deference to my (way, way) elder, I am not going to argue. Besides, if he can handle it, I can handle it, right?

I put down my backpack on the court, about 15 feet outside the three-point line. The man starts to talk with his mouth and his hands, both of which are almost surreal. His teeth are straight enough, but they look like a color card for yellow: from a light, sunny yellow on the tips to a rich, lush, almost-brown yellow toward the gums. The bottom front four are what the late Bob Ross – he of the epic one-man art show “The Joy of Painting” – would call “yellow ochre”: a rich, full-bodied yellow. His hands are shrouded in cotton gloves with two missing fingers – the right index and thumb. Based on his homely appearance, it is entirely unclear whether these missing digits are intentional (for gripping-the-ball purposes) or whether his gloves are simply tattered. I feel almost embarrassed to be wearing my loud, expensive basketball shoes.

I toss a few shots at the hoop with his ball, trying to warm up a bit. I’m still freezing. After about 30 seconds, he takes the ball, plants it on his hip, and heads to the top of the key. He begins explaining the rules of the game he wants to play. I have no idea, of course, what he is saying. I catch the occasional “lán qíu,” which I know means basketball, but other than that I am lost. I nod politely, smile, and signal for him to get things started.

He toes the three-point line dead-on from the basket and rests the ball on his right hand, parallel with his shoulder. His left hand is dangling, a total bystander to the shot. His right foot is a little bit behind his left, so his body is not quite square to the goal. Then, with the amount of exertion needed for a 75-year-old man to chuck a ball at an 11-foot high goal that’s more than 20 feet away, he corkscrews his body and unleashes a shot – which is as much throw as it is shot. This motion sends his right foot and right arm jutting forward. Awkward as it looks, it is decently effective.

I deduce that the rules dictate we trade turns shooting, like the American classic HORSE. So I grab the ball, walk to the three-point line and shoot. I jump as high as I can and, at the peak of my ascent, let fly with a shot. My shoulders are square to the goal; my elbow locks on the follow through; my wrist makes the gooseneck upon my release.

My shot has been painstakingly manicured. Of course, it misses badly, pathetically.

We keep trading shots, and I began to develop some vague idea of what’s going on. After each make, the guy will raise one finger high into the air before the next shot. It’s as though he’s sending a signal to someone on the other side of the court. After a second consecutive make, there will be two fingers. The best I can tell, you are allowed one miss without it damaging your score. But if you miss two in a row, then you are docked a point. For instance, if you make one shot, then make another, then miss one, then make one, you will have three points – each make is one point, and the single miss is forgiven because it was followed by a make. However, if you make two in a row and then miss two in a row, you go back to one – the consecutive misses costing you a point. So, a make, miss, make, would be two because there are no consecutive misses. A make, miss, miss would be zero.

For a while, he is kicking my ass. He runs his score to three and I keep teetering between one and zero. Because of the cold, the comically mucked-up rim and the fact that I’m not at all warmed up, I simply can’t knock down any shots. (Of course, it was just as cold for him, he was shooting on the same rim and he seems to be pushing 80, so I realize these are bunk excuses.) He gets to four and then five and we start a new game. I’ve never been beaten by anyone so old. He seems to enjoy his victory.

All the while, college-aged players are stopping to gawk at us: a 24-year-old white-skinned foreigner playing a shooting game with a late-70s Chinese man. It’s bizarre to me, too, and at no point does the shooting ritual seem normal. There are three-on-three games unfolding a few meters away, and the losing squad – which is sitting because it lost – spends its time gazing at us. So do people walking along the adjacent walkway. So do people passing by en route to another court. Every so often the old man will talk to me, and if I’m lucky I pick up every 20^th word. I just keep smiling and shooting, unsure if he understands just how crummy my Chinese is. Or, for that matter, if he cares just how crummy my Chinese is.

I finally hit a few shots during the second game. The old man gives good-natured groans whenever he misses, and before I know it I’m winning 4-0. I finish him off and he says something that I don’t understand. One of the onlookers, however, knows a speck of English; he tells me that the guy wants to shoot three more shots, a sort of rubber-match to determine a winner.

The whole time we are pretty jovial; I simply can’t get competitive over a shooting game with someone who is way older than my dad. But he seems a little irked at how the last game transpired, and he wants revenge. He shoots and misses each of his three extra shots, two of which miss agonizingly, flirting with the inside of the rim before popping out. He always maintains his post-shot pose – right foot forward, hunched over with his arms dangling below his waist – until the ball either misses or makes. When it misses – which is does with increasing frequency as the game wears on – he pops out of that pose quickly, like he’s irritated. When he makes, he breaks his stance with a saunter.

I make one of my three shots and we call it a game. We’ve been shooting around together for about 20 minutes, and because he’s three times my age, he’s probably getting tired. He walks away but leaves an impression on me; his zest for basketball is intriguing. I look forward to playing with him in the future.

They're Mad Here, Too, III

But even if they are gay, or even if they are cold, it strikes me as odd to see two guys striking such an intimate pose on the sidelines.

He may be tired, but I’m not. I’m just warming up. So I pick up my bag and fleece jacket and waltz 15 feet away to play three-on-three. Before I set my things down one of the college kids says, “Where are you from?” in English. I reply in Chinese: “Měi Guó,” America, which literally translates to “beautiful country.” Every one of the eight-or-so people on the court absolutely busts up laughing. It’s like I just told an awesome joke. They have hardly settled down when one of them asked to take a picture with me. I oblige, and then am met with three more photo requests, all from guys who I am about to play with.

Once the photo session is done, I step onto the court and start playing. The ball is exceptionally slick, like a wet football, and a few times I go to shoot jumpers and the rock squirts right out of my hands. And the basket is similarly crummy to the last one. The backboard, which is made of wood, is splintering and splitting, the numerous thin layers of wood splitting apart like a blooming flower.

Off the court, there is one interesting thing I notice. The best player here is a 21-year-old who has bleached, almost-red hard. He is wearing matching Puma brand pants and jacket. He is really savvy with the ball, creative, willing to try difficult dribbling maneuvers seemingly just for giggles – but executing them with precision.

About 20 minutes after I arrive, my team downs his team. I look over to the sideline where he is sitting about six inches in front of one of his teammates. Then I see him lie back, twist himself onto his side in a sort of half-fetal position, and rest his head against his teammate’s stomach. The quasi-redhead folds his arms tightly against his own body and – for lack of a better word – snuggles with the teammate, who is sitting upright.

It is not at all uncommon to see guys touch each other in public. Often time guys will walk down the street with their arms wrapped around each others’ neck; in class, kids sometimes rest their hands on their buddies’ lap, or grab for a hand if they are seeking attention. Basically, there is a lot more intra-sex touching than there is the States; people aren’t so paranoid about looking gay. Still, this sidelines cuddling session is bizarre.

They unfurl themselves to play the next game, and after losing they quickly engage in another not-in-the-States sort of position – arms tangled, head on lap. These guys might be gay, which would be one explanation for their public display of affection. Or maybe they are just chilly; it is, after all, still really cold. But even if they are gay, or even if they are cold, it strikes me as odd to see two guys striking such an intimate pose on the sidelines. There is a façade of masculinity that people maintain on and around basketball courts in the States. If you’re cold, you ram your hands inside your shirt and maybe hop around to try to generate some body heat. And even if you are gay, and even if you’re playing with your boyfriend, it would nonetheless be the height of oddness to show any affection while waiting for the next game. On the contrary, you would likely be more prone to disguise it. It’s no skin off my back that these guys are curled up together. I’m not a homophobe. I have no moral objection. It makes no difference to me whatsoever. But still, it’s foreign. You just wouldn’t see it in the States.

I go to the supermarket after I play, snagging a French press to make coffee and a bit of food. I take a taxi home and lie down for awhile, contemplating the lessons I learned today: (1) Despite being in China, I am as geeked about March Madness as I always am, and (2) Despite the cold, there were still plenty of people playing basketball. Including old-timers.

Trash Springs Eternal

It’s a day packed with the relief of good weather and the realization that more bad weather surely lies ahead.

Turns out weather reports are wrong here, too. March 4, which was supposed to have a high of around 40 with rain showers, has turned into a February 23 incarnate. I start the morning by watching an online stream of the Kansas Jayhawks versus Kansas State Wildcats game (we’ll miss you, Sherron!), then I write for a few hours, and then I realize that sun is pouring into my room. I go outside and realize that, indeed, it is borderline glorious. It feels like spring, and of course, spring means basketball. So off to the courts I go.

I’m not a stranger to the Shandong Normal University campus. Indeed, I was here yesterday, plus I was here about a half-dozen times last fall, before the sun went on its four-month losing streak. But never before have I been struck by how much the campus – at least parts of it – could pass for an American college campus. There are birds and bikes and brick buildings, plus that intangible feel of the university setting. I’ve always thought that college campuses have a certain aura, kind of like some days of the week have a feel to them. There are few places that I’d rather traipse around than a college campus – and even fewer places I’d rather traipse around than a college campus on one of the first beautiful days of the spring. It’s a day packed with the relief of good weather and the realization that more bad weather surely lies ahead.

As I walk up the slight slope leading to the courts, I can see balls looping along the horizon, making that tell-tale arch en route to the basket. I see them before I hear them and am infused with excitement. I was programmed back in college, when I used to break into the campus dome by my lonesome, to expect to play solo. It was a Pavlovian reaction: I would see a basketball court and anticipate solitude, which isn’t necessarily what I want. But today, people are out. Not in droves, per se, but they are out. I’ll be able to play in a game.

I go left upon crossing the entrance gates and plop my stuff down along the 18-inch-high wall running along the court. I am immediately summoned into a game. We gather round and someone starts spinning the ball, letting the laws of physics dictate who will be on whose team. It’s three-on-three, and I am cast into a game before I’ve had the chance to shoot a single shot.

We’re not keeping score, and I notice immediately that my mind is wandering. This is partly because I have trouble getting into these no-score contests, but also because I am looking around, trying to lay the groundwork in my mind for what exactly I want to do with this Web site. I refuse to let this blog devolve into daily play-by-play recaps of my games with these Chinese people – I went eight-for-10 yesterday! Whoo! There are stories here, I know, and I want to tell them. So because I am not yet warmed up, and because these games where no one keeps score are inherently drab for me, I scan the concrete horizon, probing, letting the various scenes sink in.

Two things stand out over everything else: A pair of bottle ladies, and the guy who is selling water and sports drinks. By “bottle ladies” I essentially mean scavengers – ladies who loiter around the courts and collect the discarded plastic bottles of those playing. Indeed, their livelihood and the little old man who sells the bottles are intrinsically tied together; he starts the cycle by selling bottles, and they complete it by picking them up. Right now the bottle ladies are sitting along the nearby wall, about 20 feet down from where I tossed my bag and jacket. One of them is exceptionally old – or at least looks it. The skin on her face has lost every ounce of its elasticity; her cheeks are droopy and wrinkly. Her eyes are hooded, partially eclipsed by the her sagging eyelids. She has her left hand resting on the knee of the other woman, who appears to be in her 50s but, by comparison, looks like a virtual adolescent.

Every five minutes or so, the two ladies rise and go in different directions on the hunt for empty bottles. At one point while I’m playing, I see the elder one approach a row of three guys sitting by the base of our basket. Her gait is tired. She doesn’t drag her feet, but each step is measured. Her hands are clasped behind her back.

The guys sitting on the baseline obviously know what she wants. They’ve likely seen her do this routine before, and if not, the three plastic bottle she has already retrieved are a tip-off. She extends her hand to one of them in a non-verbal request for his empty bottle, and the kid – he’s probably 20…still a kid in my book – flips it at her, end-over-end, like a punt in football. Though she was standing less than three feet away, the toss falls at her feet, hopelessly short. It’s a startling display of disrespect. First off, he could have waited two seconds until she was close enough to simply hand her the bottle. Or, if he was hell-bent on testing his short-range accuracy, he could have at least tossed it waist-high, you know, so she has a chance of catching it. But no. He throws it at her feet, a kind of Eff you to a little old lady collecting bottles. Who knows, maybe she is a real nuisance. Maybe she is a witch to the guys who play basketball. Maybe. But on the surface, it looked like an able-bodied 20-year-old blatantly disrespecting a partially-feeble old woman.

You can find bottle ladies like this all over China. The nation’s recent surge in consumerism has spurred a recent surge in garbage. And this, in turn, has turned trash and recycling into its own business. According to the Web site Facts and Details, China produces 254 millions tons of garbage every year – about one-third of a kilogram per person, per day. That equates to a third of the world’s annual garbage output; not bad for one country, huh? This garbage comes in all shapes and sizes.

Go to any convenience store, and you’ll see various items wrapped four times over. One of my favorite Chinese treats are these long, straw-shaped cookies that are stuffed with a filling of your choice – chocolate or strawberry or whatever. Well, to get to the cookies themselves, you first must bust open the box. Easy enough. Then, though, you must pierce the inner bag which actually houses the cookies. That’s not all. Once you are inside that bag, you’ll see that each cookie is individually wrapped. So that’s one way the trash piles up here – things are packaged to high heaven.

And not just candy. A restaurant that I frequent brings you chopsticks upon arrival. The chopsticks come inside a glossy paper pouch – to get to the utensils, you have to bust open the pouch. Once inside, you’ll also see a few napkins and a moist towelette; the towelette has its own packaging. And that’s just the chopsticks wrapper. The dining experience also comes with a set of glasses and cups and plates – which are shrink-wrapped in yet more plastic. So each time you go to this restaurant, you consume some chopsticks, some paper packaging, a few napkins, plastic shrink wrap and the moist towelette. These are mundane examples compared to the big stuff – mufflers and tires and furniture – but with 1.3 billion people here, little environmental transgressions quickly become big ones.

One common denominator to each of these billion-plus people is the need for water, which means a good chunk of this garbage comes in the form of plastic bottles. The tap water, after all, is undrinkable, and it’s not like there are water fountains in buildings or at parks to steal a quick drink. Plastic bottles, therefore, are ubiquitous.

On the surface, there appears to be some combination of disdain, apathy and ignorance regarding the gratuitous amount of trash in China; I probably shouldn’t have to dig through three layers of packaging to get to my eating utensils. But there is nonetheless a market for that trash to be turned into profit by men and women – like the ones at the court today – who collect it and sell it to recycling companies. And not just plastic bottles: trash bags, tin, rubber and glass are all also hot commodities on the recycling market.

A New York Times article from 2006 chronicled a group of scavengers from a trash dump near Shanghai. One of the scavengers, 46, whose daughter had recently been admitted to an elite school, told the Times: “We worked really hard as laborers before, doing 12- to 15-hour days for a mere few hundred yuan. You have to work even if you are sick or tired. Here we are working for ourselves, and there is a lot more freedom – four to five hours a day, plus we can earn a lot more.” Another scavenger – “garbage picker,” as the article calls him – was a 23-year-old man who supported his 60-year-old father, solely with proceeds made from collecting recyclable trash at this dump. “Don’t be surprised, it’s normal,” he said.

Scavenging for trash is definitely normal at Shandong Normal, where ladies like these can be seen milling about every day. The eldest of the two has returned from her trash-finding expedition and has again parked herself along the wall lining the court. Her friend is still on the prowl.

A few minutes pass and our game is halted by a cell phone-induced timeout. I drain my own bottle of water and walk over to this lady. I hand her the empty bottle. She looks at me with those droopy eyes, clutches the bottle with two hands, says thank you (“Xie xie!”) and tilts her heads and shoulders in the slightest of bows. I essentially just gave her an iota of money, and she seems grateful.

Meanwhile, that old man is still hocking water and drinks. He is always really nice to me, even though our conversations are confined to my piss-poor Chinese vocab and his even worse English vocab. “OK” and “Hello” are the only words he seems to know, and the fact that today he says “Hello” to me as I am leaving casts doubt on how well he understands even those two words. But he knows these courts. He is here literally every time I am, and he is always smiling, always seeming to enjoy himself.

The bottles on his table are impeccably arranged. There are two different brands of water – one with a red cap, the other blue – and each brand is given two identical rows stretching from front to back. Next to the water are two columns of little bottles of Gatorade, and next to those are two columns of big bottles of Gatorade. Naturally, the Gatorade is color-coordinated.

From what I gather, the bottle ladies and the refreshment stand guy are staples of the courts. They have been here every time I’ve been here dating back to last fall, and they seem integral to the proceedings. Without the bottle ladies, bottles would be strewn about everywhere, blowing around in the breeze and adding yet another health hazard to already dangerous list of elements – potholes, cracks, etc. – that players must negotiate. And without the bottle guy, we would all be thirsty – plus the ladies wouldn’t have anything to do. They are part of the fabric that ties together basketball on the courts of Shandong Normal University.

As for the actual basketball on March 4, there really isn’t much to report on. Unlike yesterday, we never graduate onto games where the score is kept, and save a little hot stretch for me, I don’t play particularly well. But it wasn’t a fruitless outing. I took another step toward demystifying my presence at SNU, plus between the bottle ladies and refreshment guy I have a more than a few questions to ask.

Not Keeping Score, Learning the Dress Code, I

For a while, I wondered if the guys were treating the basketball like some sort of Magic 8 Ball, spinning it and waiting for an answer. In a way, I guess that is what they are doing.

It’s Wednesday, March 3, and a dreary 43 degrees outside. But according to the seven-day forecast, this is going to be the best day to play ball for the next week. Thursday calls for rain, Friday will be 34 and windy, and Saturday starts a four-day temperature plunge culminating in a horrid Tuesday that WeatherBug.com has summed up with a picture of an igloo. They predict a high of 19. So today is the day.

I hop on my bike at about 12:30 and make the 20-minute trek to Shandong Normal University. I make the left turn through the gates of the campus and I am greeted, as always, by a towering gold-colored statue of Mao Zedong, the former leader of China’s Communist Party who died in 1976. (Lest this site gets banned, that’s all I’ll say about him.) This statue, like so many others, shows Mao striking a waving-to-the-crowd pose that can easily be mistaken for a waving-down-a-taxi pose. His right arm is fully extended, his fingers outstretched. In front of Mao is a common area where, presumably, people can gather and hang out. But even though today will boast the best weather for the next week, it’s still kind of crummy outside. No one is gathered in front of Mao, and I cruise on past.

A minute later the basketball courts appear on my right, encased by an ugly-green iron fence with thin poles standing vertical every five inches. There is no one on the near courts behind the fence save one guy who is shooting by his lonesome. I ride another 50 yards until I reach the main entrance where, sure enough, I see some people playing. On one court there is a five-on-five half-court game, and on another there are five dudes just shooting around. There is only action of two of the 22 courts, but at least there is action. Actually, three courts are occupied: off in the distance, that lone guy is shooting by himself, over and over. I’m intrigued by his routine because it is one that I’ve done a million times. While I am gazing around, one of 20-somethings in the five-man cluster extends his right arm and waves me over, slightly reminiscent of the Mao statue. That settles it. I’m playing with them.

I flip down my kickstand and peel off my backpack and fleece jacket. I move to take off my brown corduroy pants, under which are a pair of dark red Nike basketball shorts, but I hesitate. There is no one else out here wearing shorts, partly because it’s still kind of chilly, and partly because, in China, men pretty much always wear pants. Today there is a sampling of different types of pants: blue jeans, sweatpants, those goofy wind-breaker-warm-up things. But no shorts. After a moment’s deliberation I decide I’d rather be the outcast wearing shorts than play basketball in cords. So I go ahead and strip down and trot on out to the court wearing a white long-sleeve shirt, the red shorts and a black stocking cap. I am the only person wearing either shorts or a stocking cap; there will be no fitting in today.

They have five guys already, so I am the missing link for three-on-three. First, we need to decipher teams. In the States, there are generally two ways that teams are picked, at least where I’ve played. Most often, you shoot for teams – that is, the players gather at the three-point line (or free throw line) and start shooting. The first three to make it are on one team, the other three form the second team. (This is also the best method if there is an odd number and someone must sit. If you’re sitting, it means you didn’t make it. It’s merit-based.) There are variations of this, like the first person to make it is on Team A, the next person is on Team B, the third person Team A and so on. The other common way of splitting up teams is having the first two people who make shots be “captains” and simply choose who they want.

It’s different in China. The six of us gather around in a small circle, and one guy holds the ball out in front of him like he’s offering it to the other five players. He then spins it like a top and lets it come to a rest on his fingertips. Every ball has a small black circle where you can pump air into it, and that’s what we are looking for as gravity and friction bring the ball to a halt. Whoever that black circle is facing when the ball stops spinning removes himself from the circle; he’s been selected. The process is repeated however many times it needs to be until the teams are deciphered. It took me a several trips to the Chinese blacktops to understand what exactly was going on when we circled up like this. For a while, I wondered if the guys were treating the basketball like some sort of Magic 8 Ball, spinning it and waiting for an answer. In a way, I guess that is what they are doing.

The game starts and no one is keeping score. This isn’t uncommon here, but it’s still strange to me. Back home, the score is everything. The import of keeping score has been immortalized in a few notorious exchanges from 1990s basketball movies, White Men Can’t Jump and He Got Game, both of which are worth watching.

This is from the 1992 film White Men Can’t Jump, starring Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson.

Sidney Deane (Snipes): Hey. Hey man, what’s the score? Yo! Chump! I’m talking to you! I’m talking to the fucking air.

Billy Hoyle (Harrelson): My name ain’t chump, it’s Billy Hoyle.

Sidney Deane: Billy Hoyle. Billy Hoyle! Billy Hoyle! Okay Billy…can you count to ten, Billy?

Billy Hoyle: Yeah.

Sidney Deane: Good. What’s the score... Billy?

Billy Hoyle: I don’t know.

Sidney Deane: Then you’re a chump.

Billy Hoyle: I may be a chump, I just said that wasn’t my name.

And this is from the climactic scene of the 1998 drama He Got Game, featuring Denzel Washington and NBA All-Star Ray Allen. In this scene, Jake Shuttlesworth (Washington) is trying to get his son, Jesus Shuttlesworth (Allen), to sign a letter of intent to a certain university.

Jake: I’ll play you, one-on-one, to 11. I win, you sign. You win, you do what you wanna do…

Jesus: You wanna play me one-on-one?

Jake: One-on-one.

The two then duke it out on the court, announcing the score after every basket. Jesus eventually prevails, prompting this:

Game time. What you looking around for? That’s game – 11-5. Someone call a stretcher. Stick a fork in him – he’s done.

The importance of the score isn’t some Hollywood fabrication. Everywhere I’ve ever played, the losing team sits. And there are two intrinsic truths to that practice: (1) there can’t be a losing team unless you’re keeping score, and (2) sitting isn’t as fun as playing. My friends and I back home always took great pride in winning as many consecutive games as we could – monopolizing the proceedings by “holding court.” The score is omniscient. People declare the score after every made basket, and it’s not at all uncommon to hear arguments about the score. It’s important.

Needless to say, when no one is keeping score, it isn’t as competitive. And there’s something about that that just seems odd. The notion of having a winner and a loser is, to me and to most American basketball players, intrinsic to the game, even pickup games played outside. And it’s not like people only keep score when dudes are waiting and we need a way to regulate playing time. I keep score when I play one-on-one with my brother or friends. I keep score when there are four of us – and no one waiting – playing two-on-two. Three-on-three, four-on-four – unless I’m shooting around by myself, I have always kept score. Hell, when I was younger I’d sometimes play imaginary games and keep score when I was by myself.

One time last fall, before it had gotten cold, I was playing in a game where no one was keeping score. An English-teaching buddy said to me, “You look bored out here. You about to fall asleep?” I chuckled and proceeded to snare a rebound, as if to prove I wasn’t bored. Thing is, I was bored. The incentive, the competition had been removed; keeping score is part of the game. Not always here, though, and that’s one of the things I’ll be watching this summer: Why do these guys play games – of seemingly indefinite length – where no one keeps score?

Our game starts and there is no sense of urgency, turnovers aren’t a big deal, defense is generally lax, it’s just different. We are playing make-it-take-it – if you make a shot, you get the ball back on offense – which is how it usually is Stateside. This, and maybe pride, is the lone incentive to score – simply so you get the ball back.

Not Keeping Score, Learning the Dress Code, II

The ball is overinflated and coated with dust; the court is pockmarked and dimpled: there is an obstacle course of small potholes and cancerous swells.

Playing conditions are spotty. The ball is overinflated and coated with dust; the court is pockmarked and dimpled: there is an obstacle course of small potholes and cancerous swells. I notice a few times that my foot hits the ground before it was supposed to, and look down to see a mound of concrete growing out of the pavement like a cyst. Other times the ground is a fraction of an inch lower than I anticipated, throwing me off-balance when my foot touches down. I feel my away around and learn to avoid the minefield that is the left baseline corner.

As one o’clock turns into 1:30, people start trickling onto the courts. Some more players – particularly tall ones, at that – conglomerate on the opposite baseline, watching the proceedings. Our game is interrupted when one of the players scurries to the sidelines to answer his cell phone. After a momentary pause – like he was being given a chance to end the call quickly – the guy who gave me the Mao wave does the same to the hoard of giants at the other end of the court. Six guys stroll over; four of them are taller than 6-foot-1, and three of them must be at least 6-4. If readers out there subscribe to the “All Chinese people are short” myth, I assure you that these guys dispel it. (OK, Chinese people do indeed tend to be shorter. But for the most part that is an exaggerated stereotype. Not everyone is Yao Ming, but it’s not a land of midgets.)

The spin-the-ball ritual is foregone, and the guy who keeps inviting people over drafts himself a team. He seems to be a leader of sorts, at least today. He selects himself, two of the best players from our three-on-three game and me. He either thinks I am good or thinks I am a novelty, and I don’t really care which; I just want to play.

Now, for as goofy as I may have looked with my shorts and cap, this “leader” takes the cake in my mind. He is wearing a tight long-sleeved purple shirt and tight dark-blue jeans, and his hair looks like a pinecone. The hair wrapping around the lower part of his scalp is resting at ease, but the hair on his crown is gelled to all hell. It is increasingly vertical as it nears the top of his head, propped up by some sort of hair product. I don’t know how much gel or spray he used, but I know that the hair atop his dome didn’t move an inch the whole day and that he was emanating the artificial, perfumey aroma of product from the opening tip. But whatever, dude could play.

After the tall guys stroll over there is an unstated sense that games are about to become more serious. Now it’s four-on-four, and now there are enough people on this end of the court to field three teams. Thus, if you’re team loses, you sit out. We start keeping score.

The first matchup is my team versus a squad that boasts two of the three tallest guys here, each of whom is better than 6-2. At 5-11, I am one of the taller people on my team. No matter, though, because we quickly race out to five points, which is the magic number. Each one of us notches at least one basket, and I can the winning shot on a turn-around fadeaway in the lane, a shot I practiced a million times by my lonesome during college.

The next group that comes out is totally overmatched. I hit jump shots on my first two touches and notice a palpable difference in my play. The moment we start keeping score, I am suddenly competitive: I am pissed when I miss and pretty stoked when I make it. My defense is better, my passes crisper. Keeping score is basically like two cups of coffee for my game: it sharpened me and got all hyped up.

We lose our third game against the giants who, now that they’re warmed up, start to assert themselves as the best team playing. Our team assumes a spot along baseline where all the losers wait for their chance to get back out there. I walk over to my backpack, which is about 15 feet away, to jot down a note in my Official Chinese Basketball Reporter Notebook. When I come back I am greeted by a teammate who is extending a pack of cigarettes, one of them invitingly jutting out of the pack. He is probably an inch shorter than me with – you won’t believe this – black hair and yellowish skin. He seems pretty fit, a fact revealed by his skin-tight t-shirt. Across the chest of the shirt it says “Calvin Klein” in glinty, diamond-sized studs. It’s the type of shirt that you would never see on a basketball court in the States because it might come off as, oh, a little fruity. What’s interesting, though, is that his below-waist attire is quintessential basketball: black mesh adidas sweats and some really slick black and red adidas basketball shoes. (My shoes, by the way, are black and red adidas basketball kicks. They’re sweet.)

He and his cig are staring at me, so I nod, say thank you and he lights me up. It’s not unusual to have someone offer me a cigarette and that is the climax of our interaction, the only thing we’re able to communicate. But it turns out this guy speaks a bit of English. He is 27 years-old, his name is Wang (with a short A sound) and he works for whoever it is that controls the city’s buses.

“Are you a driver?” I ask, guiding a fake steering wheel with my hands, one of which is holding a burning cigarette.

“No, no,” he says, taking a drag. “I work in office. I do the paper.”

I tell him that I’m a teacher and continue to probe just how well he knows English. I ask him how long he’s been playing basketball, and he tells me that he started in middle school but had to quit in high school because he “hurt this,” pointing to his lower-back. I ask about the NBA and which players he likes.

“The Chinese players – Yao Ming and Yi Jianlian,” he says with a smile, like he’s embarrassed at the predictability of this answer. “And James,” he adds, referring to LeBron James. “Superman!”

I laugh and agree. Indeed, LeBron is Superman. Just that morning – when it was still last night in the States – LeBron had one of the more outlandish plays I’ve ever seen, fielding an errant alley-oop pass and turning it into a reverse dunk. Exactly like Superman. (The kicker was that the guy who made the pass, Delonte West, was fouled and the basket didn’t count. But the crowd nonetheless went bonkers, and in a matter of hours videos started cropping up all over the Internet. It lent credence to Wang’s sentiment: LeBron is Superman.)

The game that is going on reaches five pretty quickly, before we are done with our cigarettes. We ditch them and go back out there, set to take on that tall team which has now won a few in a row. They continue their reign of dominance, simply out-sizing us. A pretty athletic dude is guarding me, I can’t hit a shot, and before I know it I’m being offered a cigarette on the sidelines.

We play a few more games and my team collectively decides to scatter after another loss. The team captain with pine-cone hair puts on a puffy blue-purple jacket and says goodbye. I walk over to Wang and ask for his phone number, and he responds as though he was thinking about a number exchange himself. We swap info, and he says, “Sometime you are free…some beer!” He goes bottoms-up on an imaginary beer; I nod excitedly and tell him I like beer. I then mosey back over to my bike and take off, happy at the thought that I’ve made my first friend of my Chinese basketball season.

Spring's First Cameo

It is so gorgeous outside that even the trash takes on a beautiful aura.

The popular Buddhist author Thich Nhat Hahn often writes that good and bad are relative terms. The idea is that what we think of as “bad” actually forms the foundation for all that is “good.” For instance, we can’t appreciate how great it is to have a tall glass of water unless we’ve experienced true thirst. Similarly, it can be that much more special spending time with family and friends if you’ve felt the pangs of separation. The bad things – thirst or being removed from the ones we love – can make seemingly mundane things spectacular. In that sense, there is good buried even within the bad.

“If we look deeply at the rose,” Thich Nhat Hahn writes, “we see the garbage; if we look deeply at the garbage, we see the rose.” Make sense?

Well, this phenomenon is in full force today, February 23, here in Jinan. Spring has made a startling cameo appearance, and it’s incredible.

The winter in Jinan can best be described as bleak. The smog obscures the sun like that fuzzy blob that obscures a breast or middle finger on network TV. Plus Jinan is on the east side of China, so even if the sun does pierce its way through the smog, it’ll start to set really early, like before five. After four solid months of dark, biting weather – the garbage – the city broke free from the shackles of winter on February 23, awaking to a blissfully sunny and smog-free day – a rose made all the more beautiful by what preceded it. February 23, is a beautiful day by any standard; I reckon it would have passed muster even in San Diego. But the fact that it comes on the heels of four months of crap, well, that makes the sun seem a few shades brighter, the soft breeze a little more ticklish.

There is a strong but not overbearing wind that sends leaves, hair and trash aflutter. It is so gorgeous outside that even the trash takes on a beautiful aura. I see one black plastic bag drifting effortlessly through the sky as high as a three-story building, and it looks almost majestic. The kid from American Beauty would be in heaven. The wind infuses the air with just the tiniest chill, but the sun is strong enough to regulate things.

For the first time since I’ve been in Jinan, it simply feels like spring. And ever since I was about five-years-old, spring meant basketball.

So I make the jaunt over to Shandong Normal University, where much of my social experiment on basketball will take place. I played at SNU maybe a half-dozen time before the weather forbade it, but this is the first time that I’ve been to the court since I decided to embark upon this blogual adventure. It reaffirms some of my beliefs about basketball in China, namely that it’s hugely popular and quite different than basketball in America. Every one of the 22 courts (there would be 24 but for some broken rims) on the concrete swath is occupied by people playing varying brands of basketball. Some of them are just lazily shooting around. Some are playing games but not keeping score. Some people are just watching. This is a perfect day to play basketball – at least the most perfect out of the last 120 – and people have heeded the weather’s invitation.

I set up shop on the first court inside the gates that flow into this sprawl of courts. That’s where I remember the most competitive games being played last fall; per location, it is seemingly Court No. 1 in the literal and figurative sense. One tip-off that it’s a competitive court is that they are keeping score, and not everyone does that here. I plop my backpack down next to the court, tear off my Kansas Jayhawks hoodie and watch the action unfold, letting it be known via body language – the only language I share with these guys – that I am trying to get in the next game. And I do.

My squad is comprised of myself, two other English teachers – Antuan from Kentucky and James from North Carolina – and a Chinese onlooker selected at random. (OK, it isn’t totally random; he is kind of tall.)

Situated where it is, right next to the gate funneling people into the sprawling patch of courts, Court No. 1 is easily visible to anyone walking along the adjacent walkway, which is a popular thoroughfare for SNU students. And anyone who happens to be walking by on the afternoon of February 23 sees a 5-11 white guy with auburn hair (me), a 5-8 black guy with the knotted seedlings of dreadlocks (Antuan), and another black guy who is shaped like a boulder (James). We are the only non-Chinese people playing and quite possibly the only non-Chinese people that a lot of SNU students have ever seen hooping there. Add to it the fact that we are squaring off in four-on-four games against yellow-skinned, black-haired Chinese dudes, then you could have bet that a crowd would gather. And you would have won that bet.

Almost immediately, the viewing gallery – which moments ago housed but four 20-something-year-old Chinese guys waiting to play the next game – is a hot ticket. It’s not standing room only, but the crowd quickly swells to more than 15. And it isn’t just guys waiting to square off with the winning side. College-aged girls and older Chinese men and women – people who have no interest in playing and, moments ago, no interest in watching – park themselves next to the court to view. They leave as soon as our game ends, and largely because I shoot a paltry one-for-five, our game ends quickly, in defeat.

Being treated as something of a spectacle is nothing new for me here in Jinan. While this city is a provincial capital, it sure as hell isn’t a tourist destination. It’s a one-hour flight to Beijing and only slightly further to Shanghai, so if any tourists are plodding around this part of China, they won’t make time for Jinan – nor, for that matter, should they. Furthermore, Jinan isn’t much of an international business hub. In many of China’s larger cities, white people abound – Europeans, Americans, Australians, Canadians, all tapping China’s vast and ever-expanding economy. But not in Jinan. Almost all foreigners here are either English teachers or studying Chinese, and both of those groups are tiny. Thus, Chinese people here aren’t accustomed to seeing non-Chinese people, and they’re really bad at disguising their curiosity. On buses, at restaurants, on sidewalks – Jinanese people stare unabashedly at foreigners, unafraid to train their eyes on us as we walk past, like someone may eye a fish swimming the length of an aquarium. Often, they’ll shout “Halloo” at our backs after we’ve walked by. In a sense, it’s cute; in another sense, it’s exceptionally annoying. Either way, that’s how it is.

So it’s no surprise when we take to the court and people gather around. It’s not so much that were stars. It’s that we’re spectacles. And this is a phenomenon that I hope dissipates as my trips to SNU become more and more frequent. I want to just be one of the guys, so to speak, without the “Oh my God there’s a white person out there!” hoopla. And hoopla really isn’t too strong of a word. SNU students are pointing and whispering and snapping photos with their phones. Along with the mini-throng gathered along the court, there is a row of people peering through the adjacent fence. Comparing it to a zoo isn’t that much of an exaggeration.

Here's Antuan posing for a photo. It's not a celebrity effect. More of an animal-at-a-zoo effect.

Now, having good-looking college girls gawking at me – while I do something that I happen to be good at – isn’t the worst thing in the world. But at some point, I hope I cease to be so noteworthy. I’ll trade the cute-Asian-girl scenery for a chance to meld into the scene at large.

Telander, whose white skin was similarly atypical on the courts of Harlem, discussed this phenomenon in the introduction to Heaven Is a Playground:

I have tried not to evaluate the events overly much, just as I tried my best during the summer to stay out of the way, to let things happen in natural fashion. I dressed pretty much as everyone else did (shorts, sneakers, later on a golf hat and an ABA wristband) and I played ball, ate, drank, and laughed much as they did. Certainly I was visible, but I feel I overtly affected very little…

I hope to replicate Telander’s savvy. By virtue of my skin, I will never not stick out. But by virtue of my consistent and persistent presence at the courts, I hope to eventually become, if nothing else, a regular, someone who it would be strange not to see for a while.

There are other things I notice on February 23. The attire, for instance, which swings wildly in different directions. One player is wearing “Jordan” brand digs from head-to-toe – t-shirt, pants and sneakers – while another player is wearing jeans and leather dress shoes. This disparity isn’t uncommon. Also – and this, like the optional-scorekeeping, strikes me as odd – guys smoke a lot of cigarettes between games. In the States, the between-game ritual is to scurry to the water fountain or check your cell phone; here they light up cigs. Furthermore, there is an interesting friendly-hostile dynamic that I haven’t figured out. For instance, I was absolutely bowled over at one point by a particularly zealous player who drove at me as though there were a price on my head (did he resent my presence?). But after the game, as he smokes a cigarette, he utters one of the few English words he knows: Sorry. I respond by unloading about half of my Chinese vocabulary on him: “No problem,” I say. “You’re very good at basketball.” It probably comes off as the English equivalent to “Not problem. You basketball, good.” But hey, I think he appreciates the effort.

***

Winter returned a few days later, nixing basketball and setting the backdrop for one of the truly bizarre moments of my life. True to the stereotype, Chinese people love fireworks – honest to God, there are literally fireworks going off as I write this sentence at 11:30 in the morning. And on February 28, the day of China’s Lantern Festival – loosely described to me as China’s Valentine’s Day – there were fireworks galore, more than I’d seen in my six months in China. And that’s saying something. What tipped it from odd to downright wild was this: it was snowing hard – easily the hardest snowfall of the winter. People were spilling on the sidewalks, socks didn’t stand a chance of staying dry, it was nasty. But despite the snow, fireworks were exploding everywhere when I went out to dinner. I can’t exaggerate the ubiquity of fireworks that evening. From 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., you could see them in every direction hear them literally every second.

My mind was blown: a dastardly snowfall sharing airspace with constant fireworks for hours on end. Almost as strange, I suppose, as a white dude from Kansas sharing the basketball court with a bunch of Chinese guys in Jinan for hours on end. Maybe some day it will all seem normal.