Ball in Beijing

As he disappears from sight, he’s still pounding that ball against the ground. He’s been playing basketball for at least the last half-hour, and is still playing. Yet at no point was there a hoop, a sideline, an opponent. Just a boy and his ball.

If you’re ever looking for something to do in Beijing, go to Houhai Lake and rent a boat. You can get pedal boats or motorboats or, if you’re feeling especially lazy, you can hire someone to navigate your boat for you. My girlfriend and I to hit up Houhai Lake tonight, and it was lush. Sure, the Houhai area is a little kitschy – a Starbucks abuts the lake to the west, and a bar smeared with the word “Jazz” sits to the east. But innumerable things along China’s tourist trails are kitschy, so good riddance. Besides, I like Starbucks and jazz. We have the last boat on the water, so smitten with the scene (and warmed by the wine) that heading back before sundown seems like a sin.

After we fork over our ride – a battery-powered vessel that worked fine despite the disconcerting noises coming from within – we proceed to traipse around the lake on foot. We wander with a half-bottle of Great Wall wine along the streets surrounding the lake.

It takes about three minutes to see something basketball-related – a single hoop resting in a tiny courtyard, encased by pointed, wrought iron fence. The court that the goal presides over is small – too small, surely, to fire up a three-pointer (unless you hopped the fence). But it nonetheless smacks of basketball in China: a basketball hoop slipped in someplace that, at first blush, makes it look hopelessly out of place. I don’t stop to play, but I do snap a picture and proceed to traipse along.

After about three more minutes, we come to a small area that boasts a few dozen little exercise stations. These stations can be found anywhere in China. I worked out on a few in Urumuqi, which is in the largely-Muslim province of Xinjiang way out west; I saw some while on vacation in Shanghai, the nation’s poshest city and financial capital; crummy little Jinan has them as well; and obviously they’re Beijing. Author Peter Hessler wrote about the exercise stations in a 2006 article for the New Yorker:

Not long after I moved into Little Ju-er, Beijing stepped up its campaign to host the 2008 Games, and traces of Olympic glory began to touch the hutong. In an effort to boost the athleticism and health of average Beijing residents, the government constructed hundreds of outdoor exercise stations. The painted steel equipment is well-intentioned but odd, as if the designer had caught a fleeting glimpse of a gym and then worked from memory. At the exercise stations, people can spin giant wheels with their hands, push big levers that offer no resistance, and swing on pendulums like children at a park.

I personally think the exercise stations are pretty cool. They’re not necessarily designed for getting strong; don’t think weight-lifting on South Beach. Instead, they’re more for staying flexible, for moving around, for getting the blood pumping, so to speak. We could use some back home in Kansas City, which – like USC football or Kansas basketball – is perennially in the Top 10. But not among the nation’s best cities. No, it’s a mainstay in the top 10 fattest cities.

We walk enter the exercise area via a swinging, waist-high door and decide to have a little workout. While foreigners abound in Beijing, we are the only white people on this side of the fence. We hop onto a glorified teeter-totter amid a throng of Chinese men and women who are – just like Hessler said – spinning wheels and pushing levers and swinging on pendulums.

There are no basketball courts, but there are nonetheless people playing basketball. You see, one of the pieces of equipment is a modified set of monkey bars. Unlike traditional monkey bars – which have two polls running length-wise and single planks connecting those polls – these monkey bars are pretty snazzy. There is a central beam that runs from end to end, and then a series of handles that are formed by intersecting ovals. Those looping ovals forms symmetrical half-circles on either side of the structure, cutting the central bar at consistent intervals.

Right now, though, this monkey bar set isn’t being used for monkey bar purposes. There is no one dangling from the polls. There is no one doing pull-ups. There is no one scurrying from end to end. Instead, there are people playing basketball.

The half-circles formed by the curving piece of metal are about the diameter of a basketball hoop – probably a little tighter. And one boy in particular, Feng Yuan, is using those little hoops as…well, a hoop. He is wearing a Chinese school uniform, which consists of matching jacket and pants. In his case, the get-up is bright red, like the Chinese flag. He has glasses and an innocent face. His ball is alternating slices of brown and white.

He stands a few feet back and lofts shots at the monkey bars, which are about six-and-a-half feet off the ground. The rim is utterly unforgiving, and since the hole is small to begin with, this complicates getting the ball through the hoops. But Feng Yuan keeps shooting and shooting. Sometimes the ball pops off the monkey bars, over the beam, and falls on the other side, where someone will pick it up and shoot it himself. After a few minutes of watching, I become one of these people, snatching loose balls and lofting them at the basket – er, monkey bars.

Every now and then someone will snare a rebound and go in for a huge dunk – which, per the low height of the goal, is very doable. People watch, oo-ing and ah-ing, as though the dunks were being made on a real basket. I try to imitate one of these high-flyers, but I botch the finish and the ball is blasted into the air off the “rim.” My girlfriend, who is on a nearby exercise machine – it’s a sort of rowing device – shouts out “Mae you!!!” Mae you, if you remember from the March 11 discussion of Chinese basketball banter, means “Don’t have.” It is what people sometimes shout when you miss a shot or take a bad one. The Chinese people playing basketball get a kick out of her mockery, laughing with her and at me.

Feng Yuan leaves a minute before we do. Turns out we are going in the same direction, and after a moment we gain enough ground to see him off in the distance. We can tell it’s him by his bright red uniform. That, and the fact that he’s still dribbling. He is walking with a dad-aged man, slowly, like they don’t have anywhere to go.

We hang a left where he had gone straight. As he disappears from sight, he’s still pounding that ball against the ground. He’s been playing basketball for at least the last half-hour, and is still playing. Yet at no point was there a hoop, a sideline, an opponent. Just a boy and his ball. Which, really, is all you need.

No Balling, Just Brawling

Arm extended, he eyes the back of his victim’s head like a tennis player transfixed on a floating ball, ready to smash a serve over the net....

When I sit down at the corner table, I don’t know I’m about to see the biggest fight I’ve ever seen. I don’t know that, in a few minutes, I’ll have to inspect my food for blood, or that I’ll see someone get cracked over the head with a chair WWE-style, or that I’ll have to ask myself, “Is it safer for me to stay here in the corner or leap over that table toward the door?”

No, when I sit down for dinner, none of these things are on my mind. Actually, my mind is on food. I scarfed down a bag of frozen dumplings this afternoon, but now, at 8:45, I’m hungry again.

So I mosey to the restaurant on the corner nearest my apartment. It is a chuanr joint. Chuanr is kind of like barbeque, originating in China’s western-most province of Xinjiang, where most of the people are Uighur, an ethic minority in China but the ethnic majority in Xinjiang. Once Xinjiang – formerly Turkistan – was incorporated into China, chuanr was adopted far-and-wide in places throughout the country. It’s big here in Jinan, and you can’t get much further from Xinjiang than Jinan.

The food itself is pretty simple: sharp sticks lined with small chunks of meat and fat and garlic. Once dressed, the skewers are set atop a long, narrow charcoal grill and doused with spices. Having grown up in Kansas City, I can assure you it’s not barbeque the way Americans think of barbeque. But it is nonetheless a favorite for me and most of friends here – at least the ones who aren’t vegetarian.

As a regular at this restaurant, the owner recognizes me when I enter and leads me to one of the few open tables; it’s crowded tonight. There is no chair at the table, so I grab one of the empties from a nearby group of men. This chair, like all the others, is about 12 inches high with a taut cloth seat that stretches across the wooden structure. It is collapsible, and when I grab it to move it to my table, the cloth goes limp and the wooden legs dangle. I set it down, open it up so the legs form a sturdy X and park myself at the table, which is in the very front corner of the restaurant, right next to the wall of windows looking out onto the street. There are two rooms – one of which you enter upon walking into the restaurant, and another smaller room in back, accessible via a doorless, six-foot-wide entryway. I am sitting directly across from that entryway, with a view into the backroom.

I ask for 10 sticks of this killer combo with alternating chunks of garlic and chicken. I tack on five sticks of beef, which has pieces of fat interlaced with the meat instead of garlic, and two pieces of bread, which is cooked over the same coals and coated with the same spices as the meat. All of this food runs me 12 yuan, or about $1.75 USD. Not bad.

I place the order and proceed to bury my nose in my book, Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler, an authoritative and cleverly orchestrated history of China. The bread is brought out as I am reading page 97, which ironically is set in a chuanr restaurant. “Polat had kept his word; he was nowhere to be seen,” Hessler writes. “Except for me, the Uighur restaurant was empty.”

I haven’t read even two sentences past that line – nor taken more than two bites of my bread – when a man comes storming out of the back room. For a second I think he is simply loaded and running around drunkenly, jovially. That theory is dispelled, however, when two men come storming out after him. The first guy could have bolted out the front double-doors, which are a few feet in front of him. Instead, he stops in his tracks, like he is digging in to hold the line. Now I notice that he is wielding a chair. He cocks the chair high over his head and – timing the chair’s descent to coincide with the moment the men are within arm’s reach – brings it down with all the force he can muster. The wooden weapon doesn’t catch anyone cleanly; it is engulfed by a tangle of arms.

More men pour out of that back room. It is hard to tell exactly who is fighting who; I wish they were wearing jerseys. It doesn’t appear to be a total free-for-all – I reckon the men have teams, so to speak – but amid the grabbing and punching and chair-swinging orgy, deciphering who’s on who’s side is, for me, like trying to decipher Chinese characters. It’s all guesswork – most of it futile.

In a matter of about two seconds, six men are locked in a tussle in the middle of the front room. They all have chairs, but they are too close to really deck each other. Not that getting hit in the face by a chair feels good. It’s just that, per a lack of space, there aren’t a lot of huge blows being landed. It’s like what happens along the offensive line in a football game: the guys engaged in battle are trying to kill each other, but there aren’t usually any memorable hits being landed by offensive lineman on defensive linemen, or vise-versa. They’re too close to generate any oomph. The big hits, therefore, are always landed by the linebackers and safeties – the guys who stay out of that initial fray, survey what’s happening and then swoop in for that crushing blow.

Well, there is a free safety lurking in the restaurant.

As the men tussle in the center of the front room, I see a guy with a sinister look on his face come strolling up to the melee. All of the fighters are engaged with one another, like a four-man front wrestling with an offensive line. But this guy has gone unblocked. And with measured malice, he plants his feet on the outskirts of the fighting – left foot forward, right foot back – in a stance that is part boxer and part right-handed batter.

This may sound twisted, but I have never been averse to watching a good fight. Ever since my buddy Mick pummeled his nemesis Alex on the soccer field in sixth grade, fights have always struck me as entertaining. Alex wasn’t seriously hurt – just puffy-faced and a little purple – so I took away nothing from that other than a few giggles. I saw another devilishly entertaining fight in high school. Two girls – who could kindly be described as...well, they can't be kindly described – starting duking it out in the middle of a major hallway during passing period. One of them was a tall blonde, the other a short brunette. If these two girls had a weigh-in, money would have come pouring into Vegas on the blonde. But you can’t always tell who’s crazier just by looking at them, and after about 15 seconds, the short girl had splattered a good bit of blondey’s blood on the nearby windows and, better yet, was holding a huge wad of golden hair. It was awesome.

But those fights were nothing compared to what’s going on here. Not only are the guys involved in this one bigger, but there are weapons – collapsible chairs, which are nothing less than handy, easy-to-swing pieces of wood. Those other fights I stuck around and savored because there was an innocence to them, if that makes sense. Now, though, I am contemplating getting out of the restaurant because as chairs and arms fly, I realize that someone could land a shot on me.

The free safety’s feet are now properly planted. Everyone in the scrum – which is now bordering on an out-and-out brawl – is locked in a knot of arms and chairs, oblivious to anything transpiring on the outer reaches of the fruckus.

One of the fighters is about 6-feet-1, wearing a tan-brown jacket; the free safety and I are sharing an unobstructed view of the back of his head. I have an unfortunately perfect line of sight as the free safety reaches the chair high into the sky. Arm extended, he eyes the back of his victim’s head like a tennis player transfixed on a floating ball, ready to smash a serve over the net. Then the safety/boxer/batter/tennis player brings down the chair.

The sound it makes – like a drumstick hitting a table – ends the internal debate I am having about whether or not I should watch this fight: it’s time to go. Leaving my food and book, I leap over a table and chair standing between myself and the door. The small size of the chairs makes them a more accessible weapon, but also an easier obstacle to clear should escape become necessary. And after the free safety swings his chair into the man’s head with everything he has, I deduce that escape has indeed become necessary.

I take about five strides once out the door and then turn around to watch. The fight rages on. The owner of the joint, the one who had graciously welcomed me and sat me at the table, is now on the phone with the police. I cannot tell exactly what he’s saying, but there are a few phrases that I pick out, phrases that are repeated over and over again – “quickly” and “I don’t know.” Some of the culprits scurry out the front door, while many others stay put. Things simmer down a bit, with little flare-ups that are more manageable than before. People are either chilling out or realizing that they need to stymie the blood pouring out of their skulls. The guy with the tan-brown jacket presses a wad of white napkins against his head. They are red within seconds.

Usually I have a little notebook with me to jot down notes about China and basketball and Chinese basketball – you know, for the blog. But not thinking that there’d be enough going on at this restaurant to warrant note-taking, I left it at the apartment. Thus, I send a series of disjointed text messages to myself, trying to capture everything that’s going on. The first one is sent at 9:01 p.m.

21:01
start texting myself. napkins soaked in blood. people calling the police. people still wanting to fight

21:04
blood on dude’s jacket [and] neck. they [owners] apologize to me. [people] still wanna fight. i’ve had three bites of bread. hop over chair and table and leave. think and hope my food’s ok and bloodless

21:08
cops show up. paramedics too. one dude in particular led to cop car. they bring me my food and book. food tastes fine. doesn’t look like any blood. medics tend to wounded. people [on the sidewalk] watching. dude with wicked but [cut] under eye picks up a chair…just to sit

(I was sure someone was about to get cracked in the head when he picked up that chair.)

21:10
wounded telling their stories to cops. [owners] mopping up blood.

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Chucking Foreigners

Yeah, he scored 71 points in one game, the all-time record for the CBA. You can’t score 71 points unless you shoot unabashedly. And Americans – with just cause – are reputed to do just that.

I traipse out onto the schoolyard courts at around four in the afternoon. The near court is populated on one end by two kids shooting zealously, and at the opposite end by an older man, probably about 40, shooting by his lonesome. For some reason, I opt for the older guy.

I rebound a few of his shots and toss the ball back to him whether he makes it or misses. Eventually, once I’m confident that he doesn’t resent my presence, I loft a few shots of my own. Three in a row clang in, each time kicking off the back of the rim and right back to me, as though I had my own personal rebounder. We trade shots for all of three minutes before the man says he wants to play two-on-two with the kids at the far end. Who am I to argue?

We stroll down there to join the kids, each of whom I recognize from previous duels on the court. Immediately two more kids show up. Two-on-two has quickly become three-on-three; teams are dictated by the spinning ball. The older guy and I are on separate squads.

Within minutes, two of my foreign teacher friends appear under the basket. One of them, Toby, simply looks like a basketball player – kind of like John Lennon simply looked like a musician. Toby is 6-foot-5, lean and athletic. He is black, to boot, and there is no point in denying it: blacks hold a bit of a monopoly on basketball. The estimated 300,000,000 Chinese people who play basketball may eventually break up that monopoly, but they haven’t yet.

Just think: nine of 10 NBA All-Star starters were black in 2010; same in 2009; same in 2008; almost the same in 2007 (that year, it was 10 of 10). Alas, Toby is English, and he uses his palpable athletic prowess on the soccer field – or football pitch, as he’d say – and not the basketball court. He’s never played a moment of basketball in his life.

The other foreign teacher is John, who I’ve been told looks the part of my doppelganger. Like me, he’s a hair under 6-foot. Like me, he has light-colored hair. Like me, his skin is milky white. He rips off his long-sleeve shirt, now stripped down to shorts and a T-shirt; it’s getting to be that shorts-and-T-shirt time of year. One of the numerous Chinese onlookers joins John to make the teams even. The two-on-two game is now four-on-four.

John and I have traded some verbal barbs about playing basketball – who’ll show up who, etc. – but have never actually played each other. As such, I make a point to guard him. He shoots a shot the first time he touches the ball. It misses, but his next shot, which comes about 20 seconds later, doesn’t. It was a three-pointer, which still only counts as one. Not wanting to be outdone, I chuck a shot the next time I touch the ball. It goes in as well, and a quick sense of relief washes over me – I haven’t been totally outdone, not yet at least.

While there are eight people on the court, John and I fall into our own little game. We have no interest in trying to outperform the other players – just each other. There is no great pride in scoring on an adolescent Chinese kid, nor does balling on a 40-year-old do much for the old basketball ego. But John and I take pleasure in trying to one-up one another. We shoot it freely and often, and eventually it crosses my mind that neither of us are passing much at all.

We have, unwittingly, fallen into a stereotype: the selfish American basketball player. While many American basketball players are revered here in China – Kobe and LeBron jerseys abound, for instance, and Michael Jordan is held in high esteem – there is still prevalent resentment among native hoops fans toward foreigners who play in China’s professional league. They are thought to sully the game with their tendency to monopolize shot attempts. According to a July, 2009 New York Times article about the recent basketball boom in China, TV ratings for Chinese Basketball Association games soared once teams were allowed to import up to two foreign players. Despite that popularity, however, there are still conflicting feelings.

… foreign players [have] found starring roles — the top 15 scorers were non-Chinese, and players like Bonzi Wells and Dontae’ Jones — who had less than stellar N.B.A. careers — frequently scored more than 40 points a game. At the same time, the dominance of foreign players fueled frustration.

“Foreigners should play supporting roles, not dominate the game,” said Zhang Xiong, director of operations for the Chinese Basketball Association.

Li Xiaofeng, 20, a restaurant manager and C.B.A. fan, said: “I don’t like foreign players. They got most of the chances to shoot and score. How about our own players? They don’t have the chance to bring their skill and talent into play.

“Our Chinese players’ ability is limited by the current rule.”

Some Chinese state news media outlets went so far as to call imported players a “malignant tumor.”…

Now, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that John and I are tumors. But we do indeed get caught up in a little one-on-one battle, and for a while a good chunk of the shots are coming via our foreign fingertips. Like that article says, this happens all the time in CBA games. At any one time, it’s a safe bet that there will be six Chinese guys and four African-Americans on the court – the four black guys split two per team. Well, despite being in the minority in terms of numbers, there are stretches where the foreigners shoot just about every shot. And not always good shots. Wild shots. Jump shots. Ill-advised shots at the beginning of the shot clock, without any passing. A friend and I were half-watching a CBA game at a bar the other night, and he described the game as, “Get the ball to the black dude and watch him shoot.” (If that sounds crude, rest assured that Antuan is black.)

An article penned in February of 2009, appearing at Dalje.com, backs up the NYT article.

…Increasing numbers of former NBA players are turning to China’s professional league for jobs and their aggressive domination of the court has drawn criticism from a sports system dedicated to developing Chinese players.

China’s teams stepped up recruitment abroad this season after new rules allowed them to field two foreign players, a move the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA) hoped would attract interest in the league and expose players to tougher competition.

High-level imports such as former NBA players Bonzi Wells and Donnell Harvey have, however, refocused virtually every CBA team's strategy around the scoring power of the foreigners, reducing stats and game time for Chinese players.

“In the past it’s been guys who were good but more team-oriented,” said Jason Dixon, a U.S. import who has played for the Guangdong Tigers for 10 years.

“This year you’re finding a lot of high-calibre NBA players.

“Even in college (Americans) are told, ‘If you want to play in the NBA, you have to score, you have to have a sense of selfishness,’ and I think the Chinese don't understand that.”

The CBA's top 15 scorers are all foreigners this season, and the reaction has not been positive.

Dontae Jones, a former Celtics forward now leading the CBA in points scored, has been described by local media such as Titan Sports as a “cancer” on the Beijing Ducks because he shoots too much.

Former NBA guard Wells, who left the league last month, was also blasted by domestic media for pulling down the stats of his team mates by scoring as many as 50 points per game -- without improving Shanxi Zhongyu's record….

CBA office director Zhang Xiong agreed that the domination of the imports had been “detrimental for the growth of Chinese players”, who now play less….

“They are here to help CBA teams play, not just to exhibit their own shooting skills,” Zhang said….

A lot of times, though, games do indeed turn into an exhibition of foreigners’ shooting skills. If nothing else, the scoring-leaders list of the CBA reads like a who’s-who of imported American players. The CBA’s top scorer is Andre Emmett, who averages 32 points per game. Emmett, 27, is a former star at Texas Tech and was the second-round draft pick of the Seattle Sonics in 2004; he was then traded to Memphis. He was a stud in college, where he averaged 18.7, 21.8 and 20.6 points per game over his final three seasons at Tech, shooting at or above 50 percent each of those seasons despite being a 6-5 guard. I remember Emmett especially well because he had some pretty good games against Kansas; in 2004, he had 29 points on 20 field goal attempts at Allen Fieldhouse. He graduated as the Big 12’s all-time leading scorer, and that record could stand for a long while seeing as anyone who scores a lot nowadays just goes pro.

Emmett didn’t score his prodigious amount of points by accident. Indeed, as a junior in 2002-03, he led the Big 12 and NCAA in field goal attempts, and the next season he again led the Big 12 in shots (and was second in the nation.) His 882 career field goal attempts rank as the eighth-most in NCAA history.

Well, Emmett still likes to shoot, and still scores a lot of points. To date, he has at least 30 points in 20 of his 32 games, and scored at least 40 seven times. On March 7, Emmett had this ridiculous stat line: 31-45 FG, 3-11 3PT, 6-6 FT, 71 points. Yeah, he scored 71 points in one game, the all-time record for the CBA. You can’t score 71 points unless you shoot unabashedly. And Americans – with just cause – are reputed to do just that.

Just look at the names of the top nine scoring leaders in the CBA. And remember, imported players are the minority; there are but two per team. (If you don’t think Pickett and Edward and White and Brown sound like Chinese names, you’re right.)

1. Andre Emmett, 32.0
2. Charles Gaines, 30.5
3. Tim Pickett, 29.8
4. Corsley Edwards, 29.3
5. Leon Rodgers 28.5
6. John Lucas 27.9
7. Rodney White 27.5
8. Andre Brown 27.5
9. James Mays, 26.0

Number 10 is a guy named Wang.

Like Antuan said, a lot of the time it’s a matter of getting the ball to the blacks guys and getting out of the way.

The irony, though, is that Chinese people still love some of the NBA’s great chuckers. There is resentment when Americans come over and start to sully the CBA, but so long as they’re in America, it’s all good. Kobe Bryant was a downright sensation in China during the 2008 Olympics, and his jersey is still among the most popular with people here – and as of today he leads the NBA in field goal attempts. Same goes for LeBron James. He’s a star; in fact, one of the kids yesterday was wearing a LeBron jersey. He is No. 3 in the NBA in shot attempts. (In all fairness, LeBron is No. 6 in assists. So it’s not like he’s a total ball hog.) Dwyane Wade, the NBA’s fourth most frequent shooter, is another hugely popular figure here.

It is therefore an oversimplification to say that Chinese people don’t like guys who shoot it a lot. Kobe and LeBron and Wade – these guys are iconic here, yet they certainly fit the of eager-to-launch-it-American mold. In fact, those are three of the five highest-scoring players in the league. So scoring acumen is appreciated by the Chinese – as well as John and me.

We are mired in our game within the game. On one play, he is guarding me as I dribble with my left hand into the lane. I am cut off by one of his teammates – which has surely left one of my teammates unguarded. Alas, passing doesn’t cross my mind. I screech to a halt before I plow over John’s teammate, which allows John – who was a step behind me – to catch up. I am now wedged between the two of them, not an ideal spot to be. But I make a quick dribble through my legs with my left hand and split the double-team. Then, with an iota of space, I elevate and shoot a 14-foot jump shot. This is the only goal in the schoolyard that has a net, so I get to see the shot actually swish through. It’s a beautiful sight, albeit a horribly selfish shot.

To be honest, I don’t think the Chinese kids minded John and I today. We were, after all, the two best players out there, and on multiple occasions the kids were willingly deferring to us, as though they wanted us to shoot. And of course, we were happy to oblige. John and I will never be playing each other for the first time again, and thus there will never have the same incentive to try to upstage each other. We’ll get back to playing more of a team game soon enough.

Unless, that is, those articles are right. Unless we really are cancers.

It's been brought to my attention that some people can't leave comments on this blog. I don't know exactly why that is. I have enabled comments, and a few people have indeed left remarks. Even if you can't leave a comment in the Comments section, I'd still love to hear from you. If you have thoughts, suggestions or criticisms about the blog, please feel free to write me at culturalcrossover@gmail.com. Thanks for reading!