How Do You Say "Reason" in Chinese?

For not having any sort of answer, I’ve thought an embarrassingly long time about the question, What’s the difference between and excuse and a reason? 

My best guess is that it comes down to the recipient of the excuse/reason. What smacks of excuse to one person may well strike the next person as a bona fide reason. Take, for instance, the lengthy treatise that kicked off this blog – the April 10 posts detailing my post-graduate tour of underemployment and my subsequent move to China.

Some people may read those posts and think…

Wow, this guy had some really tough luck. He graduated in the spring of 2008, about six months after the start of the recession. He had that internship right after he graduated, which seemed a good idea at the time, and then he hit the ground running in September ’08 looking for a job. Alas, September ’08 is when the stock market plummeted, and when things started looking bleak in every single sector of the economy, particularly in the journalism industry, which is where this guy – who was just a kid back then – wanted to work. On the heels of his past internships and his trio of journalistic awards, he damn near got a few jobs, but juuuust missed out. After more than a year of hitting his head against the job market wall, he decided that his best play was to move to China for a while, ride out the recession, and then hit the hump again in a year or two.

Some other people, though, might read those April 10 posts and think...

What’s this guy bitching about? First off, he majored in philosophy, which is notorious for funneling people into the unemployment line. What’s more, he never diversified his journalistic expertise. He was too gung-ho about sports journalism, which is oversaturated as it is, and didn’t have the portfolio of clips to bust into the news or education or entertainment arenas of journalism, which don’t have quite as many wannabes and bloggers cluttering the market. And not only did he not diversify himself as a journalist, but he didn’t diversify himself as a job candidate. Not everyone gets to be a journalist. It’s a select crew, and anyone can tell you that it’s not a meritocracy: you have to have both skill and luck. And even if this guy has some skill – which is debatable – he was still pinning his employment hopes on an industry that required more than a little serendipity. If he was smart, he would have been putting out feelers in a million different fields and would have come to the conclusion that in the post-Great Recession job market, you can’t let your ideals run roughshod over your brains. Bottom line, he dug his own grave. 

The thing is, both responses are totally justifiable; neither can be proven right or wrong. While I would certainly tend to agree with the former of these two analyses, my dad might side with No. 2, and he would have any number of reasons to do so. That’s the bitch of this reason/excuse dichotomy: it’s all about perspective, and one’s perspective depends on a million different things, things which the person delivering said reason/excuse can’t control. 

Because of this, I don’t know how these ensuing words will be treated – that is, if they will smack of excuse, or if, on the other hand, people will look at them and see logic. Either way, here goes:

The reason (or excuse) for the recent dearth of activity at Cultural Crossover is language, and the fact that I don’t speak a lick of Chinese. Because I don’t speak Chinese, and because the original bent of this blog was to analyze basketball in China – and the people who play basketball in China – I don’t have much to write about. 

I don’t know how that will resonate. To those who think that’s an excuse, it probably sounds like am any other blogger, not someone who really deserves to put the word “writer” in his bio.

This steady plunge in blog activity happens all the time. Someone starts a blog and tells all their friends and posts like a madman for a few weeks and is absolutely confident that they can build up a good following. Then, at about the two-month mark, as the good people at Google Analytics detail the ongoing lack of readership, the blogger gets discouraged and starts posting less…and less. Less posting, of course, isn’t good for readership, which sinks ever more, further dampening that once zealous zest that the blogger had about his or her cool new blog. (In the place of low readership, feel free to substitute old-fashioned laziness as the culprit for a cessation of posts.) 

This is the excuse perspective. 

To those reason people out there, let me explain a little further. When I started this, I didn’t want it to be another China blog. There are a million blogs out there – many of which are damn good – that wax poetic about Chinese culture and Chinese news. A lot of these blogs are written by people who have lived in China for years, and who know a great deal more about this country’s history, politics, economy and culture. I don’t know all that much (or care all that much) about these things, and as such, I have no interest in trying to write about them. 

What I do know and care about, and what I wanted to write about, is basketball. And a stroll around any Chinese city will reveal beyond doubt that basketball is important to innumerable Chinese people. And you can’t have a basketball-loving country of 1.3 billion without there being a bottomless well of good stories about basketball.

But while basketball’s importance in China is indisputable, I’ve still had a world of trouble writing about it. At the outset of the blog, I was writing a lot about the quirks I noticed in Chinese basketball – the score keeping, the clothes, the lingo, etc. These things were interesting to me, and they fueled some good posts. 

After a while, I felt like I had exhausted these different topics, and was forced to make an increasing number of forays into Chinese culture: I was mining basketball not to write about basketball, but instead using it as a springboard to write about other things. This method yielded what I felt to be a few solid posts as well, like this one about Yao Ming and adidas, this one about Los Suns and Chinese censorship, and this one about the CBA and the American burnouts who end up playing pro ball in China. 

Eventually, though, the blog devolved into an ongoing dialogue about Chinese culture. I started writing about smoking in China, the lack of left-handed people people in China, how people drink hot water in China, and so on. 

These topics were vaguely interesting to me, but after a little while I realized that I wasn’t writing a basketball blog anymore. And that’s what I wanted to do here. This blog, after all, was inspired by the book Heaven Is a Playground, a Rick Telander classic in which he spends a summer playing ball in the inner city and, in the process, unearths all these cool stories about the cultural significance of basketball and the people who play it. 

That is what I wanted to do, but for some reason I didn’t foresee language being as big of a problem as it has turned out to be. In hindsight, this seems extremely naïve of me: Of course not speaking the native language is going to be an issue. Maybe I thought that there would be more English speakers out there, or that my bilingual coworkers would be more willing to help me. I don’t know. But I know that I have never been able to have any sort of substantial interaction with the people I play basketball with, and as such, I’ve had very few substantial blog posts about my time on the courts of China.

I came over here holding out little hope of learning the language, and even less of a desire to pore over flashcards and recite tones into a dictaphone to gauge my progress. I’m not defending this philosophy; it’s just the mindset I had when I arrived and the mindset that, for better or worse – mostly worse – I have stuck with all the while. 

Still, it’s an easy stance to justify; Chinese is utterly inaccessible to Westerners. Unlike good old Spanish, which I studied a bit in high school and college, there is nothing akin to a cognate. Oh, how I miss words like enciclopedia. You can’t really mess up words like that. Here, though, nothing is so clear. In Spanish, for instance, the word for chimpanzee is chimpancé. In Chinese, the word for chimpanzee is 黑猩猩. Fat chance.

So that’s what happened to this blog. I know that I never had great readership, save on days when bigger and better China bloggers graciously shared some of their traffic with me and linked to posts that I had written. But this blog was never really about readership. It was about my quest too learn about basketball in China, even if I couldn’t speak the language. I fear now, though, that all I’ve learned is that you can’t learn much of anything if you can’t talk with the people you want to learn about. 

That’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it.

Wasted Possession: Alcohol and Hangovers in China

As a high school sophomore, we had basketball practices every Saturday morning, bright and early at 8 a.m. But just because we practiced early in the morn didn’t mean we were diligently tucked away the night before. Sophomore year, after all, was when fake IDs started floating around, when kids got their licenses to drive, when we started treating the sentence, “Her parents are out of town,” with the same reverence a priest might treat a passage from the Good Book. 

The 8 a.m. start time was likely intended, at least in part, to thwart any Friday night shenanigans. But it didn’t. We still went out, still got drunk, still made silly choices and then paid for it in the morning. A lot of us would go in there with headaches on account of the alcohol, and would then proceed to give our coaches headaches on account of our crappy play.

After one particularly sluggish practice, one of the assistant coaches had us circle up for a little heart-to-heart. Coach Smith, or Smitty, was more of a football coach than basketball coach. He was round through the trunk with buzzed blonde hair, the type of hair you’d see on a drill sergeant or offensive line coach (the latter was his gig in the fall).

“Guys,” he began, “I want to say something about drinking. I know what it’s like being in high school, alright? But you can’t drink on Friday nights and then come out here and think you can play, alright? And I know some of you are drinking. I can smell it out there the second you start running around.”

There was a lightheartedness to this warning, and after the “I can smell it” line we all gave a little chuckle. Despite the district’s militant policy on student athletes and alcohol, we could tell that Smitty wasn’t out to get us in trouble. 

But before he was finished, and before we could go home and crash, Smitty looked right at me and, in front of everyone, said, “Man, you just look like a drinker.” 

I don’t know how exactly a 16-year-old can look like a drinker. Maybe it was because my hair was a little shaggy. Or maybe my eyes were droopy. Or maybe I was a culprit of the sweaty-booze smell Smitty had identified on the court. I don’t know. But as people laughed at Smitty’s observations, I smiled sheepishly and nodded; I was in no position to deny it. (In a Costanzian moment, I realized on the way home that I should have shot back, “Yeah, well you look like a drinker too!” Or at least something about the Jerk Store.)

Anyway, the reason for this anecdote, beside the tenuous link it gives me to place the ensuing words on a basketball blog, is that I wanted to play basketball today. I really did. But it simply wasn’t going to happen. Yes, it was hot, but that’s not why I didn’t ball. And yes, with my pending move to Denmark, and the accompanying logistical headaches that go with it, I have a lot on my mind. But that’s not why I didn’t play, either. 

No, I didn’t play ball today because I got a little, uh, torn last night. And when you tie one on in China, you’re bound to be aching – bad – the next day. Hangovers are of course an international phenomenon. But hangovers in China are a different beast. This is the country that boasts the world’s biggest population, the world’s biggest mountain and, by my estimation, the world’s biggest hangovers. Hangovers that unequivocally prohibit you from playing basketball.

I have been drinking on-and-off since high school (just ask Smitty), which gives me about eight years of drinking experience. I had a Keystone Light phase as a youngster, a Colorado micro brew infatuation when I got to college, a Heineken thing when I studied in the Netherlands, and a longstanding love affair with Budweiser all the while. Oh, and in the months preceding my move to China, I had a little fling with whiskey. Throw in several boxes of Franzia, an ill-fated one-night stand with Long Island Ice Tea and a typically American 21^st birthday, and I know what’s what with alcohol and alcohol’s side effects.

I’m not a drunk, but I’ve been drunk. As such, I have a well-honed understanding and appreciation for hangovers. And I’m telling you, there is no hangover like a Chinese hangover. 

One explanation for Chinese hangovers being in a league of their own is that the contents of a bottle of Chinese beer (or booze) are all second-rate: the water, the hops, the wheat, the malt, etc. The Chinese simply don’t seem to pay as much heed to the quality of beer as, say, Americans or the Dutch. Even when I was snatching up every $11.99 30-pack of Keystone I could find as a 16-year-old, there was never a day where I felt as poisoned as I do after drinking Chinese beer. It would require some in-depth investigative journalism (and the ability to speak a lick of Chinese) to really unearth the quality of ingredients that go into your average Chinese beer, but it ain’t high. It’s the same principle, more or less, behind the fact that foreigners who come to China often have bouts of food poisoning and diarrhea: the stuff the people put into their bodies here isn’t quite up to snuff compared with what we’re used to. 

Then there is a more disgusting (and troubling) explanation: the formaldehyde that is put in the beer. Yes, formaldehyde, the stuff they use to preserve dead bodies. Beer-faq.com tackled this issue back in 2007:

First of all, why on earth would breweries knowingly use formaldehyde? As it turns out it is a very inexpensive clarifying agent that lightens the color of the beer and extends its shelf life. Although some Chinese breweries claim that they have discontinued the practice, there are a number of beers sold in China that are very cheap and low quality (intended to be affordable to the masses), and it has been stated that these lower quality brews still use formaldehyde to keep costs down.

So how widespread is the use of formaldehyde in Chinese beer? I found a few articles dating back to 2005, where a representative of the China Alcoholic Drinks Industry Association (CADIA) is quoted as saying that 95% of the domestic beer in China has formaldehyde. What was that? Did you say 95% of domestic beers in China have a known cancer causing agent in them? Not really making me want to drink a Chinese beer.

One reason that Chinese beer is reputed to use formaldehyde is that the malt used in Chinese beer is of such low quality that it could rot otherwise. Or maybe the formaldehyde is used to help clean the bottles and disinfect the beer of any diseases. Either way, it speaks to my first point, that the ingredients in Chinese beer are second-rate: If you have to use formaldehyde as a preservative and cleaning agent, it’s probably an inferior product to begin with.

Another factor contributing to hangovers is the alcohol content of the beer. Chinese beer invariably has a lower alcohol content than in America. For instance, a big 600-ml bottle of Tsingtao – which is the most common medium for the nation’s most common beer – has an alcohol content of 3.1 percent. Other beers hover around that same number; some dip below three percent, none exceed five.

So, why would lower alcohol content make hangovers worse? Well, to achieve the same effect of, say, five 12-ounce American beers, you’d have to drink something like five 20-ounce Chinese beers. Indeed, a 20-ounce bottle at 3.1 percent alcohol has almost exactly as much alcohol as a 12-ounce bottle at five percent, so you have to suck down 100 ounces of Chinese beer to equal 60 ounces of real beer – er, American beer. Thus, when you drink Chinese beer, you’re simply going to ingest more ounces of beer, if not more alcohol. Thus, you’re ingesting more ounces of Chinese water, Chinese malt, Chinese formaldehyde. It’s not the next-day alcohol lingering in your system that causes the vaunted Chinese hangover; it’s all that other crap. But hey, at least if I were to die of a hangover my body would be relatively well-preserved.

Then there is fake alcohol – that is, alcohol that is sold as one thing but, after a swig, is revealed to be something else entirely. This happens with both beer and hard alcohol. One of my co-workers, a 24-year-old from Maryland, has a good story about seeing Pabst Blue Ribbon on a supermarket shelf in China. He was a PBR man in college, and seeing the quintessentially American brew lining a supermarket shelf in Jinan, China, of all places, infused him with a sense of obligation: I have to pay my respects and drink a few.

So that’s what he did – he drank a few, only a few. Yet despite his moderation he awoke the next day with the worst hangover of his life. This wasn’t an issue of drinking a lot (he had but a couple cans). And it wasn’t an issue of drinking a variety of booze (just Pabst). No, it was an issue of the “Pabst Blue Ribbon” being a far cry from the real Pabst Blue Ribbon that has helped broke college kids (and hip 20-somethings) stay buzzed since 1844. This Chinese Pabst was a knockoff that no doubt betrayed the lofty brewing standards set forth by Jacob and Frederick Pabst.

(Another fake alcohol story, if you’ll indulge me. Two guys I know took an overnight train ride a few years back. There are a few different ways in which you can take an overnight train. One is what’s called a soft sleeper, which is a room that has four relatively nice beds and a door to shun the noise and cigarette smoke that invariably fills Chinese trains. Another is a hard sleeper, which is like a soft sleeper but sans the door and with six beds instead of four; it’s a little more crowded, but totally serviceable. If you can’t procure a bed, then you are stuck sitting. My friends were unlucky enough to get stuck sitting. To ease the pain of this 22-hour overnight train ride, these guys bought a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, but because of the putrid taste and immediate nausea, they realized that the Jack was not Jack, but rather one of China’s innumerable fake products. One of my friends was quickly reduced to a floppy mess, and was forced to plop his head down on the table separating himself and the two Chinese people sitting across from him. With his forehead planted on his forearm, and his mouth aligned with the edge of the table, he suddenly vomited the contents of his stomach – a deplorable combination of noodles and Jack Daniels – all over the shared floor. Shortly thereafter he passed out cold, and for the rest of trip there was an stark role reversal: With a puddle of this foreigner’s puke at their feet, the Chinese people were in the odd position of being grossed out by a foreigner.) 

OK, how about some other perspectives on fake booze? This blogger from China rants about fake alcohol thus: 

This is a huge problem in mainland china, not only in Shenzhen, but from my experience i think the major area that its happening, is down here. I have been to places where when you open the bottle it burns your eyes it is so badly, obviously and sickeningly fake.

And this Web site reports: 

The poor often drink fake alcohol. There have been many reports of deaths and people going blind attributed to this practice. Poisonous, fake liquor left 40 people dead in Shanxi province in 1998….

Bootleg bottles are also a problem. In a three month period in 1998, 470 people were injured by exploding bottles, including 27 blinded by flying glass. The daughter of migrant workers was killed by glass shrapnel from a bootleg bottle of beer that exploded in Shanghai. The problem was blamed on inferior bottles and bottles that had been recycled too many times.

And a blogger who goes by Beijing Boyce wrote:

I can live with poor service, poor location, poor ambience, even poorly made drinks, but what I can’t live with is bars that lie about their booze….

I’m not alone in these sentiments. Last week, I asked two dozen readers their thoughts about Beijing’s drinking scene (full results in tomorrow’s newsletter). One theme: people are cautious about the alcohol in this city’s bars. Some snippets:

“…we all know about fake alcohol and just how much Beijing bars love the stuff: the situation is so bad in some parts of town that I just flat out to refuse to drink anything that isn’t beer – you just don’t know what you’re getting (and it’s not just small hole in the walls either)….

“Generally, buy stuff in bottles. Especially if you can see the staff open the bottle in front of you – it minimizes the risks of being served god knows what.”

And finally, this 2007 report:

In a check conducted before the May holiday, the Beijing Municipal Department of Industry and Commerce found that over half of the businesses that claim to sell real cigarettes and wine were actually selling counterfeit wines.

The department checked about 400 businesses including peddlers at shopping malls, supermarkets and restaurants before the holiday.

The authorities confiscated 3937 bottles of unqualified alcohol that covered almost all the best-selling brands across China. The Industry and Commerce department has put these enterprises on probation, pending further penalties.

I think fake booze may have been a big part of the problem with my crippling hangover today. After indulging in a mix of beer and wine, a crew of foreign teachers headed to a dance club. This particular club – like many others across China – likes to have foreigners milling about, and they’ll go out of their way to lure foreigners by offering them (us) free booze. When we got the club last night, we were immediately shown a table and gifted a bottle of Eristoff Vodka. Eristoff is, in theory, a “premium” vodka distributed by Bacardi. According to one England publication, “ERISTOFF is a high quality premium vodka - made from 100% pure wheat, triple distilled and charcoal filtered for absolute purity. At 37.5% ABV Eristoff has an exceptionally pure, clean, dry flavour and can be drunk neat or with a wide selection of mixers.” Well, it wasn’t 100 percent anything but nasty. Even as far as vodka goes, it was rank and vile. 

Of course, there is the possibility that I’m just getting a little old for this type of chicanery, for pre-drinking and going to clubs and tearing through bottles of vodka. I am now less than three weeks away from my 25^th birthday. At some point, it seems like I’ll have to give up on forays deep into the a.m. 

So, that’s why I didn’t play ball today, and why I am not drinking tonight…or any night in the next several. Tomorrow there should be basketball. Now, though, I must retreat to ibuprofen, sprite and my bed.

Spurning Soccer For Basketball: An American Sports Epidemic

Jinan is subject to what meteorologists call “temperature inversions.” I can’t claim to completely understand what temperature inversions are, but from what I have gathered, a temperature inversion is an anomalous layer of air in the atmosphere that acts like a cap or lid, preventing normal weather meteorological occurrences from occurring. Hot air under the inversion can’t escape upward (which it usually does), and cooler air from above can’t trickle down to the ground (which it usually does).

The best image I can conjure is the door of a sauna. Regardless of what may be going on in the area outside a sauna, the door acts as a barrier, thwarting any cool, dry air that may otherwise seep into the room. 

I’m quickly learning that, during the summer, Jinan is that sauna. The inversion to which Jinan is subject keeps the city’s bountiful heat, humidity and smog on the ground, allowing it to accumulate into a dizzying tonic that you can almost reach out and grab. Now, I’m from Kansas City, so I grew up with heat and humidity. But there is something different about the heat and humidity in Jinan, probably because it is infused with such a healthy dose of pollution and airborne crud. It’s hard to describe without having actually walked around in it. Just trust me that it’s gross, oppressive. 

Still, where there are basketball courts and free-time, I can’t help but want to hoop. So my buddy Jonathan, who you may remember from the swindle post, and I decide to head over to Li Ball’s court at about 4:30. Maybe there will be people playing, and if not, oh well; we’ll play each other. The heat is a little less oppressive than it was a few hours earlier, but not much. After all, the inversion in the atmosphere does to ground-level heat what a tourniquet does to blood: it prevents it from going anywhere. 

We are sweating by the time I stop at a little shop to buy water three minutes into the walk there. I spurn the refrigerator and its cold water and instead buy four bottles of water that are the same tepid temperature of the little shop in which they were sitting. Jonathan, who seems to be almost annoyed by my affinity for warm and hot water, informs me that he has three bottles that, for the past three hours, have been cooling in his freezer. I shudder at the thought of feeling the sharp, prickly feeling of ice-cold water shocking my insides; I forgo my usual public health announcement that cold water causes cancer, while hot water prevents cancer (and even relieves stress!). 

After a lazy 10-minute walk we round the corner into the apartment complex which houses Li Ball’s court. As we make the turn, we realize that, like a pair of high schoolers didn’t bring No. 2s to the SATs, we didn’t bring a ball to the basketball court. And there is no one else playing, which means no balls anywhere. This is a distressing revelation, for it means that one (or both) of us will have to retrace our steps back to the apartment, and then once again back to the court. It’s annoying on a practical level, and downright aggravating in light of the fact that sweat has already seeped through our shirts. 

At this moment I hear someone call my name from behind. It is no doubt a Chinese person, for the V is David is not pronounced like a V, but instead a W. There is no real V sound in Chinese, which insures that there is no real way for a Chinese person who didn’t major in English to ever say my name right. Take a moment to try to say David without even touching your top set of teeth to your lips; that’s how David sounds when a Chinese person says it. (This no V thing also seriously complicates teaching the number “5.” Invariably, it comes out sounding like “fi” with a W and three vowels tagged onto the end: fiwaue. At least when my kids try it.)

The person who said my name is a regular at Li Ball’s court, someone, if memory serves, who has been there every single time I have. He is a totally normal looking man, probably about 40. Average height, decent looking, a full head of hair that is combed to the side. I have a rapport with this guy, so we exchange pleasantries the best we can for sharing a combined 48 words. 

I tell him that we do not have a ball: Women meiyou qiu. I learned each of these words on Jinan’s basketball courts: women, or we, I learned from people saying, “Our ball”; meiyou, or don’t have, I learned because people shout it when someone takes a stupid shot; qui I learned because…well, that’s a no-brainer. The man nods understandingly and tells me that that is no problem. He either does not understand the quandary or knows where a ball is at the apartment complex. 

The latter is true. When we step foot on the court he points to the near baseline and seems to tell us to stay put. He then walks slowly to the other end of the court, the way you walk when it’s a million degrees outside. He mosies past the other baseline and opens what appears to be a closet on the ground floor of the apartment. Sure enough, he emerges with a ball and rolls it from about 50 feet away. It’s a strike, beelining to my feet as though guided by some invisible force. He waves and walks off; he’s not playing today.

Jonathan and I play a few games of one-on-one before the heat-induced fatigue/laziness reduces us to just shooting around. Our unspoken conclusion seems to be that, with the weather the way it is, there really is no point to turning this into a rigorous exercise session; that could do more harm than good. So we just shoot around, sweat and chat. 

We spend a good bit of time talking about basketball, about his Celtics, about whether or not Tom Izzo would make a good NBA coach, about how Derrick Rose is going to be better than Dwyane Wade over the next five years but no pundits want to say it. Eventually, though, our conversation turns to soccer. We are in the throes of the world’s greatest sporting event, the World Cup, and soccer is on our minds.

After a few minutes, I say something about soccer that is without a doubt true: I could have been better at soccer than any other sport, including basketball. Jonathan quickly and earnestly responds, “Yeah, me too.” 

To me, this is pretty incredible: Two guys who embraced basketball over soccer, though they both acknowledge that they could have been better at soccer.

My body is much more built for soccer than basketball, the sport which stole my heart and ultimately prevented me from ever cultivating my potential soccer talent. I am a hair under 5-11, which is hardly an ideal height for basketball, a sport which, more than any other, discriminates in the favor of vertical giants. What’s more, I am not a great jumper. I have the hops to shoot jump shots, but not to really soar the way that would be required if I were ever to become a truly formidable athlete on the basketball court. I’m also thick through the legs – mom used to call me “Thunder Thighs” – which seems to be a common denominator among some of the world’s best footballers. 

Body aside, my ability to play soccer belied how much I cared about it. That is, I was always good in little league even though I never played or cared about the sport. Had I cared, who knows? The skills that are required of basketball – limitless energy, ability to understand passing angles, knowing how to play physically but not recklessly – made me a good soccer player when I played on rec teams all through grade school. But once middle school hit, and once I started devoting my weekends to basketball tournaments and trips to inner-city gyms in Kansas City, Mo., soccer was nixed from the mix. 

Jonathan’s story is not dissimilar. He played soccer all through grade school, but he never really devoted himself to the sport the way he did basketball. He is tall and strong and coordinated, and like me his build is more suited for the pitch than the court. (Importantly, he is tall only on a normal-person scale, not a basketball-player scale. He’s probably 6-3, which is the height of many quality guards. That is not, however, the height of quality forwards, which is what Jonathan always played growing up.) 

So, here we have two fairly athletic 24-year-olds, each of whom played soccer, and played soccer pretty well, even though we never really cared about it. Alas, each of us spurned soccer in lieu of basketball, a sport that, per the physical abnormalities required to play it at an elite level, we couldn’t really thrive at. 

That’s not to say we wasted our time with basketball, or that we harbor regrets about our sport of choice, or that we aren’t good at basketball. I was, after all, invited to walk-on at my Div. II university on the strength of my buttery shooting touch, and I will always be good enough to get picked up when I played at random gyms because the ability to rain jump shots is a skill that even the tallest and springiest of basketball players don’t often possess. And while my basketball experiences with Jonathan are confined to the courts of China, I’m sure that he, too, will never have trouble playing pick-up ball because, even though he’s short by NBA standards, he’s no midget. An athletic six-foot-three guy, like a guy who can rain jump shots, will always be a commodity in non-competitive hoops.

But the fact that we never devoted ourselves to soccer is a telling (and damning) testament to the sport’s place among American youth. Just think: The United States hosted the World Cup in 1994, when we were both impressionable eight-year-olds. We both watched that Cup (and all ensuing Cups) zealously, for while we ultimately didn’t choose soccer, we nonetheless appreciate and enjoy the game. Still, we couldn’t be bothered to dedicate ourselves to soccer: Despite the fact that so-so white athletes are the minute minority in the upper-reaches of the basketball world, we made the conscious choice of basketball over soccer. That is, we chose a sport (basketball) in which we were resigned to relative mediocrity over a sport (soccer) in which we had the physical tools to compete at a higher (if not elite) level. 

And this is what has always happened in America, and likely what will continue to happen, even with the endearing 2010 U.S. squad’s jaunt to the knockout round in this year’s World Cup. Kids rarely choose soccer, even if it makes sense for them to do so.

As I watched the States’ final game again Ghana, I couldn’t help but imagine what it would have been like had, say, LeBron James opted for soccer. Every time Landon Donovan lofted a searching ball into the box – balls which invariably skirted across the tops of the U.S. players’ heads – I fantasized about LeBron soaring in to head one home. And while guys who, like LeBron, are 6-foot-8 don’t oft succeed at the highest levels of international soccer, you can’t convince me that he wouldn’t be a kick ass soccer player. He is a true physical anomaly, a never-before-seen mix of power, athleticism and coordination. Remember, had a scholarship offer to play wide receiver at Ohio State, even though he was the nation’s best high school basketball player. Someone who could have played at one of the top football universities in the nation but instead opted to become the first overall pick in the NBA Draft surely could have learned to play soccer, right? 

It’s easy to envision a number of top-flight American athletes playing soccer. What if you put Tennessee Titans running back Chris Johnson out on the wing? Or the majestically coordinated Chris Paul in midfield? Had these guys been born in any other country in the world, they would have likely been trying to cultivate their immense physical attributes into soccer skills. Instead, they’re playing American sports. Which is exactly what Jonathan and I did.

Look, I’m not saying that Jonathan and I would have been anything special at soccer. Could we have played in high school? Yes. Could we have played at a small-time university? Maybe. Could we have played in the World Cup? Certainly not. But even if we aren’t world-class caliber athletes, our story rings true across the country: Kids who knew full well that they were better suited for soccer still chose to devote themselves to basketball. And are still devoting themselves to basketball.

A Sick Move, I

Li Ball’s court, first introduced here, has become my go-to spot to play basketball here in Jinan. When I started this blog, I figured Shandong Normal University would be where most of my balling took place. That is, after all, where I first developed any sort of camaraderie with Chinese players, and where I thought I could establish myself as a regular with people who were more or less my own age.

Indeed, I still make the trek over to SNU sometimes. But Li Ball’s court, which is right up the street, has supplanted it as my favorite place to play for reasons that transcend proximity (although in a city of millions with shoddy public transportation, and with a motor bike that is broken as often as it’s not, proximity does play a factor). The backboards at Li’s court are glass, the balls are always properly inflated (and won’t scrape the clouds like they often do at SNU), the court is perfectly flat. The flatness of a court, at home, would be a no-brainer – like saying an infield had dirt. But in China, where cracks and divots and cancerous lumps dot courts everywhere, having a flat court is a veritable luxury.


Li Ball is the one in the white shirt.

And then there are the players themselves, starting with Li Ball, who I like to think of as the court’s Don Corleone. There he is, after the games have ended, welcoming the players over the base of the goal where he sits to cool down. “What is it?” he would say. “What can I do for you? You know I can’t say no on the day of a basketball game.”

Even if Li doesn’t possess Corleone-type power, he is nonetheless the most prominent figure at the courts. He is the one who always calls me to play; he is the one who dictates the teams; and often times instead of playing he’ll instead stand attention along the sidelines, dishing out officiating decrees and announcing the score in a way that is never questioned. This is a welcome change from the games I used to play at my old stomping grounds, 24 Hours Fitness in Kansas City, Mo. There, berserk argument would erupt about the score at least once a week. There was of course bickering about foul call, which is to be expected. But the score is the one thing that is subject to the unbending edicts of mathematics, and even that would inspire incredulous shouting and cussing the likes of which never failed to make me laugh (and cringe) with exasperation. Sometimes when these arguments would flare up, I would just dip out in the hallway and get a drink of water while people bitched about the score. All too often, nothing was settled when I came back. Part of the problem was ego; part of the problem was that if a team lost, they could be sitting for up to 30 or 40 minutes. Thus, no one wanted to lose, even if it meant forgetting/flubbing the score in your favor.

There is none of that hear, though. Li Ball is in control.


There even seems to be less smog when I play at this court.

The other players are cool too. I have been introduced to them all, but for the life of me I can’t remember their names (save the short fat dude who introduced himself as Tom). I know their faces, though, and I have even run into a couple of them out on the streets of Jinan, never far from the courts themselves. They range in age from young (a handful of 20-somethings) to old (30 to 45). Before long I’ll join that second segment of the playing population, all those 30-plus year-olds who have lost their hops and have to increasingly rely on guile to get things done on the court. Thankfully, I’m not at the age yet. I still have a few ounces of athleticism floating around in my legs, though I know it will soon leak out. There are a few other guys who still possess my sprightliness, and I invariably end up guarding them. (Linguistic note: In America, defensive lingo is always a variation of the verb have. Something like, “I have this guy,” or, “I’ll get him,” or, “I got ball.” In China, the verb for playing defense it look or watch, as in, “You watch him,” which translates to “Ni kan ta.” – “You look him.”)

Bottom line, the court is great, there are always games to be played, and everyone is nice – no malicious elbows to the head, no long stints sitting – even if you lose. As such, Li Ball is who I call if I want to play.

A Sick Move, II

There is, however, one big drawback to Li Ball’s court: It’s dirty as hell. This uncleanliness is hardly unique to Li’s court.; maybe it’s just more noticeable because there are few other defects. Today one of the regulars has taken a big broom – essentially a long wooden stick with a bunch of wispy bits of straw on the end – and is doing a windshield-wiper motion along the baseline. In the process, he is sending plumes of dust into the air that force people to scatter out of the way. I don’t how much of an impact this has: Even with the housekeeping, whenever anyone takes a dribble, dust is displaced like water that has been struck with a rock.

Now, basketball is hardly a sanitary activity. Really, anytime a bunch of guys are clamoring to handle something (cards, video game controllers, etc.), it pretty much can’t be clean. I get that. But when you look at your hands after playing a few minutes of basketball in China…wow. It’s disgusting.

And while it could well be true that dirt isn’t all that dirty, it’s not just dirt that makes China dirty. Which brings us to a larger point about China in general. Like Li’s court, it’s dirty as hell. The polluted air is what you hear about when people talk of how dirty China is, and that’s not an exaggeration. But now that I’ve been here for 10 months, the smog’s not even what bothers me anymore. It’s the dirtiness, the germiness.

I came to China a little on the OCD side about germs. But instead of curing me of my germ aversion, China has merely made me more sensitive to it. And there are any number of things that Chinese people do that are downright gross. (Having now reread this post, I don’t know if there is any way for me to make this not sound discriminatory: the Chinese do a lot of gross stuff. But at the same time, I don’t know if there is any way to dispute the claim that, by the American standards I grew up with, it’s not true. That’s not to say the Chinese are stupid or mean or savage or lesser. I’m just saying that they have some tendencies that would never fly in America – just like Americans have tendencies that wouldn’t fly in China. I know that I am speaking from an American viewpoint, not a privileged viewpoint. Heck, maybe America is just too sensitive to cleanliness. This article and this article seem to hint at just that.)

You can’t walk one block on any remotely-populated street and not hear someone make a deep, guttural hacking sound – a telltale prelude to a huge loogy. Just yesterday I got off a train (I spent the last 10 days in Chengdu, hence the dearth of recent posts), and at the exit gate I looked down to see a pair of stringy, yellow-green clusters of stuff that used to reside in the area between someone’s mouth and lungs. To be fair, at least this person cleared their throat after they got off the train, which is more than can be said for innumerable people who added that putrid, hacking noise to the soundtrack of the 30-hour train ride. And in a land of 300,000,000 smokers, I can assure this is a never ending soundtrack. The staircases at my school, where parents conglomerate to wait for their children, are another hotbed for spitting. Really, all of China is a hotbed for spitting.

Then there is also the move where people blow their noses, but without a handkerchief or Kleenex. They just send the contents of their nose jutting toward the ground. When I was a kid we called this the “Texas Air Hanky.” The last time you saw it was either during a hockey game or on the streets of China.

It is also not uncommon to see little (or big) piles of vomit resting at the base of a tree. If you have to puke then you have to puke; I get that. But I’ve seen more ground vomit in my eight months in China than I did in my 24 years in America. And I’ve been to a lot of bars in America.

People are also apt to relieve themselves on sidewalks. “People” in this case could mean everyone from itty-bitty toddlers (who wear crotch-less pants for quick and painless popping-and-squatting) to old men (who know better but just don’t care). Quick story about public relief of the excretory system: my mom, dad and I came to visit my brother in China a few years back, and on a plane from Xian to Guilin, my dad was the odd man out on a seat, stuck sitting on the other side of the aisle from my brother, mom and I, who controlled our own three-seat section of the plane. Pa was wedged next to a little kid who was wearing the bottomless pants. (If you’re having trouble imagining what this looks like, just think if you cut a big oval-shaped hole in your jeans from the top of your zipper, through the legs, back around to the midway point of the seat. Or you could just >look here.) Well, this kid – seated about five-and-a-half inches from my dad – unloads his bowels then and there, right after takeoff. It gets on the mom a little bit, and while it didn’t actually touch pa, he nonetheless got an eyeful of doodoo. It was a cultural experience he could never have had in a land where parents, you know, make their kids wear diapers.

This may all seem like superficial stuff. OK, so there is spit on the ground. So there is a little puke tucked against the base of the occasional tree. So kids relieve themselves everywhere, but who has ever been successful telling a 14-month-old when and where to go? (Anyway, is having a bunch of soiled diapers that much cleaner than the occasional puddle?)

The thing is, it’s not all superficial. The eyesores are accompanied by a host of things are more than just eyesores. It really is dirty – and not just dirt dirty. It’s really dirty.

There are, for instance, no soap dispensers in public restrooms, save nice restaurants. (Beijing and Shanghai pay a little more heed to soap, but like I’ve said, Jinan ain’t no Shanghai.) The bathrooms at our school feature puddles of piss, and soap dispensers with soap that’s so watered-down it surely houses more germs than it prevents.

And it isn’t just our crummy school. It’s the country at large. There wasn’t a drop of soap on the train I got off yesterday. The people who handle the food you buy off the street don’t wear gloves on their hands – just a discernable layer of brownish crud that can’t possibly be clean. And those Texas Air Hankies don’t just happen on the street. The last time I went to McDonald’s someone was pulling the time-trusted maneuver in the sink in the dining area.

Like so many of the things I talk about on this blog, the germiness of China is hard to quantify (heck, germiness isn’t even a real word). How the Chinese are always drinking hot water, how much the Chinese like to stretch, how much counterfeit clothing there is: these things are all observable, but not necessarily measurable.

The same goes for the sanitation conditions. I haven’t the scientific prowess to conduct a study of the actual germiness of China – just the time and inclination to write about it and to make up words to describe it.

But even if I can’t convey in any sort of statistical way just how germy it is in China, I can rehash an event that beats home the sanitation issue.

After a 24-hour trip that started in Kansas City, I landed in Beijing in early September. If you recall, early September was at the height of the H1N1 craze – that is, the Pig Flu craze – and people were all in a tizzy about it. Especially in China. This article, for instance, entitled “China faces grim situation as H1N1 escalates,” was published the very day I landed in China. The country took to quarantining people – like this guy, a professor from the University of Michigan, and this guy, the mayor of a major U.S. city. If you rode on a plane with someone who turned out to be sick, you could be quarantined. If you coughed a little bit too much, you could be quarantined. If you looked extra fatigued, you could be quarantined.

As another precaution, there was a rapid spread of what looked like little plastic handguns that, when stuck up to someone’s forehead, gave a quick temperature scan. One of these guns/thermometers was pressed against my forehead as I exited the plane in Beijing. I was a little bit nervous, because anything from the mildest of temperature abnormalities to a slight technical malfunction could have landed me in a Chinese quarantine, something I’d rather not see first-hand.

By the grace of God, I waltzed through the sickness-detection chamber A-OK. (I was, after all, in fine health.) But after the lengthy flight and comp coffee, I needed to hit a bathroom when I got on the ground, so I headed for the nearest bathroom. It was just like an American airport bathroom – a cavernous room with urinal upon urinal against a teal-green wall. I relieved myself and, when I was heading out, beelined toward the sink to rinse up. The American equivalent to this WC would have had a bounty of soap and a hand sanitizer dispenser as well, just in case you’re too lazy to actually wash. (Even the Kansas City airport has hand sanitizer dispensers, so it can’t be that far-out of an addition. Like I said, I’ve always been a bit of a germophobe, so I notice these things.)

Alas, there was no soap in the bathroom. So one moment I was getting my temperature taken, an obligatory procedure that could well have landed me in a quarantine because Chinese officials are paranoid (justified or not) about the spread of H1N1. The next moment, I am taking a leak in a bathroom that doesn’t have any soap.

Li Ball’s court doesn’t have any soap either.

Is it In You? Well, It's In China

Food can be something of an issue in China. It’s not that the food here is bad. On the contrary, there are a slue of dishes that I love, even if I can hardly say their names. But eating Chinese food every day can be wearying. It’d be like going out to eat Chinese food every day of the week in the States. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to do that. When you live in China, though, that’s basically what you’re doing. That’s why, just as I used to go to Chinese restaurants in America for a break from the domestic diet, I often go to restaurants that boast foreign food cuisine in China for a break from the domestic diet.

There is a pizza place in particular that has become a staple of my diet. I found it almost by accident, which, unless someone took you there, is the only way you could find it. It is located on a street that looks like any old street in Jinan. To the left of the restaurant is a karaoke bar and clothing store; to the right is an alley and a lady selling a variety of snacks and drinks out of her mobile store, which is little more than a wide, non-functioning refrigerator with wheels.

Most restaurants that boast foreign food in China are descript – that is, they are designed and marketed in such a way that you know they aren’t your run of the mill, rice-and-whatever restaurant. KFC, for instance, which is huge here in China, always boast huge cutouts of Colonel Sanders smiling invitingly at would-be customers down on the street. McDonald’s, also huge here, flaunts those golden arches at least as much as they do back home. And Pizza Hut – which price-wise is nothing less than fine dining in Jinan – has two locations here, each of which are encased by flashy walls of windows looking in, and table after table of affluent customers looking out.

Indeed, if a restaurant has foreign food on the menu, then a restaurant is something of a novelty (at least in Jinan). And if your restaurant is a novelty, then there is a good chance that you will let passersby know that your restaurant is a novelty by advertising, and advertising loudly.

But this restaurant doesn’t do that. Nope, it’s just slipped onto Any Street, with a nondescript green door acting as the gateway into an awesome (and reasonably priced) dining experience. They have pasta and French Fries and, above all, a variety of pizzas. All-veggie pizzas. All-meat pizzas. All-cheese pizza. And, my personal fave, The Hot One, which is decked with spices and peppers and all sorts of other goodness that you could expect from a legitimate pizzeria.

What makes this place all the more endearing is that the whole scene looks like a pizza joint from any college town in America. When you open the door, there is a 25-foot-long strip of the wood floor cutting down the middle of the narrow interior, leading to another door – this one with the top half cut out – that leads to the kitchen. On either side of that walkway are tables. The first six are tables with chairs; the ones closest to the kitchen are booths.

After my girlfriend and I eat our pizzas and play Scrabble for like two hours, she indulges me in a trip to a nearby basketball court. It’s 9:45 and dark, but these particular courts, which we stumbled upon last week, house basketball well into the night.

It’s a bizarre scene, unlike anything I’ve seen in America. There are maybe 20 courts, each partially lit by varying levels of light radiating from the streetlamps on the adjacent street. The courts are situated on the edge of a university campus, and the players who are shooting around tonight reflect that demographic. Guys (and one girl) from the ages about 18-20 are beating balls into the ground across a swath of land that spans about three-fourths the area of a football field. There are so many players, and so many balls, that it sounds like the basketball camps held at my old high school, where a few hundreds kids would squeeze into the high school gym and frantically run drills with the omniscient thwack of the balls resonating throughout the fieldhouse. Of course, there is no field house here. But the acoustics are such – what with the sprawl of concrete – that it is a veritable echo chamber, like a series of loudspeakers surround the area and are pumping in nonstop thwacks.

Tonight I am just snooping around, opting not to play on account of the nine-inch pizza and three beers occupying my stomach. But I do survey the scene with intrigue. It is kind of eerie, the way everything looks and sounds. You can make out where the people are, but the light is so faint on some of the courts that people are merely silhouettes, the noise of the ball revealing as much as anything you can actually see. You can tell that shots are getting lofted rimward, but with no nets, the only way to decipher between a make and a miss is to listen for the metallic clank of the rim. If there is a thud, they missed. No thud equals a make. Or an airball.

Luckily there are some things more discernable than makes and misses. Like, say, the plethora of sports drinks lining the sidelines. Unlike myself, the kids playing ball tonight have opted against beer, and are instead imbibing in bottles of Gatorade, which are sold – along with ice cream, candy and cigarettes – at a kiosk near the entrance. Seeing these bottles of Gatorade is nothing new, for Gatorade has, like adidas and the aforementioned KFC, made a concerted push into the Chinese market.

And the success of this push – and it has indeed been successful – is no doubt linked to Gatorade’s strategic marriage to basketball.

The ubiquity of Gatorade bottles now, in June of 2010, can be linked to a marketing move made back in March of 2007. It was back in ’07 that Gatorade expanded its relationship with the NBA, which itself was increasing its popularity march around the globe, in an effort to tap into Asian markets, China in particular. From the Sports Business Journal:

[Gatorade], which has been an NBA sponsor since 1984, becomes the 17th company to partner with the NBA in China….

“The NBA is growing internationally, and it makes sense to do it together,” said Gatorade’s Jeff Urban, who officially assumes his new role with the company as its senior vice president of sports marketing on April 1.

Gatorade’s expanded deal comes as the NBA targets aggressive growth in China leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The league is expected to play preseason games in China in October and is working to attract private investors to create a separate NBA China entity to further develop its international business.

Gatorade currently sells products in China but until now has never directly partnered with the NBA in those efforts.

The company is a sponsor of USA Basketball, which is marketed by the NBA. Last summer, Gatorade featured Miami Heat star Dwyane Wade on bottles of Gatorade sold in China when the men’s USA Basketball team played two exhibition games in Guangzhou leading up to the FIBA World Championships in Japan.

“We had a relationship with Gatorade in Hong Kong five years ago, but this is the first time they have partnered with us in China,” [an NBA official] said. “They were a major partner in USA Basketball and they had a ton of activation around the games in Guangzhou. That helped make their decision easy as they looked to do more with us in China.”

Gatorade also will activate on the grassroots level with the NBA in China by partnering with the league in the NBA’s Jam Van touring promotion that begins this month with visits to 24 cities in that country.

And from the Sports Business Daily:

Gatorade has expanded its NBA marketing partnership to include China for the first time as part of a multi-year renewal….

Gatorade, the official sports drink of the NBA, WNBA and NBA D-League, is also continuing to work with the NBA on a weekly basketball reality show called “NBA Zhi Zao” (“Made in the NBA”), which airs on 43 channels in China…

The move appears to have paid dividends. Not only is Gatorade the drink of choice the courts tonight, but also over at Shandong Normal, where Wang, the Refreshment Man, peddles Gatorade side-by-side with his water. And along with cigarettes, the chain-smoking dudes from that other university were indulging in bottles of Gatorade between games. (It’s unclear if Gatorade’s physiological properties can outweigh the effects of a pack of cigarettes, but that seemed to be what they were trying to figure out.)

And it’s not just basketball courts. You can find a bottle of Gatorade at any street shop (of which there are an infinite amount), and the sports drinks section at supermarkets are invariably huge. At least some of this boom is the result of Gatorade’s 2007 partnership with the NBA, a move that was in no way haphazard.

While PepsiCo, which owns Gatorade, has already invested heavily in China, and while anecdotal evidence (such as Gatorade-lined basketball courts) suggests that PepsiCo products like “G” are already going strong here, the company recently announced plans to pour even more money into the Chinese market. From the Associated Press:

PepsiCo Inc. said Friday that it plans to invest an additional $2.5 billion in China in the next three years on new plants and research facilities as the food and beverage maker builds up its presence in the growing market.

The company made the announcement in a news release Friday from Shanghai, site of the Shanghai Expo, where PepsiCo is a sponsor of the USA Pavilion. That planned spending is in addition to the $1 billion investment it announced in 2008 and plans to complete this year….

Money from PepsiCo's additional investment in China will be used to open 10 to 12 new manufacturing plants, create a new research and development center, open five new farms for potatoes and oats and to build its brands.

The company will research and develop new products just for the Asian market. It already offers drinks inspired by traditional Chinese medicine and Lay's potato chips in flavors tailored just to the market, including cool cucumber and crispy prawn.*

"We are building expertise and infrastructure now so that we can have a strong, sustainable manufacturing and agricultural base to serve the diverse and growing needs of consumers across China," Chief Executive Indra Nooyi said.

* I can attest that these are as nasty as they sound.

On an editorial note (do I need to specify that on a blog?), it is impressive what PepsiCo has done in China. PepsiCo not only owns Gatorade, but also some other successful enterprises in China. As I mentioned earlier, KFC and Pizza Hut are both big-time chains in China, and each is owned by PepsiCo (or, more accurately, by Yum! Brands, which was spawned by PepsiCo to handle the company’s restaurants).

It’s not at all uncommon for kids in class, when game time rolls around, to blurt out “Team KFC!” when I ask what they want their team name to be. Moreover, each of the three Jinan branches of my school have KFCs within walking distance; one of the schools has two KFCs within walking distance. And Pizza Hut is nothing less than fine dining in Jinan. I have only eaten there once, but on that one occasion I dropped more than 100 yuan for dinner. Convert it back to dollars, and it’s about the same that you’d pay back home. Anytime you convert something from yuan to dollars and it’s the same as you’d pay back home, you know that you’re spending a pretty penny for whatever it is that you happen to be buying. Tropicana juice and Doritos brand chips are also staples in Jinanese stores, and both of them are also owned by PepsiCo.

And tonight at least, PepsiCo also owns the sidelines.

Kicking It at a Soccer Game

I have made no bones about how easy my job is. In fact, the disparaging remarks I’ve made about the shameful ease of my professional life could warrant its own label on the right side of this blog. The tag could be, “My job: the void in my soul,” or maybe, “Idiot’s guide to playing games with six-year-olds.”

Nonetheless, Sundays kick my ass. I teach from 8:00 to 5:15 each Saturday, and then turn around and clock an 8:00-to-7:00 shift on Sunday. Even if you’re just dicking around with kiddos and concocting variations of basketball and bowling that can be played in the confines of a hot, cramped classroom, working 11 straight hours will drain you. Sure, it’s not the same fatigue that a physicist has after a long day of crunching numbers, or the fatigue that a college student has after churning out a trio of final exams in one week. But still, Sundays are brutal.

But somehow, I summon the energy at the end of day today, Sunday, to join some co-workers for a professional soccer match here in Jinan. Jinan is home to Shandong’s team in the Chinese Super League, which is China’s (bastardized) equivalent to the English Premiership or the German Bundesliga. Founded in 2004, the CSL has 16 teams. Shandong won the whole thing in 2008 and 2006, and last season the squad finished fourth. So we have a decent side to support.

I get off work at 7:00, hop on my bike and take a 10 minute jaunt over to Shandong Provincial Stadium, which I’ve driven past but never been inside. With the setting sun as the backdrop, I can see the stadium from at least a half-mile away. I can’t tell if it is an abomination or an interesting bit of architecture. It is shaped like an oval and dwarfed by four massive banks of lights jutting inward, like they used to stand upright but have since been slanted by a microburst. Built in 1988, it has some vague, fleeting sense of communism. Every inch of it is gray, and the flashing neon lights that dot the upper perimeter don’t hide the fact that the structure itself is utterly devoid of color – and life. It’s like they went out of their to build it in such a way that no one could possibly have any opinion about it, good or bad.

I don’t know if they’re going to sell beer inside, so I stop and buy four cans of Tsingtao at a nearby supermarket. (Interestingly, Tsingtao cans have more alcohol than the bottles – 4.3 percent to 3.1 percent.) I park my ride at a nearby intersection, which has turned into a quasi-parking lot, and pay the overseer one yuan for her trouble. She is probably 65 years-old and walks with a noticeable limp. As I’m locking up my bike, she keeps on pointing to my basket, which holds an old, falling-apart pair of shoes (which act as my brakes). I reckon that she is telling me that she’s not responsible if the shoes get stolen, but if someone steals those things, they probably need them more than I do.

I weave my way through the throngs of people hocking tickets. It’s not entirely clear whether they are sanctioned ticket vendors or scalpers, and I don’t have the linguistic chops to figure that out. One of these vendors/scalpers is literally standing at the window for the actual ticket office when I get there. He points to a map of the stadium as he tries to coax me into paying 200 yuan for a ticket that is apparently worth 300 yuan. But I have no intention of paying even 200, especially when my objective is to simply get in and find my friends who are already inside (they don’t have to work until 7, like I). I pay 30 yuan for a ticket and walk over to the line to get in.

In an exchange that is 40 percent speaking and 60 percent pointing, I ask a security guard if it’s cool for me to take some beers into the venue. I have little doubt that it’s allowed because, after all, you can take beer almost anywhere in China (or at least Jinan). You can B.Y.O.B. at restaurants, and no one will think twice if you are walking down the street with a brew or even if you hop on a bus toting some suds. Not that it’s common to see people traipsing around with beer, but it’s certainly not a huge deal. This phenomenon of unmitigated drinking prompted one of my co-workers’ friends to opine, after a visit to China, that people in China are freer than people in America. In the case of alcohol, it’s probably true. (In the case of the media, Internet and a semblance of a democratic legal process, it’s probably not true.).

Alas, the security guard delivers the bad news that you can’t bring your own beer, and I am left with a slight conundrum: should I down these four beers as quickly as I can and miss the first several minutes of the game (which has just begun), or should I part with the booze in exchange for catching all the action. That’s when I remember that it’s soccer, not basketball, and as such there IS no action. (Mandatory dis on soccer for being boring, check). I trade 12 minutes of game time for the four beers, then I go in.

Once in, I set out to find my buddy Toby. Working against me are the facts that I have no idea where he is, that this is a 40,000-seat stadium and that I’m slightly buzzed. Working in my favor is the fact that Toby is a 6-5 black dude, and in China, 6-5 black dudes are about as common as teetotalers at Mardi Gras. It takes me all of three or four minutes to spot Toby, who is sitting just about parallel with the end line on the west side of the stadium. I join him and his Chinese girlfriend for the remainder of the first half, which thoroughly dispels my notion about soccer being devoid of action. In the 30 minutes that I catch, there are three goals (two by Jinan), and two more shots clank off the crossbar. In addition, there are a pair of sizeable scuffles – big enough to prompt guys to enter the fray from the bench and for the ref to give guys yellow cards. It’s actually pretty exciting.

The fans also add to the entertainment. Now, the place is still empty – there are probably 12,00 people. But the fans who are in attendance are doing a hell of a job making it feel lively. Part of that zest manifests in timely, knowledgeable cheering. And part of it comes in the form of venomous chants directed at the other team’s fans. That venom may be due to the fact that the opponent was from Hunan, and according to Toby’s girlfriend, Hunan doesn’t have the best reputation in China. I don’t have any proof of Hunan’s shady underbelly – and neither does she. But when it comes to vilifying and discriminating against people for nothing more than their place of birth, you can argue that rumors and perception are (at least) as important as the facts. With disdain in her voice, Toby’s girl says that Hunan is known for criminals, and that it is the epicenter or China’s vast fake clothing market. Again, I don’t know if this girl was spitting facts or B.S., but she took them to be fact, and that’s what’s pertinent here. The hatred being spewed toward the Hunan fans backed up the idea that Hunan is indeed loathed, at least by people from Shandong.

The Hunan cheering section, which is off to the left as I look at the field, is small. There are probably 200 people wearing Hunan jerseys, waving Hunan flags, and chanting Hunan chants in a sectioned-off nook of the stadium behind the north goal. There are nearly as many security guards sitting in that section as there were fans, to either prevent or protect. The Shandong fans are shouting and pointing quite a bit during the first half, especially when the little scuffles broke out, but that disdain only intensifies after the break. Hunan quickly knots the score at two apiece, and this seems to galvanize their supporters. They are boisterous as ever, and when Shandong makes a few substitutions, the Hunan fans start up a chant that, according to Toby’s girlfriend, was something to the effect of, “You switch one c*^t for another c*^t!” There are all sorts of other things being chanted and yelled, but Toby’s girlfriend can’t quite make it out. Suffice it to say that they aren’t well-wishes.

As for the actual soccer, it’s not that great. Even I can tell that there are a lot of flubbed chances. There is one play in particular where the Hunan defender falls flat on his ass, allowing a Shandong player to race unabated up the sideline with the ball. Somehow, despite being handed a golden opportunity, the team doesn’t so much as get off a shot. And then there is another play by Hunan where they have a free kick from about 25 yards out. One player taps the ball to his right, directly in the path of a streaking teammate who is all geared up to smash the ball goalward. Well, he smashes it all right – about 20 feet over the crossbar. He was roundly applauded and mocked by the crowd, but truth be told, he is no worse than any of Shandong’s players.*

* Quick note: as is the case with professional basketball in China, professional soccer teams are allowed only a few foreigners. Shandong’s foreigners are Fred Benson (Netherlands), Siniša Radanović (Serbia) and Carlos Santos de Jesus (from Brazil, by way of Croatia), and Roda Antar (born in Freetown, Sierra Leone). None of them appear to be any good.

After the game, I say goodbye to my friends and walk along the sidewalk toward the intersection housing my bike. As I walk, I notice a throng of Shandong fans conglomerating on the north side of the stadium. They are yelling with great hostility, but when I look at the stadium to see who they are yelling at, I see no one. The crowd and the yelling swell, and the tangible sense of hostility intrigues me to the point where leaving is out of the question. I join the throng, unable to deduce what’s going but hopelessly curious nonetheless.

Eventually people in the crowd take to throwing water bottles at the stadium. The stadium has two tiers, and they are launching them at the upper tier. I immediately feel bad for whatever poor sucker(s) is standing on the concourse up there, but upon inspection, there is no one standing there. It’s just an empty concourse and a 10-foot-wide entryway into the a section of seats. Yet the Shandong fans keep chucking, bottle after bottle. A roar goes up when one of the bottles finds its way into the entryway; that’s where they are aiming. More and more bottles are launched at that entryway. At this point it becomes like that scene from Independence Day where all of the planes take aim at the alien spacecraft – that entryway is the spacecraft, the people are the planes, the bottles the missiles. I still can’t tell what’s going on though, but the bottles keep flying.

Finally, I conjure up an image of the stadium in my head and realize that this entryway – which is labeled with a giant “7” – must be just about where the Hunan fans’ section was. Yeah, that’s about right: I was sitting along the end line, to the west, and then I exited and walked around the north end of the stadium, which is where I am now. The Hunan section was to my left as I watched the game – to the north, that is – and now there are hundreds of people standing around the northern concourse, more than a few of them hurling water bottles at the entrance into the section of seating that must have been at least close to the Hunan sheering section.

The cops eventually break up the bottle-throwing party and I gladly head home. It would have been fun to see what transpired had the Shandong fans been allowed to persist, but at the same time I’m pretty tired. It is, after all, Sunday.

Should anyone have read this and expected it would at some point turn to basketball, I promise we’ll get back to hoops soon…