A Writer's Life Page 4

  After some days of uncertainty, the Chinese women in early June were given permission by their leaders in Beijing to proceed with their flight plans to the United States. And true to form—while appearing before large crowds in Portland, Oregon, and San Jose, in the New Jersey Meadowlands, and in Foxboro, Massachusetts—they recorded victories over all the teams they had been matched with, successively defeating the women of Sweden, Ghana, Australia, Russia, and Norway. Meanwhile, the American women were also undefeated after taking on Denmark, Nigeria, North Korea, Germany, and Brazil.

  And so the promoters ultimately had what they wanted, which was the closest thing that the World Cup could approximate to a Cold War confrontation with a bit of sex appeal, a battle between bevies of phyically fit young athletes with their hair cut in the style of pageboys, or bobbed or ponytailed, all of the women wearing shorts and numbered shirts and having fine legs. The United States’ uniforms were white with red trimming and on the players’ feet were Nike-swooshed black leather sneakers, which, as I would soon see on the television screen whenever an American was upended while tussling for the ball, were studded with red cleats. The Chinese women wore red uniforms with white trimming, and, like the Americans, displayed on the left side of their shirts a national symbol and on the right side the logo of their uniform’s manufacturer, which in the case of the Chinese was Adidas.

  Brand-name merchandise from the West had been distributed and also made in China for many years, encouraged by the trade policies of Deng Xiaoping, who became the Party ruler in 1978 (two years after Mao’s death) and proclaimed, “To get rich is glorious.” But now in 1999, as this nation of 1.3 billion people was about to mark a half century of Communist rule that had been inaugurated by Mao’s triumphant entrance into Tiananmen Square in October of 1949, China was hardly rich; I had read in a newsmagazine that China in 1999 was still poorer than any non-Communist East Asian nation, and that to drive one hour outside a Chinese town was to enter a rural tableau that was “medieval” Still, it was reported in the Western press that China’s leading cities were rapidly becoming towering temples of modernism, with pagoda-topped skyscrapers and five-star hotels, with shopping malls featuring world-famous designer boutiques, cappuccino machines, the latest in computer software and CD releases, and the biggest of the fast-food franchises.

  In Beijing alone there were now six Pizza Huts, thirty-three Kentucky Fried Chickens (in the capital’s streets there were more pictures of Colonel Sanders than of Chairman Mao), and fifty-seven McDonald’s. It was now possible in China to ascend the Great Wall in a ski lift and descend in a toboggan; to tour Beijing’s Imperial Palace while being guided by the audiotaped voice of Roger Moore; to be acoustically accompanied in parks by the single-string sounds of erhu players and by boom boxes blaring with the music of the Back Street Boys; and to travel through congested city streets swarming with beehives of bicyclists, diplomat-licensed limos with flag-flapping fenders, pedal-pumping rickshaw drivers, and any of the half dozen extraordinarily expensive sporty Italian vehicles sold in the past year at Beijing’s newly opened Ferrari dealership.

  “Without contradictions, nothing would exist,” wrote Mao. But what I believed I was seeing as I stayed tuned to the televised soccer finale from the Rose Bowl—watching the Chinese players running up and down the field, pushing and bumping against the Americans, and being pushed and bumped in turn—was not in the category of a Maoist contradiction, but a contrasting and updated view of the kind of Chinese women whom Mao once imagined were holding up half the sky. These modern globe-trotting, cleat-sneakered Chinese finalists in the 1999 World Cup were in some cases the granddaughters or great-granddaughters of women who once hobbled around their homeland on bound and therefore deformed feet. These soccer players were in a historical sense part of an ongoing long march, a great leap forward into the twenty-first century, where, as future mothers in a technically advanced and burgeoning superpower, their competitive genes might epitomize the energy and resolve by which newer generations of Chinese might vie with the Americans to blow each other off the map.

  But in the Rose Bowl, so far the score was 0-0, and while the rules and strategies of this game confounded me, there was something compelling enough to delay my channel-surfing back to the Yankees. My curiosity was engaged. As I sat in front of the television screen watching the players in motion without fully appreciating the intricacy of their movements, I kept wondering what it was that I was not seeing that was prompting the crowd’s constant roars of approval and sighs of regret. What I could see, or thought I could see, rising along the grassy turf of the sun-bathed stadium was the sweat seeping through the red and white uniforms of these women who vigorously pursued and swarmed around the ball, often interlocking one another’s limbs and entangling at times even their ponytails. With their soft-leather-covered feet they massaged and moved the white round ball in one direction, then another, sometimes losing it to an opponent, who often lost it just as quickly—in basketball these are “turnovers,” and whenever a player on the home team commits one, he can expect boos or jeers from the onlookers. But here in the Rose Bowl, where apparently the expectations of dexterity were not applied to athletes advancing a ball with shod feet, there were no sounds of condemnation from the spectators.

  President Clinton appeared on my television screen, smiling and waving from the shadows of his enclosed box. There were many Asians in the crowd, perhaps most of them residents of Southern California. In the press section were hundreds of American and foreign journalists with their laptops and cameras, focusing on the field-level forays and retreats and the fancy footwork of this Saturday-afternoon spectacle that 100 million people in China were now watching before sunrise on Sunday.

  I continued to wait for someone to score, wishing it would be soon. I was disappointed that Mia Hamm, the only player whose name and face I was familiar with, was not showing any of her Jordanesque dazzle when she had the ball. In no way did she distinguish herself from the rest of the players. Whatever they were doing, she was not doing better.

  I decided to take a quick peek at the Yankee game, thinking it might already be over and that Mariano Rivera had probably blanked the Mets in the bottom of the ninth to preserve the 8-7 lead and seal yet another Yankee victory.

  But the scene that greeted me from Shea Stadium was a picture of frustration on the face of Mariano Rivera. He had been unable to control his pitches, having walked the Mets’ Rickey Henderson; and then the Mets’ Edgardo Alfonzo had smashed one of Rivera’s ninety-five-mile-an-hour fastballs deep into center field for a double, sending Henderson to third. As I stood up and watched, doing as most of the fifty thousand fans in the ballpark were now doing, although they were also clapping and shouting for the Mets’ rally to continue, Rivera deliberately walked Mike Piazza. This loaded the bases. There were already two outs, and issuing an intentional walk to a slugger like Piazza was a predictably intelligent managerial move. The last time Piazza had come to bat, two innings before, facing the Yankees’ middle-relief pitcher Ramiro Mendoza, he had hit a three-run homer. All that Rivera had to do now was induce the next hitter to make an out, and this long game would be over.

  The Mets sent up a pinch hitter named Matt Franco. I had never heard of him, but I normally do not watch Mets games. Whoever Franco was, I reasoned, he was surely not as threatening as Piazza. Franco strolled up to the plate and, with the bat on his shoulder, took his position, ready to swing. Rivera glared at him from the mound. Rivera then took a deep breath, went into his pitching motion, and hurled one of his signature fastballs that was supposed to look like an aspirin as it streaked past the hitter for a called strike. But Franco saw it clearly and hit it perfectly, whacking it out to right field beyond the Yankee outfielder’s reach, and suddenly Henderson and Alfonzo had raced home to score two runs, and now the Mets were the winners, 9-8. As the Mets’ fans leaped and screamed in celebration, and as Franco was embraced by his teammates, Mariano Rivera walked slowly with his head lowered towar
d the Yankee dugout.

  I sought my relief by walking into the kitchen for a can of beer. For me this afternoon so far had been a total loss—no tennis, no Yankee pitching, nothing to do until dinner (if my wife ever came down from her reading room) except to click back to the soccer women. I did not know how many minutes had been played, but there was still no score, and still the banner-waving and noisy fans continued to give the impression that they were excited by what they were seeing on the field. This game that my foreign-born father used to refer to as “a waste of time” seemed to be wasting what was left of my afternoon, and yet I continued to watch and wait for something to happen that I would find satisfying or conclusive. That this women’s contest had attracted so many spectators, and was featured on American network television, was definitely a point of interest. Soccer might well be the world’s most popular sport, played in the past by such renowned millionaires as Pelé and Maradona, and at times personified by rabbles of passionate fans who started riots in the stands and ran berserk through the towns in which their beloved teams were matched against loathed rivals; but the many millions of foreigners who had come to the United States and assimilated during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had not seen this sport assimilate with them into the American mainstream. They had left the game behind in the Old Country, as my father had, leaving it to male relatives whom he somehow suggested to me were village laggards and POW candidates.

  And yet here in the Rose Bowl, this manly foreign game was being profitably promoted to Americans through network television by young women—foreigners in the sense that Chinese players were involved, and foreign in the sense that the American women were, in style and manner, foreign to many men of my generation and certainly to the immigrants of my father’s time.

  Since I am about to sound somewhat knowing about these women and this sport about which I have heretofore proclaimed so little knowledge or interest, I must explain that, in addition to the newspaper and newsmagazine articles I had been reading recently about the World Cup competition, I had also been receiving abundant information about soccer via E-mail and the postal service from a soccer mom in her late thirties who the previous spring had attended a writing seminar that I had been invited to conduct on a campus not far from my home. This woman was aspiring to complete a book entitled Confessions of a Soccer Mom, and, while her literary skills at this point in her life were not much developed beyond the singing talents of the late Patrick Shields, she was consumed with confidence and recommended that I give her work in progress to my wife.

  Among the drawbacks that I associate with my participation in seminars and with the part-time teaching that I sometimes do at universities within their graduate and undergraduate writing programs is meeting students and other people who have book ideas and manuscripts for my wife and who regard me as part of a courier service that will transport their efforts expeditiously and personally into her office. I have actually done this, carried away from a classroom a thick envelope or package addressed to my wife; but since the results have too rarely been satisfactory to anyone, I now strive to remain uninvolved, although it is often not that simple with people possessing the stamina and single-mindedness of this soccer mom from the suburbs of northern New Jersey. Even though my wife or one of her colleagues did finally read and politely turn down what the woman herself had delivered to the office receptionist, and despite my own courteous avoidance of the opportunity she extended to me as her chosen ghostwriter or even the coauthor of her book, she nonethless continued to send me massive amounts of material about women’s soccer that she herself had collected while attending games and picking the brains of the cognoscenti along the sidelines or while she was at home communicating on the Internet with fans of women’s soccer around the world, including many soccer moms in China.

  A typical Chinese woman lacked the resources to buy a sport-utility vehicle, she informed me, acknowledging that she herself had two SUVs, one left behind by her former husband (it had a broken axle), and so in China the young girls who were escorted to practice by their mothers did so on the backs of bicycles. If any of these girls indicated signs of exceptional ability on a practice field, she continued, they were practically snatched from the backs of their mothers’ bicycles by one of the regime’s talent scouts, who would then enroll the girls as full-time students for years in a special academy, where they would receive an inadequate education in everything except the development of those physical skills that might qualify them finally as Olympic contestants in soccer, or gymnastics, or volleyball, or swimming, or whatever sport they were capable of performing on a world stage so well that their male coaches and the Party bureaucrats would have no fear of losing face.

  While five of the twenty-two Chinese women players on the 1999 national squad were married, none could have children if they wished to remain affiliated with the team. With their average incomes being about five thousand dollars a year, and with financing in China unavailable to help cover the high cost of such items as, for example, an automobile, only four members of the squad owned and operated cars (three of the women had working husbands who shared expenses; the other was the unmarried daughter of a successful family from Shanghai). The majority of their teammates did not even have a driver’s license and saw no point in taking lessons to obtain one. None of the women on the national team had a college education. The only one with classroom experience on a campus was the team captain, Sun Wen, who dropped out early in her first year. Drinking, smoking, and dancing in discos late at night—a not-unfamiliar routine with some male soccer players following practice sessions and games—would have caused a woman player’s dismissal had such behavior come to the attention of the national team’s ascetic male coach, Ma Yuanan, who considered himself permissive when he allowed one of his wedded sequestered soccer-playing sprites to accept a husbandly visit in her dormitory bedroom late on a Saturday night.

  The women of the United States team, on the other hand, were free to partake in nighttime interludes with husbands and/or admirers of either sex. Two of the five married players on the American squad had children (one had two), and when these women were on the road with the team, the organizational budget covered the travel costs and living expenses of the accompanying nannies. All the American players had college degrees or were in the process of getting them. All drove cars, and, with their team salaries and bonuses and their forthcoming game fees as participants in the newly formed National Soccer League, the women would soon join the lucrative six-figure ranks of professional athletes. With the exception of the goalkeeper, who was black, all the American starters were white women, who as a group were fair-haired and photogenic enough to be courted by the makers of commercials in the mainstream market and to be poster-perfect for schoolgirls in the suburbs. The American players also tended to be larger, taller, and yet just as fast as the Chinese—I could see this myself from watching the Rose Bowl game on television—and it also appeared to me that the Americans’ bodies were more curvesome and fully feminine than the Chinese. The latter were inclined to be quite narrow-hipped and boyish in figure, and, with one or two exceptions, to have smaller breasts than the Americans. Actually, I had not noticed large-breasted women on either team. Perhaps there were some seated among the substitutes, but, since the television cameras were not catering to the sensual concentrations that might enliven my afternoon, any women so endowed existed beyond my purview.

  Still, from what I had read about the American team, they were not especially prudish. One of the starting players was apparently proud enough of her body to pose in a bikini for Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue. Another starter was photographed in a squatting position in Gear magazine, wearing no clothes at all while holding a soccer ball in front of her breasts. I could not imagine the Chinese coach allowing his players these liberties even if they were so disposed, but this was conjecture on my part, the musings of an elderly man who, for lack of anything better to do at this particular time, was watching fleet-foote
d and sweating female athletes chasing one another around the playing field while momentarily imagining them gamboling in G-strings in a rain forest on the Playboy Channel.

  This game was now nearly over and the score was still 0-0. The regulation time of a soccer match is ninety minutes—two forty-five-minute halves—and so far every shot aimed at the net had either been misguided or blocked by the opposing goalkeeper. The Americans got off more kicks than the Chinese, and they seemed to boot the ball harder and farther and to cover more ground as they roved widely around the field before settling into their offensive or defensive formations. But the Chinese impressed me as having the edge in teamwork and in anticipating where the ball was going to be before it got there. They were prescient about what footwork and ball movement would lead to, and, like the onetime rebounding basketball star Dennis Rodman—a veritable geometric genius in the way he foresaw and acted upon the projections of errant shots caroming off backboards and rims—the Chinese women arrived just ahead of time at the spot where a pass from a teammate was due or where they might intercept an intended exchange between their opponents. The Chinese minimized their own turnovers by advancing with short passes, and they also maintained possession of the ball through feigning—keeping the ball between their feet while pretending they were about to kick it. Instead of kicking it, they sidestepped it, danced around it, did the jig, the rumba, then wiggled their hips and their heads just enough to keep the opposition off balance and allow sufficient space through which they could get off a quick kick downfield toward a teammate dashing in the direction of the rival goalkeeper.