A Writer's Life (66 page)

In July 1999, while Nan was a guest lecturer in California at the Stanford publishing course held every summer for a week or so on the Palo Alto campus, I was at home in New York, trying to write and extricate myself from the literary logjam that had stagnated my professional life. When I was not parrying with words and paragraphs at my desk, I was indulging in nerve-calming diversions—rearranging things in my office, removing and rewashing the filter in my air-conditioner, tuning in to baseball games and other sporting events on my small television screen. For me it was a channel-surfing summer. It was when I first felt the urge to fly halfway around the world to interview Liu Ying, the young Chinese woman who had missed that important kick in the China–United States women's World Cup finale, costing her team the match.

The Chinese players, as you will recall, had undoubtedly entered the Rose Bowl knowing that special importance was being attached to this contest by high-level Party leaders in their homeland, where there existed unfriendly feelings toward the United States in the aftermath of the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by an American plane. The United States government's explanation that the targeting had been unintentional was greeted skeptically by Chinese officials, reflecting the latter's mistrust of American foreign policy, as was reported in the press throughout the summer and into the autumn of 1999. I had also read several newspaper and magazine articles indicating that heightened security arrangements would be imposed in October as the Chinese Communist Party marked its fiftieth year in power. There would be public displays of tanks, missiles, and millions of troops marching past rows of Politburo members assembled on reviewing stands. There would be multitudes of security guards checking everyone's credentials, especially those of foreigners. It was admittedly not an ideal time for me, an unaccredited American writer, to be wandering around the country seeking to interview a young woman possessing deficient skills as a soccer player. Who would believe that I would travel so far for such a purpose? And, moreover, I had reasons of my own not to be in China during the late summer and fall of 1999.

I had promised to go with Nan on a European sojourn, a kind of postanniversary wedding gift that we were giving to each other. After a few days in Paris, we would join other couples on a bicycle tour of the Bordeaux wine country, and then in mid-September we would fly to Barcelona and embark on a two-week cruise of the Mediterranean.

According to the sailing schedule of our Cunard liner, the
Royal Viking Sun
, we would be in Florence on September 28, and in Rome on October 1 (where we planned to revisit our marital site); and on October 3, after moving along the southern Italian coastline and past the mountain ranges of Calabria that had long loomed over my ancestry, Nan and I would arrive on the morning of October 8 in Athens. We would remain there for four days, and then fly together to Germany on October 12, and part company at the Frankfurt airport. Nan was expected at the Frankfurt Book Fair, a weeklong event that she had often attended in the past, whereas I was to return to New York on a flight to JFK.

This was our plan, and we followed it precisely until the final day of our excursion. After I had accompanied Nan to the Frankfurt airport's baggage carousel, and then escorted her out to where a German driver was waiting to take her to her hotel, I returned to the terminal to await the announcement of my flight, which was five hours later. As I was hauling my belongings on a trolley and idly surveying the merchandise on display in duty-free shops and other stores, I passed the entrance of the airport's Sheraton Hotel and noticed a sign announcing that the hotel had a health club. I thought it would be a good idea to register for a room and have a workout and perhaps a massage prior to my flight. I was in no particular hurry to get back to New York.

Two hours later, having been to the gym and enjoyed the massage, I was wearing a robe and relaxing in my hotel room, reading through some of the notes that I had brought with me on the cruise. Among the material was a slim folder labeled “Wrong-footed Chinese soccer maiden—a work in progress.” It contained several pieces about the World Cup soccer match and my letter to Norman Pearlstine, the magazine boss at Time, Inc., suggesting that an article might be done on Liu Ying.

As I was getting dressed and rearranging my luggage prior to checking out, I reached into my jacket for a slip of paper on which Nan had written the phone number of the Frankfurterhof, which was where she was staying while attending the book fair. I dialed the number but was unable to reach her. My call was soon transferred to a man at the front desk, who asked, “May I take a message for Mrs. Talese?”

“Yes, thank you,” I said. “Please tell her that her husband called to say that he is canceling his flight to New York and is going to China, and he'll get back to her when he knows where he'll be staying.”

Later that night, I was on a jet heading east.

Five months would pass before I would return home to New York.

O
N ARRIVING IN
B
EIJING
, I
REGISTERED AT THE
C
HINA
W
ORLD
Hotel and was assigned to an attractive suite on the fourteenth floor, which had large windows and looked out upon several gleaming multistoried buildings rising in the polluted sky of this capital city that had a population of 12 million people, not one of whom I knew.

My plan, such as I had one, was to meet somebody who could facilitate my introduction to Liu Ying—but who? I decided that it would be unwise to approach the officials at the Chinese Sports Ministry directly, imagining that they would just entangle me with red tape, and I also did not think that it would be productive if I went to the American embassy, given the present state of U.S.-China relations. I did believe, however, that there was an individual in Beaverton, Oregon, who could help me.

He was Philip H. Knight, the founder and chairman of Nike, Inc., based in Beaverton. I had met him a year earlier through my wife. During one of his business trips to New York, he had gone to Nan's office to discuss the publication of a book he was writing in his spare time, a work of fiction having nothing to do with Nike. His wife, Penny, was with him in New York, and, after the four of us had dined one night at Elaine's, he handed me his business card and suggested that I contact him whenever I was in the vicinity of Oregon.

I had no idea how his novel was progressing when I arrived in China, but I knew that Nike was flourishing throughout the country—manufacturing tons of sneakers, employing thousands of Chinese factory workers; and it occurred to me that there was probably no one of my acquaintance who had more influence in China than Philip Knight. He surely possessed in abundance what the Chinese call
guanxi
—“connections.” The word
guanxi
had often been referred to in
The Beijing Guide Book
that I had bought at the Frankfurt airport and had kept with me during my eleven-hour flight into Asia. In a chapter headed “Doing Business,” the book's author noted:

I dialed Philip Knight's office from my hotel room, having, fortunately, kept his business card in my address book. Although he was unavailable when I called, his secretary promised that she would deliver to him the fax message that I said I would send within the hour.

In my fax to Philip Knight, after recalling our dinner together at Elaine's, I explained why I was in China and offered him a synopsis of my soccer idea, emphasizing that it was not my intention to portray Liu Ying unfavorably but, rather, to suggest that, like most competitive performers who have encountered setbacks, she is guided by a “comeback spirit”—a spirit compellingly expressed by Michael Jordan in one of his famous commercials for Nike.

“In that commercial,” I reminded Philip Knight, “Michael Jordan is telling us about the numerous times when he has missed important shots, and the countless contests that were consequently lost, and yet following each defeat he expresses determination to keep going, to give it another shot.…” At the conclusion of my fax, I sought Knight's advice on how I should properly proceed in China, hoping that he would put me in contact with someone who might eventually make it possible for me to have a face-to-face meeting with Liu Ying.

Later that day, I received a reply from Knight's office saying that my fax had been received and that he would get back to me as soon as possible. Two days later came a message from Philip Knight himself—one of four from him that I would receive during my early days in China, all of them encouraging in tone but also cautioning me to maintain my patience. “As you might imagine,” he wrote in one fax, “Chinese Officials are not always enamored with the idea of talking to the U.S. press.” In another message: “Dear Gay: China is a big country compiled of many different dialects, attitudes and regional barriers, all presided over by a government in conflict with itself,” and he added, “I don't know where all this leads, but I do believe you will not be sorry you have gone on this search/adventure. Best regards, Phil.”

The most important thing that he did for me was to refer me to Nike's chief representative in Beijing, an amiable round-faced gentleman in his mid-thirties named Patrick Wang, who had been born in Shanghai but had attended colleges in Oregon and New York and spoke English fluently and heartily. He was Nike's ambassador to the Chinese sports regime and therefore not lacking in
guanxi
. Shortly after I had spoken to him and had enjoyed the first of our many dinners together, he called to inform me that the soccer authorities would be sending a car and driver to pick me up at my hotel within a few days, or a week at most, and would take me to a location in the western hills of Beijing, where I would witness a practice session by the team and receive an introduction to Liu Ying.

While awaiting this occasion, and keeping Nan informed of my activities via faxed messages to the Frankfurterhof and later to our home in New York, I read through my guidebook and selected sites that I planned to visit, and I familiarized myself as well with the public spaces existing within the China World Hotel, a massive brownish-toned curved glass emporium that offered an aerial view of the city from its Horizon Club lounge on the twenty-first floor, and there was also a double-leveled shopping mall below its main lobby. According to the China World's brochure, the hotel consisted of nearly eight hundred guest rooms, all with color television sets, bedside controls, and minibars; and the recreational facilities included three indoor tennis courts, a skating rink, a twelve-lane bowling alley, and a large gymnasium and swimming pool. Beyond the revolving glass doors of its entranceway was a marble-floored reception area flanked by two decorative stone elephants, and behind the elephants was a fountain and a two-hundred-foot-long room lined with vermilion columns. On the right side of the room, atop a three-stepped platform and surrounded by a brass and glass banister, was a café with a few dozen tables served by young Asian waitresses who wore high-necked red silk gowns with a gold circled pattern, and whose tight-fitting skirts were slit open on both sides up to the middle of their thighs.

I spent an hour or more here almost every day, having breakfast or lunch while writing postcards and letters and reading the official English-language
China Daily
, which the concierge provided free of charge, and the
International Herald Tribune
, which was on sale in the lobby for the equivalent of about three dollars in Chinese yuan. The front page of the
China Daily
regularly showed pictures of high-level Party officials posing with visiting foreign dignitaries and executives of global enterprises, and there were editorials and articles stressing the importance of China's impending acceptance into the World Trade Organization
(WTO). There were also many references to China's seventy-three-year-old President Jiang Zemin's fifteen-day visit to France, England, Portugal, Morocco, Algeria, and Saudi Arabia, a goodwill tour that the paper celebrated as “China's major diplomatic campaign at the threshold of the new century”—a campaign promising to promote China's “great potential and vast prospects” for economic expansion and prosperity.

Having never before been a daily reader of a Communist newspaper, I found it diverting to see how its evaluation and coverage of foreign and domestic affairs was at variance with how the news about China was prioritized and offered in the
International Herald Tribune
.

In the
Tribune:
“China's state-owned enterprises are dying, noncompetitive even in its restrictive system.…”

In the
China Daily:
“China's socialist democracy and legal system is the only guarantee for the country's rapid economic development.…”

In the
Tribune:
“Mr. Jiang's security police forcibly detained more than a dozen members of the Falun Gong, the banned spiritual group, who had dared to unfurl a yellow banner and meditate in Tiananmen Square.…”

In the
China Daily:
“Seattle's streets were transformed from a battle zone to a near-police state on Wednesday, one day after broken glass and booming tear gas volleys shattered the peace [as] the city struggled to scrub itself clean for WTO delegates meeting here.…”