A Writer's Life (75 page)

Later in the week, the Chinese soccer players and the coaching staff were invited to the Great Hall to be greeted by President Jiang Zemin and receive medallions identifying them as honored citizens of the People's Republic. The women were uniformly attired in gray skirts and jackets, white blouses, and black pumps. As President Jiang walked toward Liu Ying and placed a ribboned medallion on her shoulders, he smiled and told her, “Don't worry, there will be another day, and you will have another opportunity.”

I
FOLLOWED THE FORTUNES OF
L
IU
Y
ING FOR THE NEXT FEW
months, and then the next few years, waiting for her to have a heroic moment.

With her mother's cooperation and goodwill, I met with Liu Ying on a number of occasions during the latter part of 1999 and the winter and spring of 2000. After learning where the team would be participating in tournaments and exhibition matches within China and overseas, I took it upon myself (without further consultation with the soccer authorities) to become a frequent flier on Dragonair, Mandarin Airlines, and several international carriers.

Whenever possible, I booked flights that would take me to the soccer sites prior to the arrival of the team, allowing me time to mingle with members of the welcoming committee (usually a congenial group of banner-waving, flower-bearing boosters) as well as the local camera crews and print media who stood waiting in the lounges of the airports. It was my hope, and it was a hope invariably fulfilled, that I would meet someone who spoke English well enough for me to recruit them on a freelance basis to accompany me to soccer fields and help whenever the need arose for me to understand something being said in Chinese. This was not a problem in Hong Kong, where English was widely spoken, but it was crucial in such places as Tainan on the island of Taiwan, and along the mainland's southeastern port city of Xiamen, a onetime fishing village that in recent decades had blossomed into what was commonly conceded to be the smuggler's capital of the People's Republic of China.

When I flew into Xiamen to watch an exhibition game between the Chinese team and the national women's team of Australia, the entire municipal leadership was being scrutinized by hundreds of investigators from the central government who believed it was being fleeced by customs agents who were illegally importing into China merchandise and
commodities worth nearly $7 billion—oil, automobiles, telephone equipment, semiconductors, cigarettes. This inquiry would eventually lead to the conviction of not only customs agents but also the deputy mayor, the police chief, regional Party bosses, bankers, and corporate executives, many of the latter affiliated with a large firm devoted to sponsoring soccer matches in the area. It was likely that I sat among some of these executives in the box seats of the Xiamen stadium while six thousand spectators cheered on the Chinese team that defeated Australia, 4-2, led by Liu Ying, who scored two goals. Liu Ying was very contented with her performance and afterward invited me (and my new best friend, a young Chinese advertising man who had mastered English while attending college in Perth, Australia) to spend time with her at the resort hotel where the team was staying, on Gulangyu Island, which was reachable by ferryboat; the hotel's main restaurant was serviced by waiters on Rollerblades.

I next saw Liu Ying in the southern Portuguese town of Albufeira, where the team was registered at a beachfront hotel for ten days in mid-March 2000 while competing in the seventh annual Algarve Cup games against many of the national teams slated to play in the forthcoming Olympics. I watched Liu Ying score a goal in a victory over Finland, and she played well defensively in the following games against Canada and Norway, although the Chinese lost to Norway, which, in turn, lost to the Americans in the finals of the Algarve Cup. I expected to see Liu Ying three months later in the United States, during the early summer, when the Chinese team would be visiting three cities (Hershey, Pennsylvania; Louisville, Kentucky; and Foxboro, Massachusetts) while participating in continued competition against teams from other nations. But she was unable to make the trip. She was in a wheelchair, hospitalized after a rival player had collided with her in late May during an exhibition match. Although three of her ribs were broken and she had sustained other injuries, she insisted that she would recover in time to compete in the Olympics, which is why, in early September 2000, I flew from New York to Sydney, Australia.

During what seemed to be an endless flight, the high point being the descent into Hawaii for refueling, my mind was adrift with dreamy, cliché-ridden scenarios in which I foresaw a Gold Medal showdown between the women of China and the United States,
and
a last-second scene in which Liu Ying would stand poised in a penalty kick situation

None of my imaginings transpired during the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. It would prove to be an event in which Liu Ying would never command the spotlight. Unable to play at full strength as a result of her earlier injury, she sat watching on the bench as her team was surprisingly overwhelmed by Norway, 3-0, in an early-round match that quickly eliminated China from further competition.

A few days later, I flew from Sydney to Beijing, seeing Liu Ying on three or four occasions during the month I remained there. She was disappointed but not pessimistic, believing that the team would reclaim its stature by increasing its commitment, and that she herself, on regaining full strength, would contribute much as a member of the starting lineup. The Chinese press, however, was now saying that the team was getting old and was injury-prone, and what was needed were younger players and a new coach.

I revisited China for two weeks in 2001 in the aftermath of many celebratory demonstrations arising from the International Olympic Committee's announcement on July 14 that Beijing had been voted the host city of the summer games of 2008. Among millions of cheering Chinese gathered in Tiananmen Square and along Chang'an Boulevard were Liu Ying, her mother, and many members of her family, although the news hastened efforts by land developers to modernize the city and replace hundreds of
hutong
communities with high-rises and avenues wide enough to accommodate three million vehicles, which was double the current amount.

When I returned to Beijing for a fortnight in 2002, the courtyard house in which Liu Ying had been born and reared was leveled and lost among acres of rubble. For a while there had been stubborn resistance from some home owners, who had cemented large lagged pieces of broken glass to the tops of their walls in an attempt to discourage intruders from climbing over; it was not burglars they feared as much as the ruffians who had been hired by land developers to throw stones through windows and commit other acts of destruction against people ignoring eviction notices issued by civil authorities. What had been a household of twenty-seven residents at number 74 Wuding Hutong was inevitably dispersed to various places, with only Liu Ying's mother and grandmother remaining together. Her grandmother received only $25,000 in credit toward the purchase of
a $75,000 four-room dwelling on the fifth floor of an eighteen-story pink apartment building on the southern edge of the city. Their apartment, which I visited, had two bedrooms, electric heating, and a modern bathroom and kitchen. Displayed over the archway in the living room was a red wooden sign:
74 WUDING HUTONG
.

I had planned to return to China in September 2003 to attend the World Cup matches scheduled to be hosted by the city of Shanghai, but the event was quickly relocated to the United States due to China's springtime SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) epidemic. Neither Liu Ying nor her teammates were taken ill, because they were insulated from the public. But in a warm-up match months prior to the World Cup, Liu Ying was again seriously injured. This time she dislocated her left knee, requiring surgery. She did eventually accompany the team to the United States, but her playing time was limited because she lacked her usual speed and agility. After the team had been eliminated in early-round competition by Canada, the new Chinese coach (who had taken over the team the year before and would, in turn, be fired a year later) informed Liu Ying that she was no longer a member of the national team. A youth movement was in progress, he said, with only four players from the twenty-two-member 1999 roster representing China in the 2004 Olympics in Athens. The youthful team would not represent progress, however, being overwhelmed by Germany, 8-0, followed by a 1-1 tie with Mexico, leading to China's early-round elimination. The Gold Medal went to the United States team that defeated Brazil, 2-1, in overtime.

With the assistance of translators, I thereafter remained in touch with Liu Ying via E-mail or fax, or telephone calls placed from my home in New York, with an interpreter listening on an extension. During a recent conversation, she told me that she was planning to return to school, a college in Beijing. She said that her present ambition was to become, like her father before her, a physical education instructor.

I had meanwhile put aside, with finality, my notes on Liu Ying, and had already begun to write:

I am most thankful to many friends and colleagues who encouraged me during the research and writing of
A Writer's Life
, but most particularly to my publisher, Sonny Mehta, and my editor, Jonathan Segal. Their patience and guidance through my working years at Knopf (beginning with
Unto the Sons
, published in 1992, and continuing through 2005, when I completed this book) fill me with gratitude, respect, and pride in our enduring friendship.

Finally, I wish to add a note in remembrance of my mother, Catherine E. Talese, who hoped that she would live long enough to see me finish this book. She died in Ocean City, New Jersey, on August 11, 2005, days after I had completed the manuscript. She was ninety-eight.

G
AY
T
ALESE
worked as a reporter for
The New York Times
from 1956 to 1965, and has frequently contributed to
The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper's
, and
Esquire
, among other national publications.
Esquire's
editors declared his article “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” to be the best they ever published. He is the bestselling author of
Thy Neighbor's Wife, Honor Thy Father
, and
The Kingdom and the Power
. He lives in New York City.