Brave Dragons Read online

“Today, we won because we played together,” Coach Liu answered. “And everybody played good defense.”

  He had singled out the two areas, team unity and defense, for which he was directly responsible. I smiled and observed that it did not hurt that Olumide was unstoppable inside and that Zhai shot so well. Coach Liu did not smile. He kept eating, pushing his rice to the edge of his plate with chopsticks. “The only key points are that we played together and we played good defense,” he repeated.

  I had no interest in confrontation, so I praised the defense and team play. Coach Liu nodded, his face hovering a few inches above his food as he shoveled rice into his mouth. He turned to Little Sun and I could hear him say, “Ask him what he thought about Donta.”

  Donta had not played well. He finished with eight points and seemed frustrated. He played like someone trying to prove he was a superstar, yet the harder he tried, the worse he played. I offered Liu a sanitized version of this opinion and pointed out that Donta played very good defense.

  “Six turnovers,” Coach Liu replied. “He had six turnovers.”

  Liu finished slurping the liquid off his plate. His lips were wet and he whispered something that shook Little Sun. I asked what happened. “He told me, ‘You are too soft. If you don’t change your mentality, you cannot survive in the CBA,’ ” Little Sun said.

  Liu began poring over statistics from other games on the schedule. We no longer interested him. “You can see his attitude,” Little Sun said, pivoting toward me. “He cannot accept another guy’s advice. He cannot accept Bob.” Our conversation was making me uncomfortable. I knew Coach Liu could comprehend a tiny bit of English, having watched him clumsily try to communicate with the foreign players. I worried that Little Sun was veering toward trouble, but he kept talking.

  “Everybody will say he did a good job,” Little Sun said, frustrated, as the coach stayed fixated on the statistics. Little Sun’s voice wavered. “But it is only the beginning, right? It is only the beginning.”

  Liu Tie looked up from his papers and again whispered something to Little Sun. Little Sun lowered his head and stood up. He walked over to the buffet, poured a Sprite into a paper cup, and returned to the table. He placed the cup before his coach and sat down. Liu did not acknowledge him. He sipped the Sprite and mentioned that an American player, Kirk Snyder, the former Houston Rocket, had scored 43 points that night, a huge number, for the Zhejiang Wanma Cyclones.

  Little Sun turned to me. “You need to tell him that you are going to your room,” he said, anguished. “I cannot go unless you go. You need to tell him.”

  I realized too late my complicity in Little Sun’s humiliation. I stood to leave and Little Sun followed me.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SHOOTING THE MESSENGERS

  It was nearly 11 p.m. when I reached my room. Joe and I were roommates for the night, and I found him staring into his laptop, checking scores from around the league, his face glowing in the blue light of the screen.

  “We were lucky,” he said. “Liaoning is not a good team.”

  Joe had not been impressed. Liaoning’s best players were off form, he thought, and their new Americans were not talented. One of their stars played sparingly because of a lung injury. Still, a win is a win. “It kind of looks like Liu Tie and Bob are a good combination,” he said, smiling his nervous smile, sounding more hopeful than convinced.

  I had spent as much time watching the action on the bench as the action on the court. Despite the regulations of the Chinese Basketball Association, every coach, assistant coach, owner, team leader, and female companion on the Brave Dragons bench had failed to remain seated. Liu Tie was up constantly, pointing at the refs, jabbering at players. Every time a player left the game, Liu greeted him on the sideline, insistently tugging at the player’s hand and whispering instructions. If a player tried to pull his hand away, Liu held tighter. Boss Wang would jump up and, soon, not wanting to be left out, the second Chinese assistant, Wingtips, would jump up, too. Weiss was up and down, as befits the head coach, walking the sideline to talk to players or complain to the scorer’s table, but his role was complicated. He was supposed to have authority over the games, yet the man talking in the middle of the huddle was Liu Tie.

  Joe looked away from his laptop. The problem was language, he said. There was not enough time for Weiss to talk and Joe to translate. “If two guys talk, we’ve only got one minute, so maybe not enough time,” Joe said. He returned his gaze to the laptop, tapped on his keyboard and an online version of the numbers game Sudoku appeared on the screen. Liu’s practices were so difficult that the game seemed easy, Joe thought, yet the game was poorly played. Brutal practices didn’t produce better basketball.

  “The players have no passion,” he said. “They are not playing like art. They are just attacking. Like the army.”

  Joe had intrigued me from the moment I met him in October. I did not share the view of Weiss, Turner, and Zhang, who questioned whether Joe was fully interpreting what they were saying, or if he was rounding it off, omitting opinions that might provoke confrontation. Without Joe, they could not communicate, yet that dependence also sowed uncertainty. During the assembly stage of the team, as different foreigners were trying out, confusion had arisen between Weiss and the general manager over which players Weiss wanted, and which ones he did not. When a few of the ones Weiss did not want unexpectedly returned for more tryouts, questions arose about Joe’s interpretation. The general manager began pulling Little Sun off the court for private chats with Weiss. No one really knew what was going on. The arrival of Liu Tie had presented a different complication. Joe once worked as an assistant coach for a team where Liu Tie had been a player, making Joe his elder and making it harder for Liu to bully him. So Liu began turning to Garrison as his interpreter.

  My impression of Joe was different. I found him thoughtful and reflective, familiar with the Chinese and American approaches to basketball. His English was good, though sometimes awkward, and he made the same point about Chinese basketball on the first day I met him: that it was not art. He had an idealized view of American players, of their maturity and capacity for self-discipline, and he blamed the immaturity of Chinese players for the early problems that arose for Weiss. Joe admired Weiss’s coaching style, how he rarely screamed at players, and he saw the flaws of Chinese basketball as parallel to the flaws in how China developed its people. He thought the Chinese system failed to teach teamwork, that people were motivated more by self-interest and self-preservation, if out of necessity. Any sports columnist in America would say the same of American society and American sports stars, but Joe saw Americans as more likely to share and work for the common good.

  “They try to hurt people here,” Joe had told me early on. “Sometimes I’ll try to hurt you even if it does nothing for me. At least it will eliminate you from the competition.”

  He had paused a moment, adding: “Maybe there are just too many people.”

  Joe was eighteen when he joined the Bayi team in the 1980s. The team kept him behind high walls at a time when Chinese society seemed to be finally cracking open. If there was a world beyond, he was not seeing it. He finally quit in 1986. He was struggling as a player and frustrated that the coaches could not teach him how to improve; practice was about punishment more than improvement. He decided to see what was happening outside those high walls. “I wanted to go out,” he said. “I felt really hopeless and lonely. And maybe, you know, I just wanted to see the outside.”

  He enrolled at Renmin University, a top school in Beijing, but could not shake a desire to leave China. By the late 1980s, China appeared at a precipice, and no one could predict in which direction it might go. Communism had declined so rapidly elsewhere that China seemed to be the next place about to shrug off its authoritarian leaders. The party’s reform policies had raised incomes, but also raised expectations for faster change, even as Chinese society remained seeded with the mistrust and lingering betrayals of the Mao era. “I didn’t like the po
litics,” Joe said. “People have two faces.”

  Japan provided his escape. Japan was a rising global economic power and introduced a special visa program to attract manual laborers, and Joe soon found himself washing dishes in Japan. He spent two unpleasant years there, but he used the time to qualify for a student visa to study English in Canada. He arrived in the summer of 1989.

  “Once I got there, Tiananmen Square happened,” he said, looking up from his screen.

  The government crackdown against the pro-democracy Tiananmen Square demonstrations dispelled any notion that history would sweep away the Chinese Communist Party. Overnight, Chinese society froze in fear, and other countries, including Canada, responded by offering asylum to young Chinese citizens. Joe spent the next decade in Toronto and was granted a Canadian passport. Without any education, he delivered newspapers and painted houses until he developed a specialty as a guide for Chinese tourists. Toronto already had a large Chinese population and as the Tiananmen crackdown slowly receded, more Chinese visitors began to arrive.

  “I’ve been to Niagara Falls maybe 100 times!” he said, laughing.

  He had gone to Toronto with his wife. They married at age twenty-four after friends and elders had nudged them together, since both were athletes. She was a long jumper. He had never dated or remotely understood women, but he assumed that, eventually, a feeling would infuse the marriage. “I sort of thought that like the older generation, after marriage, you can get that feeling,” he said. “But I never had that.”

  Living in Toronto meant living apart from the societal binds that kept such marriages intact in China. Joe decided they should separate. “American people, Western people, when they don’t have a feeling, they agree to separate,” he said. His wife thought they should have a baby and soon a daughter was born, but the condition of the marriage did not change.

  He and his wife separated for two years and he considered the marriage to be finished. Then, in 1996, he met a woman visiting from the Chinese city of Zhuhai. She was a middle manager at a stock brokerage. She had no interest in traveling but won the trip through a company reward system and felt, as a manager, she had to go. Her itinerary included only the United States but the group decided to make an unplanned side trip to Toronto. At her Toronto hotel, she had noticed Joe on the elevator and when he later was one of her available choices for a guide, she grabbed him.

  “I got a feeling with her,” he said. “But I was still married. And she was married.”

  Joe turned away from where he was sitting and faced me. “Do you know the word yuanfen?” he asked. It roughly translates to fate or destiny. He spent three days with the woman and became convinced that their meeting was yuanfen. “They changed their itinerary,” he said. “They flew to Canada. I don’t know, but that is yuanfen.”

  Destiny would not be simple to achieve. His wife was furious, and he gave her everything, except $200. He moved back to China in 1997, with his Canadian passport. “I’m free now,” he said. “If I don’t like this country, I can go somewhere else. I have other options.”

  For a time, he did nothing. He needed to absorb his new life, absorb how startlingly China had changed. It was now a country on the move, with people suddenly untethered to their villages or families, everyone scratching to get ahead. Going outside used to mean leaving China. But now it meant going to the coast, to Guangdong Province, or going to the big cities, any big city. He had returned to a country that had woken up while he had been away. There were still too many problems, but he believed China was becoming more open and free.

  “I can see the future,” he said. “Before, if you made a joke about the leaders, and if somebody reported you to the policeman, they will come to your home and put you in jail. Now you can say on the street that you don’t like the Communist Party or make a joke about the leaders. So much freedom.”

  It was past midnight, and I was exhausted. Joe was still playing Sudoku. It sounded as if he had been right about destiny. His relationship had slowly improved with his first wife; she now had a steady job in Toronto and was living with a boyfriend, a former professional hockey player. His daughter, now fourteen, had lived with grandparents in Beijing until two years ago, when she joined her mother in Toronto. In China, she had wilted under the academic pressure of school. “Homework, homework, homework: lots of stress,” he said. “When she got to Canada—no homework! She feels really relieved from the pressure.”

  It was time to sleep, but I had some final questions. I knew that Joe and the woman on the tour had gotten married. I had met her at a dinner weeks earlier; she was tall and elegant. But what had happened to her first marriage? I asked. Joe sighed. Her divorce had not gone easily. The husband did not want a divorce but never said as much. Joe said his tactic was very Chinese: He made seemingly impossible demands in hopes that his wife would change her mind. The couple had a son, and a father in China would usually fight for custody. But he told her she had to raise the boy. She said fine.

  “Then he said, ‘Okay, you get no money,’ ” Joe continued. “She said, ‘Okay, no problem.’ He was really frustrated.”

  Finally, the divorce went through. I asked my last question: What happened to the husband? Our conversation had unfurled for more than an hour, propelled by my questions but also by Joe’s desire to talk about his life, his journey, but now, as if making a blind turn, we had come to the scene of an accident. Joe paused, uncertain what to say.

  “He’s dead,” he answered, pausing again. “Suicide.”

  We were silent as Joe hit the keyboard. A new Sudoku chart appeared on the screen. Then he looked down at the floor and I saw tears in his eyes. Joe could not understand why the man would take his own life. Chinese are practical. Chinese are survivors. The man had more than 2 million yuan after the divorce, a fortune in China. “He could have had a young lady, much prettier,” Joe said.

  I stammered out an apology. Joe smiled to reassure me and shut down his computer. No one can predict yuanfen.

  When the team landed back in Taiyuan, the general manager and about fifty fans were waiting with flowers. Every coach and player received a bouquet, with the biggest, most elaborate arrangement presented to Weiss. The newspapers ran excited stories and fans rushed to buy tickets for the home opener on Wednesday, against the great Bayi Rockets. To anyone on the outside, the experiment seemed to be working. The new NBA coach was successfully transferring some of his high-level knowledge. But inside the team, the players understood that power was shifting to Coach Liu. Victory had exalted him. He had already introduced new rules prohibiting talking or laughing during practice. He had spent nearly an hour lecturing against complacency, invoking something from Mao about never being satisfied; again reminding the players that the Brave Dragons didn’t have to be big to do big things, he veered back to Napoleon.

  “He couldn’t even touch the net,” Weiss joked about the Frenchman.

  Victory had confused the foreigners. Winning usually eliminated confusion and papered over any problems inside a team. And beating the Liaoning Pan Pan Dinosaurs had felt good. Weiss had called his ninety-year-old father, Vic, with the news. But if the fact of winning felt good, the implications of winning were disquieting. Olumide had played the entire forty-eight minutes of the game, banging around the basket, and was angry that Liu insisted he run wind sprints the day the team returned to Taiyuan.

  Weiss was trying to be diplomatic. His fingerprints had not been completely erased from the win: His inbounds play had worked, and Olumide and Donta were listening to him more than Liu Tie on the sideline. But he was frustrated, and he and Rick Turner were ever more baffled by what Liu was trying to accomplish in practice once the team had returned to Taiyuan. More than half of practice was still spent on drills. Almost no time was dedicated to offense. Two players, Zhai Jinshuai and Wei Mingliang, had pulled Turner aside to ask what the hell was going on. He told them he had no idea.

  Turner did not know whom to trust. He was suspicious that Joe was not interpre
ting everything he said, or everything that was said to him. He also thought the front office was lying to him. A few days before the team’s flight to Liaoning, he had been told he could not go because his visa could not be renewed quickly enough. When he went to the visa office on his own he had gotten a renewal in a few hours. The team then bought him a ticket but chased him from the bench to shoot video from the rafters. Then he saw the owner and his companion on the bench.

  Turner and I had gone to lunch after returning from Liaoning, in what might be called Taiyuan’s Little America. At a downtown intersection, we deliberated among a KFC, a McDonald’s, and a Pizza Hut, opting for KFC and Mexican-flavored chicken wrap sandwiches. The American fast food chains were part of a major overhaul of Taiyuan’s downtown. Sidewalks were being torn up, roads were under construction, and new businesses were opening. Less than a mile away, new high-rise apartments were going up along the banks of the Fen River, which city leaders were trying to transform from a stagnant ditch into a showplace of landscaped parks. For now, it was a big construction mess, but this newer downtown, farther away from People’s Square, was being fashioned as the new heart of the city. Tracy had discovered the area on one of her walks, and also discovered the World Trade Center Hotel. It was far nicer than the Longcheng, with an attached apartment tower, and she had been prodding for a move when Olumide arrived demanding the luxury four-bedroom apartment stipulated in his contract. The general manager capitulated, and the foreign contingent had moved over shortly before the season opener.

  At KFC, Rick and I took a corner table overlooking the intersection. Across the street, a clothing store named Apple Man stood a few doors down from Conch Apparel, a clumsy rip-off of Coach. Rap music from America was playing in the KFC as Rick took a bite of his chicken wrap.

  “It always amazes me how little difference there is between Chinese and American kids,” he said. “They laugh at the same stuff. They are wired. They like girls. The same stuff pisses them off. They don’t like coming out of the game any less than the American kids do.”