A SOJOURN IN BEIJING: Episode 9

The Paddle. The Ping. And the Pong.

The package arrived special delivery one morning from somewhere in southern China. It was decidedly lightweight.

My wife knew what it was; she’d ordered it: a nifty new Double Happiness brand, 6-star, ping-pong paddle; it’s rubberized surface blue on one side, red on the other, with a stylized wooden handle. There was a box of orange synthetic balls and a protective carrying case.

My wife’s western name is Lily, given on her first job as a teenager at a Japanese restaurant in Beijing. But her Chinese name is Li Ping.

And Li Ping is dead serious about ping-pong.

Her renewed interest in a lifelong passion was inspired by a company tournament. She works for a credit card company in the Bay Area and a majority of the rank-and-file workers are from both India and China.

They stage an annual tournament and the competition is fierce. She lost last year in the semi-finals.

This year was going to be different.

At first, I figured that my wife, as a native Chinese woman, would have DNA on her side; sI’d always thought that table tennis, or ping-pong, originated in China; long ago, on the whim of some feudal lord with an afternoon to kill.

I mean, the name of the game even sounds Chinese.

But I was wrong.

And this comes from the “Who Knew?” file.

The sport actually originated in 1880s Victorian England, played as an after-dinner parlor game, when the intellectuals used the dining table as a playing field. The first paddle was reportedly the back of a cigar box, the first net a stack of books, the first ball a champagne cork. Some believe that an early form of the game was brought back from Indian, developed by British military officers posted there.

The phrase “ping-pong,” was trademarked by a British company in 1901 after several other catastrophically failed attempts, such as whiff-whaff, flim-flam, punch ball and pim-pam.

Statistically, measured by winning percentage, the greatest player ever isn’t Chinese, but Swedish: Jan-Ove Waldner, the “Mozart of Table Tennis,” won 16 World Championships and a slew of Olympic medals.

But the Chinese have pretty much dominated the sport, winning 90 percent of all Olympic gold medals: thanks to government sports factories that produce cyborg players who have perfect the ball’s freakish spin and furious, long-range, back-and-forth style of play that is often too fast to follow with the naked eye.

The Chinese win Olympic gold so often, that the press here has called ping-pong China’s “lonely national sport.” In 2007, after another Olympic medals sweep, a columnist for the government press wrote, “Watching these games is like watching a TV series that has been on for 53 years, with the same plot repeated over and over again.”

China can thank Mao Zedong for that.

The Chairman, looking for a new activity to unify his rising China, declared ping-pong the national sport in the 1950s. Ping-pong was perfect for a developing China: The equipment was inexpensive, people of all ages could play. Another theory is that the International Table Tennis recognized the fledging communist China, when other countries and organizations didn’t.

The game was also instrumental in the first official contact between the U.S. and China, in what is now known as Ping-Pong Diplomacy, when Mao invited the U.S team to visit China. Richard Nixon followed suit the following year.

Today, some 10 million Chinese play ping-pong competitively and as many as 300 million — nearly as many as the entire U.S. population — play the game occasionally. Public tables can be found in nearly every back-alley and street park.

But some say Mao’s chosen sport is losing its luster here. Many young people see ping-pong as a symbol of an outdated China, as a more-educated population has become less tolerant of the heavy-handed government management of athletics that have produce all those Olympic winners.

My wife began playing ping-pong with her friends when she was a teenager. One day, her father spotted her practicing on a table at his office and realized that his daughter was pretty good, if unschooled.

So, he took her under his wing and gave her regular lessons, offering a discipline to her efforts. As a result, she got pretty good.

Years ago, when my in-laws first came to the U.S. to visit us In Los Angeles, I had a match against my father-in-law. Just to make things interesting, I upped the stakes on the games.

If he won, I said, the U.S. government would no longer officially recognize Taiwan. If I won, China had to give up all claims on Tibet.

The game was nip and tuck, a barn burner, as the two daughters — my wife and her younger sister — cheered their father to a decisive victory.

My Ping-Pong Diplomacy was a decisive failure.

In recent days, my wife has turned her parent’s apartment into a ping-pong training camp. In her own unique, animated style, she air-practices her serve and backhand shots, and moved the dining table against the wall so she could shadow play by herself.

When we return to the U.S., my wife will soon have a big company match against a formidable opponent, who also happens to be a Chinese national.

But she’ll be ready with her new Double Happiness paddle, with its advertised “five layers of high-quality thick plates and professional premium inverted rubbers.”

The paddle, the packaging promised, was “very suitable for all-around performance, especially attacking. The rubbers provide high friction and ease of control, driving the balls to spin insanely.”

More than 200 World Champions have used this racket.

And now my wife joins that esteemed group.

Her colleagues had circulated a rumor in her absence that she went to China, not to visit family, but to take surreptitious ping-pong lessons from some Beijing table guru.

Hardly.

Of course, she still desperately wants to win her company tournament, but not for herself, she says.

She wants to win for her life coach.

Her father.

Postscript: The company tournament did not go well. My wife lost both games she played.

She wasn’t happy. That night on the telephone, she said she needed time to absorb the losses and figure out where she’d gone wrong.

Next year, she insisted, she’s going to get really serious.

She’s going to hire a personal coach.

Both her father — and Chairman Mao — would be proud.

TOMORROW: The Taxi