With all the layovers, it took us almost thirty hours to get from Los Angeles to Qingdao. In the Tokyo airport, while we were waiting for our next flight, Mother and I got into a fight. It was my fault⁠⁠—I made fun of her for playing too much Candy Crush on her big Samsung phone.

“This is beneath you,” I said. “This is the kind of thing for people with low intelligence.” We were sitting in one of those airport food courts, so there were a lot of people getting up and down and chairs scraping and orders being called out and such.

She didn’t look up.

“You’re polluting your mind,” I continued. “What if we go to the bookstore?” I tugged on her arm. “We can see if they have any books in Chinese.” I was always trying to get her to read.

“This is why you have no friends in school,” she said, looking up finally. “Because you read too many books.”

But this wasn’t true. When I was in elementary school, yes, I had no friends, but that was because one day in third grade, I wore my professional short-shorts to school and they were so tiny that my ass was kind of hanging out and then this tall white girl, Lisa, told everyone on the playground that I was a slut. While I was playing with the wood chips and monkey-barring or whatever, she went around and whispered seriously into people’s ears, “Look at that slut, running around.” None of us knew what that meant, that word. Only that it was not okay. Also I was too big in elementary school, like a foot taller than everyone else. That’s another reason why people didn’t like me, probably.

But now I had just finished sixth grade, and the Percy Jackson series was huge. I told Mother about the time I’d brought a copy of The Mark of Athena to school the day it came out and this one girl who sat next to me in homeroom literally got down on her knees in front of everyone and begged me to let her borrow it for homeroom reading. The teacher had to come over and be like, You can’t get down on your knees in homeroom like this. I told Mother this as if to say, See, books can be cool, can even make people come down to their knees, which for Chinese people is very big news, people coming down to their knees, and she said, “Why would you call me dumb?”

“What?”

“You can’t call your own mother dumb,” she said. “That’s really mean.” 

“Ma, I didn’t call you dumb.”

“Yes, you did!”

“No, what I’m saying is, you’re doing something a dumb person would do. You don’t want to be mistaken for a dumb person, right?”

She went back to playing Candy Crush in a big fuck-you kind of way and continued to play on the plane. “You’re not dumb, okay,” I said, when we got to our seats. “I’m sorry,” I kept saying, but she stayed steadfast in ignoring me. So I did a practice AMC 10, which stands for American Mathematics Competitions, tenth grade, and the rest of the time I slept soundly. Mother, on the other hand, who has not been able to sleep a lick since the year she got pregnant with me, watched Skyfall instead, the one with the Adele song, because it was one of the few movies on the plane that had Chinese dubbing. And also because she liked Adele, which is another thing about Chinese people. All Chinese people love Adele.

When we got to the hotel, it was the afternoon. We fell asleep promptly and when we woke, it was three in the morning. Without turning on the lights, so I could try for some more sleep, Mother got my primary blade out from the luggage and started to reglue the rubbers, so that they would be ready for the big day ahead. Over the years of gluing my blades, she had become a maestro, so much so that grown, sweaty men back home paid her handsomely to glue their rubbers, although I suspected that they used this as an excuse to get closer with Mother, who walked around the club in red stilettos and lipstick, picking up balls from every corner. She did this with various ball-picking-up instruments, a long black tube with rubber bands at the ends, a thin net connected to a pole, and she looked beautiful. She really did. The men paid her fifty bucks for the whole process, which I always felt was an injustice. Mother’s gluing was worth so much more. It took so long and filled the whole room with fumes, and of course the men would imagine her at home, in the privacy of a bedroom, in her soft home clothes, gluing, waiting for the liquid glue to tense up into a clear, stiff substance, and that was worth more than fifty dollars, I think. Mother knew it, of course, but she wanted to be good to everyone⁠⁠—she wanted the men to play with me, to give me more games, more of their sweaty time.

I sat on the bed in my little white underwear, my back against the headboard, and Mother sat at the hotel desk, her back turned to me, peeling the Hurricane 3 from my blade and removing the old, dried glue by rubbing at the rubber and the wood with the pads of her thumbs. She brushed on the Haifu Dolphin speed glue and fanned until it dried. She added her secret ingredient: Johnson’s Shea & Cocoa Butter Baby Oil. Drifting in and out of sleep, I watched her, the sky starting to blue, the birds starting to chirp, the smell of speed glue mixed with cocoa butter becoming ever more nauseating and pleasurable.

In the morning, a green cab took us halfway up a mountain and into a forest, until we reached a huge sliding gate amid some trees. We went up all these horrible dirt roads, but the driver seemed to know exactly where the potholes were and would slow the car nearly to a halt before each one. The car would lurch to one side and Mother would press solidly into me or me into her and we went like this the whole way there, sliding into each other. We went through the gate, past all these unnatural beige buildings jutting out of the nature, until we made it to the Playing Hall, which was an enormous concrete brick of a building. There were stairs, a lot of them, that led up to a small red door. Surrounding the place: sand. A thick moat of sand. It was all so hot and white and bright, my eyes burned from looking. In the distance, forest. Which was a strange combination, I felt. Fine white sand and then forest. 

We went through the door into the biggest room I had ever seen, where about a hundred kids my age were marching in a single-file line that curled around the perimeter. As they marched, they stretched, swinging their torsos left-right-left-right in sync. One lone voice rang out, a boy in the line, chanting a count to which the others moved. As the stretch ended, another began, and the next voice in line picked up the count without breaking the beat. It wasn’t really chanting but singing, the one-two-threes attuned to a melody they all knew. 

High-ceilinged and without supporting beams, the inside of the Playing Hall looked like a nice place to house a few commercial airliners, but instead there were fifty ping-pong tables, arranged five by ten. The place was so large you could hardly see the end of it.

Someone approached us. An adult. “My name is Shao,” she said, offering her hand to Mother. “You must be the little American,” she said, turning toward me. She was smiling wide, with perfect teeth. She had really nice skin. “Oh, he’s pretty,” she said to my mother. Mother laughed. All moisture had left my mouth. “Here, you two stay put,” said the one with the name Shao. “I’ll go upstairs and get Dong Dao.” The kids were still stretching and circling and singing. 

Dong Dao came down some stairs, his hands gripping the handrails firmly during his entire descent. He had a lot of wrinkles on his face, like a French bulldog. He pointed at me and curled one gargantuan gnarly finger in a “come here” motion. I went over to him at a light run. Mother watched us from a distance. All the other kids were still stretching. They seemed to have a never-ending amount of stretches to do. 

“Your coach called me yesterday,” he said. “We talked about you.” 

“Oh.” 

“I raised him like my own,” he said.

I didn’t know what to say, so I bowed. “Dong Dao,” I said.

He seemed put off  by the bow. A stretch ended⁠⁠—it was the final one, unbeknownst to me⁠⁠—and everyone coalesced into three rows, each of descending height from left to right.

“Attention!” yelled the coach named Shao. Everyone shifted into a perfect stance. Chin up. Chest out. “We have a new member.” She grabbed me and put a hand on my back. “He’s from America. California province.” It took a long time for her to say all the syllables in “California”⁠⁠—Jia-li-fu-ni-ya. “Let’s give him a warm welcome.” Everyone clapped. I could see their faces more clearly now. They looked lean, hungry. Everyone was around twelve, my age, give or take a few years, but there was a seriousness about their chins and their mouths that made them look older. Shao Dao said some more words about the beauty of cultural exchange, about the luck of us all to live in an international epoch of table tennis, about the emerging table tennis landscape in America. What landscape?

“How about this,” she continued. “Before we start practice today, let’s play a game. For diplomacy. Or maybe just for fun. An exhibition.”

People chuckled. Shao Dao beamed. “Any volunteers?” she asked. Every single hand shot up.

I looked at Mother in full panic. She nodded brightly. I was not ready for this. I was not warm. I hadn’t practiced in three days. I didn’t know how the ball would feel in this air pressure or humidity. I didn’t know the bounce of my new glue or how much friction this floor would produce against my shoes. Shao Dao chose someone. Everyone else moved to a comfortable position on the sidelines.