The Boxing Rebellion——美国《纽约客》对邹市明的专访
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Zou with a trainer during the match. “Zou rarely knocks his opponents out,” Osnos writes. “He batters them and darts out of reach, like an angry sparrow.”
Zou’s parents had no reason to be familiar with boxing. Western boxing, as it was known, had first appeared in the nineteen-twenties, in the port cities of Shanghai and Guangzhou, where foreign sailors were pitted against local fighters. The sport grew, unsupervised. In 1953, at a big competition in the northern city of Tianjin, a boxer died after a bout. Sports authorities were unnerved, and in 1959, as China organized its first national games, it dropped boxing from the lineup. Mao was driving his nation deeper into isolation: the Great Leap Forward, his disastrous push for an industrial breakthrough, was already heading toward a famine that killed more than thirty million people. The political atmosphere was increasingly hostile to Western imports. As Fan Hong, a scholar who specializes in China’s athletic history, puts it, “People believed that boxing was very brutal, very ruthless, and those were said to be the characteristics of capitalism. So it was banned.”
When the Cultural Revolution engulfed China, in 1966, the Communist Party banned competitive sports, and athletes who had won medals in the past found themselves accused of jinbiao zhuyi, or “trophy mania,” a charge of pursuing victory more zealously than Mao’s vision of mass fitness. The Ping-Pong champion Rong Guotuan, who had been greeted with parades a few years earlier, was detained on a trumped-up charge of spying and later hanged himself. Before his death, he wrote, “I love my reputation more than my life.”
After the Cultural Revolution subsided, in 1969, China used Ping-Pong matches to reconnect with the world, sometimes throwing matches to promote a friendlier mood. It was not until the late nineteen-seventies that Deng Xiaoping decided that competition might be as good for athletics as it was for the economy. In December of 1979, Deng invited Muhammad Ali to the heavily guarded compound housing China’s top leaders. The champ hugged him. They sat. And the word went out. “Now the message was ‘If we want to win friends, if we want to win respect, we have to win medals,’ ” Fan said.
In the following decade, Chinese boxers began training again, after a fashion. “We had no bag or gloves,” Liu Gang, one of the earliest recruits and now a promoter, said. “In three months, I wore out two pairs of white cotton shoes. We punched sandbags.” Liu went on to the 1992 Olympics, in Barcelona, where competitors were delighted to face off against Chinese opponents. The best that their coaches hoped for was that each fighter might stay on his feet a bit longer than the one before him.
Today, as China transforms itself for the Olympics, Beijing is determined to broadcast a picture of prosperity. It is overhauling parts of the city that hadn’t changed much since the thirteenth century, razing miles of one-story brick alleys that Mongol conquerors designed to uniform widths of twelve or twenty-four paces. It is building a new world of vertical apartment complexes, with foreign names like the Greenwich and the Upper East Side. Underground, a web of subway lines has more than doubled in length in barely six years. Olympic guests will step through an airport terminal that will be the largest in the world. The torch relay will include 21,888 runners, more than any previous Olympics, and a stop at the peak of Mt. Everest. In this atmosphere, any feat of preparation seems plausible. One Chinese pork supplier vowed to produce specially pampered pigs, to insure that hormone-fed meat would not cause athletes to fail doping tests. Only after Chinese citizens began wondering about their own pork did a Beijing Olympic Committee spokesperson issue a “Clarification on Olympic Pig-Related Reports,” denouncing the pork story as an “exaggerated falsehood.”
In the Games proper, China hopes to win more gold than ever before. At the founding of the People’s Republic, in 1949, no Chinese athlete had ever stood on an Olympic podium; by the close of the 2004 Summer Games, in Athens, China trailed only the United States, thirty-two to thirty-six, in that year’s gold medals. Chinese sports officials scrutinize, dissect, and forecast the medal race with an intensity that lends it the air of science—convinced that sufficient analysis will eventually engineer away the frailty of a diver in midair or a fighter in the ring. In 2000, Chinese officials launched the 119 Project, a campaign to win more gold medals in the Summer Games’ most competitive events—a list that by China’s calculation totalled a hundred and nineteen medals.
In Athens, China’s gold reflected its focus on producing an élite cadre of championship-level performers. Most Olympic delegations return home with more bronzes and silvers than golds. China achieved the opposite: for the most part, its athletes went to the top or they went nowhere. China now cultivates sports that it never cared about before, events that (like boxing) increase a medal count because they include various weight classes or categories. Sports officials groom champions in canoe-kayak and doubles tennis. Chinese athletes and coaches have also begun to defy their long-held belief that they can never best larger, taller Western competitors. And doing so is particularly glorious, as the sprinter Liu Xiang indicated after he won a gold medal in the hundred-and-ten-metre hurdles in Athens. “I believe I achieved a modest miracle for the yellow-skinned Chinese people and the Asian people,” he said afterward.
The élite athletes who bear the responsibility for realizing the country’s ambitions live in privileged isolation. Their talents are treated as public goods, but while they are practicing they live in secluded sports complexes, where they eat, sleep, and train under coaches’ instructions. If national-team members have endorsements, they are required to share the money with their team staff and the state. When the Olympic diving champion Guo Jingjing was criticized, two years ago, for having too many “commercial activities,” she appeared on state television to apologize. “I belong to the country,” she said. As a boxer, Zou is even more cloistered, because his sport sanctifies monastic training. At times, coaches confiscate his cell phones to eliminate distractions.
Zou after defeating his opponent 20–0.
Soon after Zou made the Guizhou team, in 1996, Teacher Zhang began to notice his extraordinary work ethic. Zhang had set out to develop a distinct Chinese style of boxing. He was studying fighters from Cuba, Russia, and the U.S. “Asian people have different abilities and body types than Americans or Europeans,” Zhang told me last fall. “We have to fight with flexibility and fight with speed. Because, after all, you don’t often win by knocking people out. Fight with your mind. Fight with strategy.”
After three years, Zhang was promoted to an assistant-coaching job on the national team, and Zou moved up as well, as a sparring partner. The training was taking a physical toll, but when he talked to his parents on the phone he reassured them: “I always said everything is fine, even when I was in great pain or my nose was bleeding.” In 2003, Zou won his first national championship and drew political recognition; he was named one of the Ten Outstanding Young Persons in Guizhou Province and, later, a National Advanced Worker. Like other national champions, he joined the Communist Party.
Chinese reporters nicknamed him the Dark Horse at first. Later, they tried the Knight of Lightning or the Fox or, sometimes, the Pirate, all celebrating his knack for snatching points and peeling away from his opponents’ reach. That strategy was helping him win international matches. In Athens, Zou made it to the semifinals, eventually winning a bronze, China’s first in boxing. He captured headlines, but when he returned home his achievement paled against the frenzy over Liu Xiang’s gold in the hurdles. Zou’s loss in the semifinals began to feel like a failure. “Making a mistake in an event as grand as the Olympics, and to come so close to a gold medal, is a feeling that is inscribed into your bones and printed on your heart,” he told me. It was another year before Zou won his first gold medal, at the 2005 world championships, held in the western Chinese city of Mianyang. He was the nation’s first amateur boxing champion, and China celebrated. For him, the lesson was unmistakable: “You must win the championship in order to get acknowledgment.”
The following year, Zou started a blog where he posted his diary entries and photographs. Entering the site triggers a twinkling piano tune, the first in a long loop of his favorite songs. A few hours after he posted his first message, a fan wrote, “You are the pride of the Chinese people!” Some days, Zou writes about fighting (“I’m fully confident that in tomorrow’s combat I cannot fail!”). On others, he posts a picture of himself strolling on a beach or flying a kite. He writes of his struggles: “Often, when I sleep, my legs don’t know where to go. No matter how I lie, I can’t sleep comfortably. Worst of all, in a flash, the whistle blows and it’s time to get out of bed again to train.” After twelve one night in the winter of 2006, he wrote, “This week’s training has been really tough, and the added intensity is bringing out accumulated years’ worth of pain, to the point that my back hurts so much it is keeping me awake.” It was a week before the Chinese New Year, the most important family holiday, and he was spending it, once again, at a training center far from home. “The thought of the pain and homesickness troubles my mind. It’s late at night, I’m still unable to sleep, and I really want to find a good friend to chat with, but I feel bad to bother them. So I’ll just pour out my heart to everyone, and hope people encourage me to shake off this spell of being down!” He received five comments immediately. Someone using the name A Secret Supporter wrote, “I, too, am far from home, and I know what you are experiencing.”
Zou signs an autograph for a fan. “Around his teammates, Zou enjoys no special privileges, and although he has attracted more attention and glory than than all of them combined, they betray no hint of jealousy,” Osnos writes. “When I asked Gao Lingzi, another light fighter on the national team, about his first impression of Zou, Gao looked back at me, puzzled. ‘I worship him,’ he said.”
In Chicago, Zou finally had a chance to get out of the hotel. He devoured his first lobster. He wandered down to the edge of Lake Michigan, where the autumn wind lashed at his gym clothes. In the arena, the local Chinese consulate organized a cheering section, which worked in shifts, handing out homemade placards bearing the Chinese characters for “Add oil!”—Chinese for “Let’s go!” None of the diplomats and visiting students involved knew much about boxing, but they saw themselves as participants in China’s effort to express itself. “I think there are a lot of misunderstandings about China in Western culture,” Bai He, a Ph.D. student in medical chemistry, told me. “They think China is very underdeveloped and they don’t have any idea of what China is like.”
Zou won the Chicago championship with ease. In his final match, he routed a Filipino, 17–3. Even Dan Campbell, the American coach, said that he was impressed. After the national anthems, Zou wandered through the halls of the arena but drew little notice from the American fans streaming past. China’s state news service once ranked him No. 4 on the list of the nation’s top athletes, three places behind Yao Ming, but outside of China Zou remains virtually unknown. When Chinese-Americans stopped him for autographs and snapshots, he seemed startled. He spent most of the time frozen in a half-smile and let them do the talking. “This is going on my wall,” Ray Liu, a fifteen-year-old from the Chicago suburbs, said, autograph in hand. “I wrestle,” Liu explained. “He’s a model.” Then he turned to Zou and said, in loud English, “You’re a model!”
That night, I asked Zou what he planned to do now that the competition was over. “After I report back, I’ll have dinner with my family, visit my grandparents,” he said. “When that’s taken care of, I’d like to take my bags and go someplace with a beautiful view, someplace quiet, like a tall mountain or a big ocean, to relax from the pressure of a long competition.” He was outlining a trip that he knew he had no time to take. “Then I’ll throw myself back into training.”
In addition to Zou’s gold medal, China had won four bronzes, its best finish ever. When the team landed in Beijing, on November 5th, after an all-night flight, Chinese reporters were waiting for Zou in the terminal. They gave him bouquets of flowers and launched an impromptu press conference around his luggage cart. The next morning’s Beijing News carried a story about his return, headlined with a quote: “We Told the World with Our Fists That China Is Strong.”
Zou relaxes in the locker room. “Zou seemed at peace with the knowledge that his country’s self-regard hinges on a single fight in his future, on a single medal,” Osnos writes. “He has come of age in China’s system, and, if it chafes him, he doesn’t readily admit to it.”
If Zou’s home town were in the United States, its seven million people would make it America’s second-largest city, but Zunyi doesn’t have an airport, so when teams from China, Kazakhstan, and the United States arrived in late November for a friendly competition they landed in Chongqing, a three-hour flight from Beijing. From there, they took a three-hour bus ride through mountain tunnels and gullies, around terraced fields, and into the clanging center of Zunyi.
Inland Chinese cities live in a parallel world of brands and icons. Stores are named to carry a whiff of foreignness: Toskany for belts and purses, Ochirly for clothes, Dico’s for fast food. The area around Zunyi has one famous export: Moutai, also called Maotai, the national firewater that is served to summiting Presidents and Prime Ministers. (After visiting China, Richard Nixon tried to show his daughter how strong the stuff was by putting a match to a bowlful; he set the table on fire, according to Henry Kissinger.)
Here, in the nineteen-thirties, Mao won a struggle for control of the Long March. Today, the city does a fine business in celebrating the Communist revolution. Banners welcome “Red Tourists” by the busload, who buy memorabilia and file past the spartan bedroom and thin mattress where Mao, whose image is omnipresent, slept.
Zou’s picture was almost as prevalent: on the front page of the Zunyi Evening News, on cardboard cutouts beside restaurants that serve bumblebee larvae, a local delicacy. The façade of the Fuyuan Hotel was plastered with two huge posters of Zou in the ring. In English and Chinese, they said, “Welcome to the Return of the King from Victory.”
It was Zou’s first competition here in years, and the event was to last three days. His face was printed on the tickets. His first opponent was a Kazakh. The match was lopsided and brief; midway through the second round, Zou was pummelling the hapless man, 20–0, when the referee stopped the fight. Zou waved to the audience and jogged back to the sanctuary of his locker room. Fights were still under way, but a frenzied crowd of kids began to mass outside the locker-room door, which was guarded by police, except for the police who wandered inside to ask Zou for his autograph.
“Get changed!” Teacher Zhang murmured. “If you wait until the end, it will be hard to leave. This is a small town.” The door opened a crack, revealing a wall of young, reddened faces pressed against a policeman’s outstretched arm. The door slammed shut. Zou stepped out of his trunks and pulled on jeans and a Brazilian soccer jersey. The room smelled of sweat and garlic. From the sound of it, the crowd outside was growing. He looked at his coach. They were, for the moment, trapped. Well-wishers had left giant bouquets of flowers on the table in the locker room, so Zou grabbed two of them and held them in front of his face as a shield. And then he and his coach pressed into the maw of the crowd. Teen-agers swarmed, jostling and shouting. Zou smiled and thanked them but pushed forward. By the time he had squeezed into the stairwell and down to a waiting bus, the bouquets were shredded.
The next day, Zou and his parents visited relatives in town. They climbed the steps to a modest two-bedroom apartment where the entry was filled with a large empty fish tank and a folded treadmill. The apartment was decorated, more or less, with Zou: a wall poster of his face beneath the phrase “Everything for 2008”; a poem written in calligraphy by another relative, which ended, “Surprise the whole world in year 2008.” Looking at it, I wondered how they would redecorate once the Olympics were over. As we walked to lunch that day, I asked Zou if his body was holding up. His back and his foot have been bothering him for months. (He had told a Chinese reporter, “After endurance runs, I lie on the ground, and I can’t tell the tears from the sweat.”) “It’s painful,” he said. “But there’s no time for surgery before the Olympics. That will have to wait.”
I once asked him how it felt to live his life suspended between future success and failure. “I absolutely can’t allow such a heavy burden to feel like it’s suffocating me, or I will bring those worries into the ring,” he said.
The following night, in the final, Zou faced Luis Yanez, a confident, experienced nineteen-year-old from Duncanville, Texas, who had won a succession of amateur titles on his way to the American Olympic team. His father had taken him to the gym as an eight-year-old, and he had thrived. In high school, he had divided his time between boxing and waiting tables at the Blue Moon Café, in nearby Lewisville. After years of hearing about Zou, he had a strategy: “He drops his hands a lot and holds his hands down, and I got a quick jab, so if I just keep my jab out there in his face he won’t have them down there no more,” Yanez told me. “But he’s a good little fighter. He’s slick.”
The arena holds about five thousand people, and that night it was packed. The walls did not meet the roof, and it was cold inside; the ring-card girls huddled in down parkas during the rounds. The city had made special preparations for its foreign guests: officials were identified with signs intended to be bilingual. A Chinese sign indicated the “Arbitrator’s Seat.” The English letters below read “Arditrator eat.” Not that the American team was unaccustomed to communication trouble; team members had spent part of the day at a pharmacy trying to mime the symptoms of a stomach ailment.
Zou jogged out of the locker room draped in a golden robe, his face hidden beneath the hood. Only his gloves were visible, firing jabs into the cool night air. High over his head, a banner along the rafters ran the length of the stadium wall, with an enormous picture of him in mid-fight. When the announcer said his name, the crowd went berserk. On the upper deck, a man unfurled a red Chinese flag as big as a bedsheet, and Zou’s cardboard-blow-up face danced in the crowd. Teacher Zhang had warned him before the fight not to let the attention affect him. “Don’t try to prove anything or show off,” Zhang said. “Be yourself, and you’ll be fine.”
Yanez came out with no robe, jogging and sidestepping toward the ring, flicking his gloves over his shoulders as if trying to shoo away an insect. He climbed through the ropes, jogged in place, and settled into a half-crouch to wait for the bell. The two surged into each other. They wrestled and bear-hugged, tying each other up in headlocks. The referee pulled them apart, and Zou buried a combination into Yanez’s head. The crowd loved it. Yanez responded with a broad hook that missed by a foot.
Zou settled into a rhythm, and his fists dropped to his waist, his gloves rolling loosely up and down, as if he were a timpani drummer, rising only to peck at Yanez’s temples. Yanez grew frustrated. He lunged, angrily, but landed few punches. When the first round ended, Zou led, 8–1. He turned back to his corner. He waved away his stool and stood facing into the ring, his arms splayed comfortably on the top rope. He looked at home there. It occurred to me that he has been boxing almost half his life.
The second round drifted farther out of Yanez’s grasp. Zou racked up points, setting his feet to hit hard now, intent on landing a big punch. He held his hands so low that they dropped behind his back, pleading with Yanez to open himself up. As Round 3 ticked down, Yanez was frantic, swinging broad hooks through the air. He looked, suddenly, like a child. Zou stretched his lead to nineteen points. The bell sounded. With his chest heaving, Yanez plodded back to his corner, but the American coach was already nodding to the referee.
Zou thrust his fists into the air. The audience erupted and began pouring toward the ring. The fighters shook hands and Yanez slipped away, unnoticed. Zou put on his golden robe, brilliant in the ring lights, and stood alone, arms raised in the center of the canvas. He turned and faced the crowd of his countrymen, hundreds of them pressed against the edge of the ring, cell phones aloft, snapping pictures. Zou seemed at peace with the knowledge that his country’s self-regard hinges on a single fight in his future, on a single medal. He has come of age in China’s system, and, if it chafes him, he doesn’t readily admit to it. Like the pressure born of his talent, his role as a political symbol seemed to be something he accepted long ago, something larger than he is. ♦
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