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“Do you not have parents?” I asked the little girl, three, maybe four years old, who tugged at my sleeve and who looked upon me with giant saucer eyes. There were four, five, six little ones now, all pleading money money. “Seriously, you are very little people. You should be at home reading Chinese fairy tales. Really, you are just way too young for this. Who takes care of you?”

Money, money.

In the shadows I saw an old, hunched woman with a weathered face. She waved and smiled. I waved back and wandered off to search for a place to drink a beer. Inside the Party-Time Disco and Bar, I found myself bathed in a dim blue light listening to trance music. Who are you people? I wondered, glancing at the dozens of figures around me. They must have been eighteen, tops, and they sat on couches listlessly playing games with dice as the tables filled with bottles of Crowne Royal and 35-yuan Tsingtao. I sipped at my beer and watched these young Chinese hipsters, the girls sucking on lollipops, and thought, You kids are just way too young for this. Really, ennui at eighteen. It’s just not right.

As time went on, I had begun wondering about sports in China. The Chinese, of course, are fantastically good at gymnastics, Ping-Pong, swimming, particularly diving, soccer, especially women’s soccer, basketball, and badminton (it’s a sport, really), but you never actually see the Chinese doing sporting endeavors. Not once in China did I see a jogger. Of course, the mere thought of jogging in China made me laugh. Few endeavors strike me as more absurd than running in China, a country in which people routinely wear surgical masks while conducting their errands. Nor did I see anyone playing soccer or volleyball or even badminton, which, judging by the television coverage on the Chinese sports channel—a knockoff of ESPN, incidentally—is a sport in which the Chinese kick serious butt in international competitions. Beyond the basketball players and the gangster rap in Shanghai, I never actually saw anyone in China play sports as just a sort of fun thing to do on a Saturday afternoon. And yet they excelled at so many sports at the international level. How could this be? I wondered.

In China, sports are not meant to be fun. Like in the East Germany of old, China has sports factories where youngsters who have demonstrated an unusual aptitude for a sport or a particular body type, like being a six-foot second-grader, are sent for rigorous training. Sports are seen as an extension of China’s strength and swiftness. It’s not about you, these youngsters are told. It’s not about the team. It’s about the great nation of China. To see a Chinese woman lose a badminton match is a searing experience. She is crushed, humiliated, embarrassed. You can barely look. You can tell that she feels she has shamed the nation. And while I couldn’t understand the commentators, I sensed they believed likewise. You did not try hard enough, Liling (which, incidentally, means Beautiful Jade Tinkle). You have shamed the Motherland. And after China has done so much for you, you dare to lose? Shame!

Sports are seen in an almost martial light. Indeed, as they prepared for the Olympics, the Chinese national basketball team trained by going to boot camp. They lived together in communal barracks. They were given military uniforms. Chinese military uniforms, alas for the players, did not come in the size XXXXXL required to cover a seven-footer, and so the team went through their paces in pants that flopped around their shins. But did they complain? They did not, except for Wang Zhizhi, a seven-foot-one center who was the first Chinese player in the NBA, and who refused to join the team for the hard drudgery of boot camp. Then the shame campaign began. Newspapers denounced his selfishness. Television commentators bemoaned his lack of national pride. After all, look what China had done for him. In the end, sputtering his humblest apologies and reaffirming that he would endure any hardship for the Motherland,