The Golden Child

Aziz's dominance grows over the next few minutes, with Xiao weakly hitting a backhand into the net. First game to Aziz, 11-6.

"You see that?" Aziz exults. "You see that? Come on." The Aziz supporters excitedly slap hands. The Xiao loyalists quietly look on, stunned.

The best-of-five-game match continues on this same improbable trajectory. Aziz is hitting killer forehands, happily shouting at the air, hopping perilously close to Xiao on the table's side. A few minutes later, the match is over. Aziz has won three of the four games, finishing with a flourish, a forehand that Xiao barely gets his racquet on.

Grinning, Aziz shouts at Cheng: "You still think I can't beat him? What do you say now? What are you saying now? I told you I could beat him. See? I told you. He's not that big of a player. How do you like that?"

Sixty feet away, Cheng pauses from his lesson to glance up and smile at Aziz. Then, in the next instant, he has retrained his attention on his work. The moment is not nearly dramatic enough for Aziz, who looks back at Han Xiao and gives him a pat on the back. Xiao smiles and nods, his head bowed ever so slightly. All this good-natured courtesy seems to dampen Aziz's sense of vindication -- no one looks at all humbled. He walks away from the table, accepting congratulations from his brother and friends, then sending a last shot Cheng's way: "I told you I'd beat him. Didn't I tell you?"

By then, Xiao has walked off, finding himself a quiet place at the other end of the club where he sits and mulls over what has just happened. Unconsciously, he begins biting his fingernails ravenously. "I played lousy," he declares. It is no way to begin an afternoon in which he hoped to sharpen his strokes and build his confidence, which, of late, has been starting to slip.

IN THE LATE 1980S, WHEN HE WAS A TODDLER, Han Xiao's parents left him behind in China for a couple of years, so that they could build a new life in the United States for themselves and their son. Jobs in the scientific and technical fields were scarce in China at the time, his parents remember, and the Chinese government generally looked the other way when young people who attended American universities quietly chose not to return to the homeland. In his parents' absence, Han lived with grandparents in the city of Nanjing. In time, his parents received graduate degrees in America -- his father in chemistry, his mother in biochemistry -- and with secure incomes and their lives stabilized, they sent for him. Han was 2 1/2.

He was precocious, reading books before he entered school; he bypassed kindergarten altogether. His parents wanted him -- and later his younger sister -- to be steeped in two cultures, and made a point of speaking only Chinese to him in their home. Leisure time was limited. If his father spotted him watching a few minutes of television, he'd often ask Han why he wasn't doing anything productive. The boy revered the work ethic of his father, a computer database administrator for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. If there was a shared recreational pleasure, it came upon a kitchen table fashioned into a Ping-Pong surface. Wei Xiao and his wife, Grace Zheng, played the game as schoolchildren in China, and they enjoyed gently batting a table tennis ball back and forth. Their young son joined in; the family eventually invested in a cheap $100 table.

In the early '90s, while reading a Chinese newspaper published in Washington, his father noticed an advertisement for table tennis lessons at the Maryland Table Tennis Center. "I just wanted Han to have a sport and exercise," Wei Xiao remembers. "It was nothing serious. I liked the game when I was a boy, and everybody I knew in China liked the game. Everybody played in China. I thought he might like the game, too."

As Wei Xiao saw it, table tennis also offered another way for his son to forge a connection with his culture and homeland, which treasured its long success in the sport and viewed the game as ideal for building fitness and character.

Table tennis historians generally agree that the game didn't come to China and other Asian countries until the 1910s, or a couple of decades after Britons and Americans began playing it, in some cases by using rounded wine corks for balls and cigar box lids for paddles. But by the early 1960s, China dominated the sport, in large part because its poverty and scant athletic facilities had made Ping-Pong one of the few games that the citizenry -- old and young, rich and poor -- could afford to play.

The Chinese government made a cause out of Ping-Pong excellence. Major tournaments there drew crowds in excess of 10,000. Fans' fervor fueled the growth there of a premier table tennis league; teams lured foreign talent to join homegrown standouts, with the matches televised throughout China. During the last four Olympics, China won 14 of 16 gold medals awarded in table tennis. The sport's top players enjoy rock star status in the country.