Absurdity, Allegory and China

There is a good piece by John Leicester in the Seattle Times concerning the former Chinese gymnast, Dong Fangxiao, who won a bronze medal at the Sydney 2000 Olympics: China leaves underage gymnast in the cold. Ms Dong is now at the center of a records falsification storm, abandoned by the officials who most likely were the ones who saw to it that a few years were added to her age. Ms. Dong, who now lives in New Zealand, applied for a job at a gym that was seeking government funding, and her CV was placed online. Her new date of birth was shown to be three years after the date she claimed to have been born when she won her bronze medal a decade ago.

Leicester, an AP international sports columnist, does a fine job telling this story, and I’d recommend that you have a look at it.

The state-run newspaper China Youth Daily quoted Luo Chaoyi as saying that Dong was eligible in Sydney but then shaved three years off her age after retirement in 2001, and that “this must have been an act by her and her family.”

Such an explanation is barely credible – unless, of course, Dong is a master forger of official documents, which is even less believable. In China, as elsewhere, passports are government-issued. Coaches – and not just in China – have also long falsified ages for girls whose small and supple bodies give them a competitive advantage over larger and older young women. The reverse scenario – that a retired gymnast would pass herself off as a kid – makes no sense.

It also hard to believe Chinese officials didn’t know Dong was underage in 2000. Most of Dong’s childhood was spent within the state-run sports system that churns out medalists for China. Her CV shows she joined a sports school at age 4, a provincial team at 7 and the national team at 10. The regimen in such teams can be so tough that wealthier Chinese parents are now steering their children away from organized sports and Chinese media have been increasingly critical of sausage-factory training methods.

How the IOC will respond to these allegations will be fun to watch. How far is Jacques and his crew willing to go? Well, now that the burden of the falsification has been placed upon “her and her family,” I think it is safe to assume that this is the official Chinese permission that the IOC has been waiting for, and the way is now officially cleared for the IOC to demand that she return her medal. I am hoping that Ms. Dong will tell them all to go piss up a rope!

This piece on age discrepancy reminded me of a couple of stories I am quite familiar with. The ease of falsifying records here in China is one that most people in the west can’t quite imagine, though perhaps after 8 seasons of Jack Bauer and his several busy days on the TV show 24, they have a better handle on it than I did before I came to China.

A woman I know, surnamed Song, found herself during the Culture Revolution with a mingzi that was certainly troublesome – the very same name as a famous cross-strait’s personality. In fact, there is every reason to believe that my Song was named after the last empress of Taiwan. The humbler Song was able to get her name changed on the streets of Beijing back in 1967 for twenty or thirty kuai, though that didn’t keep her from being ‘sent down’ to Guangxi for three years of utter nastiness. “But,” you might say, “that was then and this is now. And now is a whole lot different than then.” Well, in some cases it’s not much different at all, at least when it comes to really needing to have your records updated.

I also know a young man, a minority from the western countryside, who was, officially, born too soon after his older sibling. Although his parents were allowed to have two children, there was a restriction on just how quickly one could have a second child after the first was born. “Too quickly” meant that a penalty could be enforced in the process of apportioning fields. If the second child followed too close on the heels of the first, a farming family could find themselves being only given the field allotment for one of the children. In other words, a family of four might only be allocated the same quota of arable land as a family of three, which could mean a critical loss of food, especially when the products of the fields are for self-consumption; the fruits of one’s land and labors are what gets a family through the long, cold winter. Once you begin to understand this, there is not much mystery to understanding how important a loaf of bread is when given as a gift.

The young man in question was not legally registered at birth, though everyone knew how old he was. If his family had tried to get a birth certificate when he was born, they would have put themselves in a position to be officially audited at some other, higher level beyond their village. As it was, it remained a village issue, and the extra land was allotted and everyone had enough food to eat.

Jump ahead a few years and the family finally gets a certificate that records the boy’s age as being three or four years younger than he actually is. No big deal. He’s the son of farmers, and what does age really matter as long as you have a certificate, even if it is off by a few years?

Jump ahead again a decade or so, the boy at this point a young man, and a very bright young man to boot. He has been fortunately noticed by some people along the way who have helped get him out of the countryside and into a fine education program (not public) in the provincial capital. Through a set of circumstances that no one in his family could ever have dreamed possible, the young man is offered a scholarship to a very good university abroad. There is a stipulation: he must be 18 years old to leave. Big problem! His birth certificate records that he’s somewhere in the last half of his fourteenth year. Whoops! Now what? Well, you head back to the rural township office with the right person as your representative: a big, strong man whom everyone knows and also happens to be afraid of because he can whoop all of their butts, two/three/four at a time. And Goliath happens to be carrying a few bottles of qingkejiu, along with enough money to take everyone of standing in the concrete office out to lunch. And that’s how 3+ years get officially added to a certificate to bring the young man up to his correct age, as well as up to speed on getting out of town. Presently, he is living a life unimaginable to himself and everyone in his former rural orbit. Done!

I also know how this works when the official route is taken. I am close with a small family – a mother and her two daughters – who followed the law because there probably wasn’t a choice. Mom registered their births – two years apart – because she couldn’t afford not to. In other words, she couldn’t buy off the right people along the way, and so she had to follow the rules. If I showed you a photo of a group of young women, you’d say, “Look at those two there! They’re so thin!” And then I’d tell you how they’re from a family of three women that only has a field allotment for two. But they have correct birth certificates and have had them their entire lives. “And man,” I’d say, “You should see those two work!” The skinny engines who could, indeed. How else could they get by living within the shadow of the law?