Paris France.- At just 28, the California native can’t help but dream of playing in front of a home crowd at the 2028 Los Angeles Games, but her parents are less enthusiastic.
“We’re always trying to convince her to stop playing,” says Linda Liu, her mother. “We just want her to have a normal job.”
So it turns out that even the most decorated American of all time in her sport cannot escape the pressure from her parents regarding her profession.
It’s an Olympian twist on the eternal conflict between kids chasing unconventional dream jobs and parents pushing for a 9-to-5 job. Aside from enduring frequent, unsolicited career advice from mom and dad, what bothers Zhang most is that she recognizes they’re right.
For every Simone Biles or Michael Phelps who turns Olympic success into a fortune, dozens more scrape by in less glamorous sports. They fly solo, in economy class, to distant meets on the international circuit, competing for meager prize money and sponsorships.
A bad run of form or a torn ligament could put an end to everything. “So many things can happen that can take away your stability in an instant,” Zhang admits.
The irony is that Linda Liu and Bob Zhang helped turn their daughter into a table tennis star. The immigrants from China wanted to pass on their home country’s national sport to their descendants. So in a small apartment in Palo Alto, the ping-pong table served double duty.
“It was also the dining table,” Lily Zhang recalls. “We would just put a tablecloth on it and eat.”
A prodigy at age 10, she began spending summers in China practicing with provincial teams that feed into the national team. For her, it was a chance to hone her skills and learn the secrets of why China has won 32 of a possible 37 gold medals since table tennis became an Olympic sport in 1988: Chinese athletes train up to nine hours a day, four times what Zhang does in the United States.
For his parents, table tennis was an opportunity to bolster his university applications. “If he played at a high level, it would help him get into a good school,” notes his mother, Liu.
At 16, she competed at the 2012 London Games. Although she lost her first match, her parents considered it a resounding victory. “They said, OK, you have the Olympics, you have them on your college applications, and now you can focus on your studies,” Zhang says.
After that, she practically gave up table tennis. Then, as a freshman at the University of California, Berkeley, she felt something was missing. She wanted to take a gap year and train for the upcoming Summer Games, but her mother disapproved.
“You’ve already gone to the London Olympics,” Liu told her at the time. “That’s enough.”
Liu says the conflict stems from generational and cultural gaps. “We are traditional Chinese parents… We always want her to focus on school; I always wanted her to get a job and be a normal girl.”
Jun Gao, coach of the U.S. team, said this outlook has ended the athletic careers of other promising U.S. table tennis Olympians, who have been mostly Asian-American. “That’s why you see so many talented players, men and women, saying goodbye after they get to college,” said Gao, a silver medalist from China who began coaching U.S. national teams eight years ago.
“I play because it makes me happy, because it’s one of the biggest passions of my life,” Zhang says. “I didn’t want to look back 30 or 40 years from now and regret not taking that chance.”
Mom and Dad relaxed. “It’s always her decision,” Bob Zhang says. So they helped her. They gave her food and shelter during her sabbatical, paid for her flights to competitions and cheered her on at the 2016 Rio Games, where she improved on her London debut by reaching the third round.
After graduating from college with a degree in psychology, she returned to the Olympics in 2021 and matched her result in Rio. She then joined the professional circuit, flying without coaches or teammates to competitions with varying prize money.
This year, early exits at major tournaments in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and Chongqing, China, earned him $11,000 each time. But winning a competition in Manchester, England, earned him just $650. He now also receives income from his sponsor, table tennis equipment manufacturer Joola.
Zhang, the 19th seed and the top American table tennis player in Paris, has already gone viral. As hundreds of American athletes boarded a boat during the opening ceremony, basketball player Stephen Curry brought Zhang and her teammates to Anthony Edwards and told the young, scrappy basketball superstar that these women would beat him in ping pong, 21-0.
“I don’t think so,” Edwards replied. “I’ll take a point.”
“No way,” Curry said.
Last Monday she demonstrated why that idea is completely absurd. With Edwards in the stands, Zhang unleashed two stunning forehands to stun Brazilian Bruna Takahashi.
Zhang’s parents also watched with pride as she achieved the biggest victory of her Olympic career, but that doesn’t mean they’ve changed their minds. “Being a ping-pong athlete is not stable,” her mother reiterates.
Editing of the original article
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