I met with Jacky a couple days
after our first meeting following our Senior Showcase in the TCU School of
Classical and Contemporary Dance Department. I found out in our first meeting
that Jacky roomed with Will, one of the freshman ballet majors, so we decided
to meet after he watched his roommate perform in the show. After briefly
discussing the dances (I will refrain from going into too much detail here for
sake of avoiding jargon and lengthy explanations of topics that don’t hold much
importance here), we began to reflect upon sports and childhood pastimes.
The
conversation started as Jacky noted that when he found out Will was a ballet
major, his response was that he didn’t know that men performed ballet at all,
which I, as a ballet major myself, found mildly humorous in that it benignly
violated the entirety of my life—I suppose I laugh self-deprecatingly at myself
here. Regardless of the humor analysis, this small point spurred a conversation
on sports in which we held interest.
Jacky
started by telling me of his newfound interest in basketball since being in the
United States. I suppose his interest was not necessarily newly founded, but he
gravitated toward the sport more heavily than when he resided in China. As the
two of us continued to converse, we came upon the topic of soccer—a sport I
actually comprehend in its entirety (not too complex really: kick a ball
around, try to score, fall over in excruciating agony and then get up as soon
as a penalty is drawn—in actuality, not that different from basketball). Apparently,
soccer is huge in China. I may have expected this due to the popularity of the
sport in essentially every country aside from the one in which I live, but I
think that due to the lack of results put up by the Chinese national team, I
just assumed it wasn’t that big in that country.
However,
Jacky informed me that the sport is popular in the country, but the people of
China generally watch English Premier League teams and other European club
football on their televisions. Why? The number of pitches in the country remain
few and far between, especially at high schools. The conversation did not delve
into why such a lack of playing fields exists in China (even in comparison to
the U.S., where the sport is only beginning to gain popularity thanks to FIFA
video games), but I have a theory. In the United States of ‘Merica, football
fields take residence alongside nearly every high school that can afford to
have one (which is most since having sports is much more important than paying
teachers well in order to foster better education), and the dimensions of a
football field and a soccer field are quite similar. Thus, having a soccer
pitch here is fairly simple.
In
China, I assume that American football isn’t really a thing (since it isn’t
popular in any other country aside from the U.S.; Canada has a few teams, but
it’s not nearly as pervasive in the culture) and, therefore, that making football
fields is likewise not a highly valued task. While this knowledge does not in
and of itself explain the lack of soccer fields in China, it does perhaps shed
some light on cultural values that might be different between the two
countries. I would have to do more research to say this with certainty, but it
seems to me that the education system of China concerns itself more with
academia than the extracurricular activities that seem to be stressed more in
the American schooling system (so much so that it is not good enough to have a
4.0 GPA and a 36 ACT score to get into Harvard or Yale: you need to have some
sort of sport or provide some sort of diversity much of the time in order to be
accepted to those types of schools). I will iterate here that this is mere
conjecture to explain why a popular sport in China does not have enough space
to be played regularly by its inhabitants and is not, in fact, fact.
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