Badminton I
Note: I shall attach my high-school TED-talk draft “Being good at badminton is to be a good person” here as a prelude.
My badminton experience before and during high school can be summed up in two phrases: wanting to win, and losing a lot.
An extremely intense desire to win probably emerged alongside my first consciously perceived defeats. I no longer remember which came first: perhaps my first SSSA tournament in early second grade, or the annual “class tournaments” held every fall back when I was still in the local program (both concepts are equally familiar to me). Unable at the time to regulate my emotions, I cried uncontrollably (my memory is very certain about this: it was uncontrollable sobbing, not quiet sniffling) because I could not understand why, despite having “training” every week, I was still losing to classmates who had never trained at all and who held the racket in pan-handle grip
That was because the training was fake.
From grade one through four, I trained under three coaches. Aside from the first, who was genuinely competent (and unfortunately left for the U.S. after only a few months), the other two had neither real ability nor proper training methods (one came from a sports school but not a badminton background; the other was a retired umpire).
Judging by the outcome: my grip was never corrected, I barely ever properly practiced footwork or shadow swings, never did the high-intensity multi-shuttle drills essential for real training, and had no physical conditionings at all. I genuinely have no memory of how I got through those years. The first time I went for a trial at a semi-professional club, I received the comment that I “had a form, but everything was strange.”What is amusing—or perhaps tragic—is that neither my father nor I realized back then how unprofessional that training environment was. As a result, I squandered what should have been the golden years for building foundational technique. At the time, I trained only once a week for two hours—how could that possibly be called “training”?
It was in this state that, in fourth grade, I entered my first real club: the Sun Jun–Ge Fei Badminton Club, usually referred to as “Sun-Ge.”
As for why we thought of switching clubs, it was because my coach was extremely elderly; during a match with me, she was pushed deep into the backcourt by one of my unusually well-executed high clears, lost her balance, fell, tried to brace herself—and fractured his left arm. My father finally realized that training with this coach could no longer lead to improvement, and through word of mouth, brought me to Sun-Ge, located in the old campus gym of Jincai North School. At Sun-Ge, I experienced for the first time what it felt like to be unable to win—and to rank dead last. When I had private lessons before, a session involved at most three people, and winning or losing was never that consequential. But in this group of fifteen or sixteen players, I may not have won a single internal match in my first twenty games. The impression was searing: everything about me was bad. Although I had not yet developed a strong system of self-reflection, I dimly began to understand what “helplessness” and “inferiority” meant. Whether because the training itself was long and extremely grueling, or simply because I never had a chance to “play my game” or beat anyone, I began to develop avoidance toward training. Neither my father nor my coach seemed to notice much, but whenever possible I would delay my arrival at the training venue after school, or in more extreme cases, invent excuses not to go at all.
(An aside: the head coach who trained me at Sun-Ge was a man in his forties or fifties, a retired Zhejiang provincial player, extremely strict and difficult to communicate with. For me, this was a double-edged sword: on the one hand, I held an almost absolute respect and fear of authority figures at the time, so I forced myself to carry out every instruction he gave; on the other hand, a personality that might otherwise have become open or even lively became rigidly sealed under such high-pressure conditions. Any early signs of boldness or aggressiveness on court did not reemerge until five or six years later.
At times, I truly did not know what to do.)
But I still wanted to win.
My first tangible result came in fifth grade, when I placed fourth at a local “Rising Star” tournament. As for why I achieved a result completely mismatched with my then-mediocre strength, it can only be attributed to beginner’s bracket luck… (In hindsight, every opponent I faced from the round of 32 onward was almost certainly the weakest in their respective groups.) And just like that, I miraculously “floated up.” This was the first time I stood on a podium holding a certificate. The tournament was small, the prize insignificant—but it gave me a ridiculous hint: I had won; I could win. I got addicted. I became genuinely addicted to winning.
Training at Sun-Ge alongside me was a classmate from school. It was also because I knew him that I transferred internally from the local program at Pinghe to the international one (yes… unexpectedly, badminton was the reason I transferred internally). Almost every day after school, people at PH would see the two of us, each carrying two bags, hunched forward as we trudged along Huangyang Road toward Biyun Road to catch a taxi. (At the time I was very small in stature; carrying an Artengo racket bag made me look like I had a turtle shell on my back. Indeed, whether on court or socially, I was like a turtle: withdrawn.) We were competitors, but because he had started training two or three years earlier than I had, he was far stronger. Defeat after defeat, fight after fight; pursuing victory was almost like courting defeat. It was not until the Shanghai tour of “The Legend’s Vision” at the end of sixth grade that I narrowly beat him—for the first and only time. That was also our final match against each other. After that, he moved south for schooling, later transferred to a U.S. high school, and we never again had a serious match.
“The Legend’s Vision” was a Yonex-sponsored tournament jointly organized by the four great singles players—Lin Dan, Lee Chong Wei, Gade, Taufik—and Lee Yong Dae, and was the largest amateur badminton competition in China. Its magic lies in the fact that it threads together my entire middle-school badminton memory. Every tour of “The Legen’ds Vision” at Shanghai was held at the Bokuan Badminton Club—a place where I would later spend six years training. I participated four times in a row starting in fifth grade; every year I encountered players from Bokuan; and every time except the last, I lost to them. Just as my training at Sun-Ge was hitting a bottleneck, my father, following the logic of “if you can’t beat them, join them,” enrolled me there. I myself also wanted to see what kind of training methods produced players of such caliber and results.
From the beginning of seventh grade until leaving the country in twelfth grade, I spent six years at Bokuan. Thus, everything that follows unfolds against this backdrop.
From the start, I seemed to fall into a recurring cycle: losing many matches—training diligently—winning a small victory—then declining due to various obstacles. The fundamental reason for the losses was the enormous gap between me and my teammates when I joined; and as I improved, they continued improving as well, making it inherently difficult to catch up. Diligent training is easy to explain; typically it was followed by a brief period of rapid improvement during which I slightly surpassed my teammates, but within a week or two the golden period would end, replaced by multi-layered decline in stamina, energy, and technique. The reasons for decline included injury, pandemic lockdowns, academic pressure leading to late nights, insufficient nutritional support, and so on—but regardless of the cause, it almost always occurred. (Perhaps it can be said that when one trains too aggressively, such setbacks are inevitable.)
The psychological effect of this cycle was a sustained downward spiral: offering a bit of hope, then yanking it away, producing massive disappointment. The function “y = cos x − 0.9” captures the essence behind losing far more than winning: very little rises above the surface, far more remains submerged beneath it. I remember vividly: in early 2021, during the internal trials that determined Yonex-sponsored slots, I defeated a strong opponent and was widely favored—only to lose completely afterward to a teammate I should not have lost to, due to stamina and warm-up issues. The result was total collapse, followed by days of conflict with my father. (In fact, I deeply resent parents offering commentary on sports they do not understand; they see only outcomes, seek momentary verbal victory, and rarely provide useful advice or view matches through an athlete’s perspectives.) Similar situations occurred in district tournaments in 2018 and late 2021: strong performances in training beforehand, followed by muddled defeats in competition due to subtle shifts in venue, mindset, or feel.
Aside from a small peak in April 2019, which happened to coincide with back-to-back editions of “Rising Star” and “The Legend’s Vision”, where I unexpectedly earned one gold and one silver, not a single official competition was played with me fully in competitive form. Coaches never commented on my matches; perhaps because I was never a priority trainee, or perhaps because they recognized the fragility of my self-esteem and trusted that I would reflect on my own. Still, I knew that the phrase they often used on others—“you didn’t bring your training into competition”—applied to me as well. My self-esteem feared disappointing others: I feared disappointing my coaches, disappointing my teammates in team events, disappointing my partner in doubles, disappointing myself.
This led to the dialogue I later reenacted in my TED-talk. It was my first confrontation with an existential crisis within myself—albeit one confined to a single dimension of an interest. I had to ask myself the question of “why.”Why do I play badminton? Why “train diligently and fight tenaciously (刻苦训练，顽强拼搏)” (the two slogans posted in large characters on the walls)? I realized that such questions arise only in extreme pain, prolonged stagnation, and repeated failure; had I been winning effortlessly every day, I likely would not have bothered asking them at all (thanks to failure!).
Losing a lot; wanting to win. These two states, which seem to form a bidirectional causal relationship, are in fact driven by the latter: it is because I wanted to win that I lost so much; and because I did not win, I wanted to win even more. Winning brings happiness, but after losing so much, that final victory brings enjoyment—a higher form of “happiness” that transcends biological pleasure, woven with pain and reason.
(I must also mention the private coaches who trained me alongside the club. Altogether, I worked with six different private coaches, all under Bokuan’s name—Bokuan is large, and staff turnover is relatively fast. Their once-a-week sessions were comparable in effectiveness to the club team’s five sessions per week; perhaps because I am better suited to one-on-one or one-on-two interaction, and the positivity these young coaches radiated in casual conversation helped carry me through my most depressive periods.)
What if I couldn’t win for months—or even a year or two? I honestly don’t know. For athletes in more advanced teams, the answer would likely be demotion or retirement—there is precedent. Even if I could endure it for a while, could I endure it forever?
Fortunately, I won one last time. At my second Shanghai Team Championship—I was fielded for a single match as first singles, and narrowly won. That was enough. It satisfied my desire to win and overshadowed dozens of losses at the Local Championships, U-series events, SSSA, Will of the King, Rising Star, Sunshine Cup, and student competitions.
One win was enough.
(As for what happened after I went abroad—let’s talk about it another time.)