Part 2: (More about Nini's training, plus and a surprisingly large amount about her mother's childhood)
[TN: Just a word of warning about strong (censored) language plus some details which might be a bit triggering. On the other hand, Ms Zhang's bizarre explanations of her parenting approach veer towards the farcical (e.g. shooting off random references to self-castration and a warlord-era democracy advocate). Morbidly fascinating.]
As a new mother, Zhang Aijun at first had a mortal fear of losing her daughter. She was a beautiful child. "She looked so lovely as the moonlight shone on her." For a time, Zhang Aijun would think at least once a day, "How would I live if this child died?"
To learn what the experience of losing a child might be like, every day she read from the website of "Starry Harbour" (a charity that provides psychological support for bereaved parents/families), crying as she did so. However, this mood did not cause her to go easy on training her daughter. After completing her infanthood physical preparation, Nini went on the ice for the first time at 2 and a half years old. Zhang Aijun knew not to delay, since to be a professional skater one must begin between 3 to 6 years old - any later and the feeling for the ice would not develop.
The first time Nini skated was at Haotai Rink in Gaobeidian. Subsequently, she roved between various rinks in Beijing like a little bee: Wucaicheng, Dayuecheng, Qidi... However, shopping mall ice rinks are like playgrounds - nobody would be like Nini, preparing for serious skating competitions. Every afternoon the malls would become packed with people, forcing Zhang Aijun and An Longhe to take Nini and search for other places. Or else, the infrastructure would be old and run-down, for example obsolete refrigeration systems that, once broken, remained unrepaired for weeks on end, eternally interfering with Nini's already-limited training time.
If there really wasn't a session scheduled, Zhang Aijun would take Nini along and negotiate for ice. She would bribe the old uncle who resurfaced the ice with gifts, pleading with him to covertly turn on the rink's lights while his boss was away, to which he would often silently acquiesce. Still, at times he would scold her instead, "Scram!" This was not enough to deter Zhang Aijun, who was determined to get ice time for her daughter at all costs - axe-breaking, boat-burning courage had already become a habit for her. [TN: the proverb refers to soldiers who destroy their means of retreat/subsistence to force themselves to fight to the end - like the English 'burning bridges', but not quite.]
"I was already a bloody notorious woman by then!" says Zhang Aijun as she sits in on Nini's dance classes, reminiscing about an incident from Nini's early childhood. Around 5 or 6 years old, Nini was practising 8 hours a day. As time went by, rink regulars' tongues started wagging: "This child skates all day and never goes to school, she's growing on the ice!" [TN: either means growing up on the ice, or becoming permanently rooted on it like a plant growing on the earth.] They saw Zhang Aijun as a madwoman and an idler, otherwise what mother would let her child skate around all day instead of going to school? Others mocked: "No need to watch, the girl will be crippled by next year!" "An Xiangyi, if you practice like this, you'll be carried off in a stretcher in three days!"
Zhang Aijun maintains an intensity like that of military training. Thus, when people refer to mothers with strict demands of their children as 'tiger mums', she regards this as an overused stereotype [TN: I think 'chicken soup' is Chinese internet jargon for 'bandied about to the extent that it's meaningless', but am not sure.] She prefers the term 'officer' for herself. "Not in the sense of throwing grenades at her and ordering her to charge, I mean rather in the sense of being a commander. It's a bit like learning the Sunflower Manual, in that I sacrifice my motherly role in order to push this child forward." [TN: The Sunflower Manual is a reference from the 1960s wuxia novel "The Smiling Proud Wanderer", referring to a martial art that is powerful yet dangerous, and requires self-castration before it can be trained. Here she literally said she had castrated herself for her child's sake, so I interpreted it as a metaphor for sacrificing one's dignity/traditional gender role...]
This winter, Zhang Aijun is always wearing a pair of baggy black down pants, thick enough to help her withstand the cold of the rink. Zhang Aijun wears it like an army uniform. "I can at any time shout, laugh, show wrath, kick or hit her. Everything is under my control - it's extreme personality training." Just like that day, when Zhang Aijun increased Nini's programme runthroughs from 3 to 5 times, because she sensed that Nini was being reluctant.
"Go - five times! You must practice whether you want to or not!" Zhang Aijun shouted towards Nini. Though she knows that her child is not a machine and will put up a fight, Zhang Aijun's approach is that if her daughter shows displeasure at the training arrangements, she will increase this type of training. "It's how an officer trains the mindset of new recruits."
Nini mutters quietly, skating aimlessly back and forth on the rink. When Zhang Aijun notices, she raises her head, shouting again: "Cut the crap... always trying to be lazy... spin! [TN: literally 'revolve', may refer to jumps instead.] And after f***ing being done spinning, not even one successful attempt!" [TN: I'm not familiar with foul Chinese language as my dad is quite polite, sorry if this is inaccurate.]
Zhang Aijun had already begun this approach by the time Nini was 5 or 6 years old. "I controlled things very well," she said. "She was not allowed to cry... Every evening after 5 hours of training in the mall, I'd reward her with food, buy things for her such as books, let her freely download iPhone apps... basically, childhood development as usual." Zhang Aijun calls this a "U.S.-style upbringing".
Zhang Aijun became 'obsessed' with organising Nini's upbringing. "I felt the urge to train her to perfection. Everyone's like this - it's like an inquest, the deeper you go the more exciting it gets." She compares herself to Hu Shi's mother Feng Shundi. "The reason why Hu Shi was such a great person was because he had a great mother... I hit her because this is my duty towards society." [TN: Hu Shi was a literature professor and politician in post-Empire/pre-Communist China. He ended up fleeing with the Nationalists to Taiwan after the Civil War. I think she's just randomly name-dropping by this point.]
Presently, Zhang Aijun gives Nini another directive: "No matter how hard you might fall, all the moves must be done properly down to your fingertips." By this she doesn't mean to exert mechanical force through the fingertips, but rather to maintain a balletic attention to artistry. Thus, while skating, Nini needs to always arch her feet and point her ankles, letting movement extend through the knees and pelvis, up the spine and waist to reach the upper extremities and project beyond. This is where figure skating differs from other competitive sports; it is not about raw bursts of power but rather a combination jumps, spins, footwork and other diverse movements, and demands of athletes great physical, dance and musical ability.
The intense training finally began paying off when Nini was 5 years old. She won the children's group A event at a local skating competition, which was her first Olympics. [TN: Metaphorically.] After this, Nini gradually became the centre of attention - "the nation's hope" or "Chen Lu's successor", as netizens said after watching her at competitions.
At 11, Nini debuted in the senior division at skating competitions and in 2019 alone won three such events. However, for an 11-year-old to step on the ice as a senior competitor and skate to something like 'La La Land', she is obliged to draw upon her imitation skills [TN: for artistry/interpretation] and devote constant effort in training towards minimising the junior-ish qualities of her skating.
In 2014, after Nini competed at an all-Beijing skating competition, Zhang Aijun saw a comment: An Xiangyi has nothing apart from spins. "I bloody well couldn't accept that, could I?" Zhang Aijun said. "At 5 years old she jumps single axels and wins numerous championships, so what's the basis for saying that?!"
That night, Zhang Aijun sifted through the internet for more such comments, collecting them as she went through, getting angrier the more she read. She started putting 5 times more effort into training. There was a day when Nini trained for 12 hours "until she had a fever," Zhang Aijun said. "That time I had gone mad - the more criticism Nini received, the more I trained her, because I'm the sort of person who will not be defeated - I can't bear defeat, not even by a hair. I must have face [TN: roughly means to avoid shame/embarrassment]. I want to win."
Zhang Aijun's desire to win began when she was in the third year of primary school. Before this time, she had never been conscious of this fact. As the worst student in her class, she was often made to stay behind after school for remedial lessons. As she wrote 'a', o', 'e', the teacher said her 'a' was as skinny as a crescent moon. However, her 'ambitions' were more mature than her classmates.
She grew up in military housing - family life in her early childhood was far from warm and loving. Today on Nini's birthday, faced by a festive scene of fruit plates and cakes, Zhang Aijun remarks to a nearby friend "Our family didn't really know how to do this sort of stuff."
Throughout childhood, she had always battled her own sensitivity and insecurity. She had parents who were virtually invisible to her and a brother and sister more than 10 years her senior. Her sister resented their father's favouritism towards Zhang Aijun, deliberately neglecting her share of food when she cooked. Zhang Aijun was both hungry and angry, yet understood clearly that her sister was 'a great student' and 'a capable person'. Her brother in contrast was a delinquent young man who smoked and drank, liked to party with his 'bros' [TN: may mean criminal gang or just male friends], and would often grab her and lift her by the neck. These trivial incidents were seen as very serious by Zhang Aijun; she very clearly recalls that her sister called her 'ugly'.
At the same time, Zhang Aijun envied her siblings' lives and aspired to be like them, dancing, organising events, having a platform to perform on - but who would heed the needs of a child? Thus her aspirations for public attention remained unfulfilled, causing Zhang Aijun to feel lonely from an early age. "I would have given anything to be in the spotlight," she said.
Zhang Aijun learned the habit of desiring fame from her mother, who liked to be fashionable and filled the house with the latest trends, from coats to books. In 1978, attracted by the craze for foreign languages that followed China's economic re-opening to the outside world, her mother accumulated stashes of English, Japanese and French language books beneath the family's elmwood coffee table, but never ended up learning any of them. Zhang Aijun followed suit in chasing this trend, using pinyin [TN: system for representing Chinese phonetics in Latin alphabet, also used in transliterating foreign words] and radio broadcasts, to learn to sing 'I love the great Tiananmen of Beijing' in Japanese ("I was terribly fashionable back then.") Even now when Zhang Aijun mentions these things, she looks proud and excited.
Today on Christmas Eve 2019, in a nursing home in Beijing's Changping district, Zhang Aijun stands in the hallway, bending over to dissuade her wheelchair-bound mother who wants to return home with her. Outside is dark and snowy, while inside, warmth lingers on the table after lunch. Being elderly, her 92-year-old mother hears and speaks unclearly, thus Zhang Aijun often stoops closer to her mother's ear level.
Zhang Aijun was rarely this intimate with her mother as a child, as her mother was career-oriented. Her mother would leave the house at 5 am to take the tram to work, and return after her daughter had gone to bed. However, the events of bygone days do not prevent Zhang Aijun from understanding why her mother wants to leave the nursing home - it's because she prefers independence to the comforts of the nursing home.
When the Tangshan Earthquake struck [TN: in 1976, infamously killed 250,000 people], when her bed started shaking in the early hours of the morning, her mother burst in and carried Zhang Aijun to safety. "My mother really is a hero," she recalls approvingly. It was this incident that drove home to her that "ultimately, she is a good mother.”
She recalls that it was her father that brought light to her childhood: taking her for rides, swimming, on farm visits, carrying her on his back and crawling around the house. During parental committee meetings at school, it was always he who attended.
Some matters are already long past, yet Zhang Aijun unerringly remembers an instance one year when she caused her father to break traffic rules resulting in him being scolded by the teacher, and her resultant guilt.
Chafing at the restraint of boarding school, that same winter she took a 10 yuan bill stolen from her father and a box of coins that she had saved, and ran off with another girl to Zizhuyuan Garden, playing on the slides and swings. Trouble came at day's end when she got a sound beating from her father, a scolding from the teacher, and was demoted to a lower class [TN: Like some other countries, China does class streaming based on student ranking.] From then on, a sense of shame and defiance entered her consciousness. [TN: boarding school in China is common and not posh like in the West, just basic food and dormitories. Can be necessary if the family lives in a rural area or can't afford housing in a good schooling zone.]
Zhang Aijun only gained 'enlightment' in 3rd year, when an essay she part-wrote, part-plagiarised was praised publicly as a "distinguished work" by the teacher, who set as a model example. This was her first taste of 'victory': such a sweet feeling, being number one! When her father was praised for his daughter's achievements at the parents' committee, Zhang Aijun understood - to be the first in class and excel academically, she would be able to bring him honour. She would not permit any blow to this honour - later when she didn't manage to be top of the class, she privately slapped herself in the face. Now, Zhang Aijun sees her daughter through the same lens:
"When she sees me cry or get angry, or be scolded by others, Nini feels sad. She would fight to the death for my honour - such are children's emotions towards their parents."
Will continue in the weekend when I'm free again...
An article of this length is not easy.
Felt like contributing since I often enjoy reading some great translations provided by other posters
