Junior Iron Hammer

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Bai Lang (Lydia Bai), daughter of Lang Ping (Jenny Lang), is now a member of the US Girls’ Youth National Volleyball Team. Before the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the 16th-year-old 1.86-meter-tall Lydia came to Beijing to train with Beijing Women’s Volleyball Team. As soon as I learned about her presence in town, I made arrangements to interview her. The venue was the training camp in a small hutong, where her mother once trained on her way of becoming an international volleyball star and winning China various world titles.

Lydia had just taken part in the North and Central America U18 Youth Volleyball Championships. She was happy in Beijing, for she could enjoy chatting and laughing with girls of her age to her heart’s content. Her mandarin is accented. She speaks Chinese at home and she needs English words now and then to express herself.

Volleyball is just fun, and has nothing to do with her famed mom.And it is by no means everything of Lydia’s life. She counts her hobbies: tennis, basketball, surfing, all having something to do with sports. She is full of vigor and energy as if nothing could exhaust her. “I don’t go out of my way to take part in sports. I just feel bored without sports.”

She is now on the school team and on the U18 team of the TCA club. On the school team, she is a spiker but on the club team, she is an assist. She prefers to be a spiker, for when the going gets tough, the team will look to the spiker.

I learned unexpectedly that the mother does not impose the volleyball upon the daughter. Lydia does not talk about her performance when she comes back home from a volleyball game. She prefers to talk about new friends she has just made. Her mother asks Lydia to refrain from mentioning her mother was the Iron Hammer of the Chinese Women Volleyball Team.

When we talked about her mother’s success as coach of the American Women Volleyball Team, Lydia said she was a reason behind her mother’s success. It turned out that Lang Ping ran into unexpected difficulty at first. After taking over the team as head coach in January, 2005, Lang Ping prepared a list of players and worked out a 12-month training schedule. On the appointed day, only two players showed up. Lang phoned some players who were playing in European clubs. Their answers were unanimous to the extent: they made money in Europe and they didn’t want to play for the national team because they would not be paid.

The team lost all the games in the World Championships in early 2006. Without systematic training, the American team couldn’t organize effective offense and defense. But Lang Ping was frustrated more by these girls’ attitude toward their defeats. They said they played the volleyball simply because they loved it and it was their bad luck that they had lost, but tomorrow was another day. Lang Ping was so frustrated by the answer that she ordered them out to run 20 laps. They just ignored their head coach and walked out on the famed iron hammer.

When Jenny and Lydia chatted on the phone about the walkout, the junior knew what had gone wrong. Lydia asked her mother to remember that it was not China, that it was America, and that she couldn’t order the players around simply because she was the head coach. Shortly afterwards, the daughter asked her mom to see her play the basketball in school one weekend. Lang Ping was surprised to see that the youngsters played enthusiastically even though they were not paid a cent. Lydia explained that the coach treated them like friends and treated them with ice cream and invited them to the family dancing party. Although Jenny still refused to admit that new ideas were needed for her training camp, she knew in her heart that her daughter’s advice made sense.

At the first training session of the following training camp, Lang Ping did not start the training right away. She invited all the girls to her home and made Jiaozi with them. When the girls watched their head coach make the traditional Chinese dumpling with meat stuffing, they were amazed by her ambidextrous fingers. The Jiaozi party broke the ice. And the team accepted the Chinese. Lang Ping herself has changed a lot since then. She smiles a lot and makes generous and encouraging remarks. She praises first before she corrects a mistake. In order to find a common language with the young players, Lang Ping even attended the parties thrown by her daughter and learned songs of Avril Lavigne, a singer popular with youngsters. This way, Lang Ping knew much better about her players.

As her grandmother is in Beijing, Lydia flew to the city half a month before the Olympic Games started. The American Women Volleyball Team, headed by Lang Ping, was a big focus of news media during the Games time. Lang Ping is a legend in China. The iron hammer appeared at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games and defeated the American team on her way to win a gold medal. She headed the Chinese Women's Volleyball Team in the 1996 Olympic Games as coach and the Chinese team won a silver medal. Twenty-four years after she was the Olympic champion, Jenny Lang came back at the head coach of the American Team. What would happen this time?It was a big topic for news media across the country.

When Lydia Bai appeared at the side of the playing ground, she held in her hand a Chinese flag. The American team won the silver. The Chinese won the bronze. Lydia and her mother hugged when the American team walked off the playing court with the medals.

Lydia is now in the second year of senior high school. when I asked if she wanted to play as a spiker on the American National Team, she did not hesitate to say “Yes!”