Chinese Volleyball

I recently read an article on 9-man Volleyball. I actually never realized that the game as it was played in Taishan or Chinatown differed in the rules so much. In other words I didn't realize there wasn't an Olympic 9 man volleyball. As a child going to Red Oak, all the cooler older kids, or TA's played volleyball. The boys and the girls. I always wanted to play. But I guess when you are actually old enough to start doing that is Highschool, and since I went to Groton, a private boarding school, I did not get a chance.
I have a lot of friends that play the game, but most of the stories I heard about Volleyball were actually from my Sifu, who played the game as a young man in Taishan. My Sifu is actually pretty tall for a man from Taishan of that generation. Not the tallest. And today he would probably be considered average to tall in height. But he was not only athletic, he was also a Kung Fu Sifu. He said he could spike the ball hard enough to knock out whoever was giving the team trouble on the other side, that a spike and a cup cuen were not that different, and that there was an internal and external way of doing it. Some time the other team would confront him at the end of the game and challenge him to a fight. That would be unfortunate for them. Sifu said he could have played nationally but his family was considered to have a black mark against it because of the Scholarly background. Scholarly=Bourgeois. Communism. But it wasn't the worst thing that the communists had done to him.
He talked about other players too and their skills. How some were real. But some turned out to be fake.
He talked about a legendary event where a camera was first introduced into the game, and one team was caught cheating by doing a slight of hand move where they pretended the opposing team had blocked the volleyball, by blocking themselves, and then hitting the ball back over to the other side with the advantage of having set it up with his own hand. The action was caught in a photograph.

He also had all these cool Kung Fu names for Volleyball moves and dives, and claimed to be so quick on his feet that he could serve the ball to himself. I didn't really know anything about the game, but is cool to listen to. In fact my only hands on experience of Chinese or Chinatown Volleyball besides hitting the ball back and forth with female teachers at BCNC, was quite embarrassing.
I remember coming back to Chinatown on some weird prep school holiday and meeting up with some friends at the Quincy School Gym. I walked in and they were doing volleyball drills. The Gym was alive with young high school aged adolescents like myself (at the time). I knew most of the guys, and a lot of the girls. Except the last time I had seen the girls they had been classmates in grade school or kindergarten, and now they were short short wearing hotties. When I stepped in everyone kind of looked at me and I red in the face. Not so much because I was white, but because the only clothes I owned at that point were within the Groton School dress code. I didn't have Groton clothes, and Chinatown clothes. I just had my clothes, which meant I was wearing kakhi pants and a collared shirt.
"Hi Adam..." my friend smiled, "What the fuck are you wearing?"
I shrugged.
"Do you want to try some drills? You can. Feel free."
They were doing some sort of spiking drill.
I ran over and jumped up and.. the ball didn't go over the net even though it was thrown to me in a way to make it easy. I did it a few more times and then just stood around talking with friends instead of further embarrassing myself.
Will my kids play Chinese Volleyball? I don't know. I'm not the only person in Chinatown who didn't get into the Volleyball scene, or the Dragon boat scene. The Kung Fu and Lion Dance scene has a lot more, Non Chinese and also a lot more recent immigrant Chinese. At least my school anyway. And I liked that aspect of it. But it was kind of like we were all the fringe of the fringe. People on the outskirts of Chinatown. Americans who didn't speak Chinese, and a lot of Chinese who spoke no English. And then me.
The cool kids seemed to all play volleyball.