Zhuang Zedong - Early Life

Early Life

Zhuang was born in 1942 and he joined the Chinese National Table Tennis team as a teenager. His coach was Fu Qifang. In 1961, at the 26th World Table Tennis Championship, he won his first men's singles championship, and at the next two World Table Tennis Championships, the 27th and 28th in 1963 and 1965 respectively, he again won the men's singles championship.

He also won numerous champion titles at various other regional, national and international table tennis events, and the number of his championship titles exceeds all those won by the other members of the Chinese national team combined. No single player has ever won so many championship titles.

In the fall of 1959, Zhuang Zedong met the pianist, Bao Huiqiao, in Vienna, Austria, at the 7th World Youth Peace and Friendship Festival. She was there, along with the pianist Yin Chengzong, to participate in a piano competition.

Shortly after Zhuang won his first world men's singles championship in 1961, Bao Huiqiao won the fifth place at the International George Enescu Piano Competition in Romania.

At the Spring Festival party given by Peng Zhen, the mayor of Beijing in 1962, Zhuang Zedong met Bao Huiqiao again and sent her a toy model car that he won as an award in a game at the party and they subsequently started dating each other.

On January 20, 1968, two years into the depth of the Cultural Revolution, they got married in the dormitory room of Bao Huiqiao at the National Music Conservatory in Beijing. Since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Zhuang had not been able to pursue his career as a table tennis player as usual, nor had Bao hers as a pianist. In late 1968, Bao Huiqiao gave birth to a son, and they named him Zhuang Biao.

Read more about this topic:  Zhuang Zedong

Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:

    ... business training in early life should not be regarded solely as insurance against destitution in the case of an emergency. For from business experience women can gain, too, knowledge of the world and of human beings, which should be of immeasurable value to their marriage careers. Self-discipline, co-operation, adaptability, efficiency, economic management,—if she learns these in her business life she is liable for many less heartbreaks and disappointments in her married life.
    Hortense Odlum (1892–?)

    It is not too much to say that next after the passion to learn there is no quality so indispensable to the successful prosecution of science as imagination. Find me a people whose early medicine is not mixed up with magic and incantations, and I will find you a people devoid of all scientific ability.
    Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)

    The price we pay for the complexity of life is too high. When you think of all the effort you have to put in—telephonic, technological and relational—to alter even the slightest bit of behaviour in this strange world we call social life, you are left pining for the straightforwardness of primitive peoples and their physical work.
    Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)