I’ve played ping pong for several times since I came here. I really enjoy playing it. Actually, I have taken some course of ping pong for some years, not continuously. My advantage is that I have standard forms because every form I learnt needs to be practiced hundreds of time in each class. While my weakness is that I didn’t have much experience of competition. I’ve only played it with my parents and my coach. So I’m not good at games. Last time I played with one of our interns and finally I lost the game.
Besides the game, I found that there is also a difference between U.S. and China in playing ping pong. There are two ways to hold the ping pong racket. But I don’t know how to say it in English. If you hold the handle with all your fingers around it except the forefinger, we call it HengPai. And if you hold the handle like the last three fingers below the racket and thumb and forefinger are above the racket, we call it ZhiPai. I noticed that most of our Chinese students would tend to use ZhiPai rather than HengPai which is just the opposite with American students, except me like whom get some formal training. It might seem very simple to others. Only because different habit maybe. But I think, after being trained for some time, I feel that HengPai has more assaultive power than ZhiPai which focus more on defense. That make me relate it to different personalities we have. Maybe there has nothing to do with it. But I just couldn’t help thinking like this. We Chinese more like to fend rather than attack. It is really like our Chinese character.
All the things seem to have some correlations from my perspective, if these correlations are not fallacies.