Where Can I Get Good Jeans in China Chinatown
China's Li Na Finds a Taste of Home in New York
Li Na stepped past the musicians plucking familiar string instruments and people doing tai chi in the pavilion. She stood near tables of men huddled around games of checkers.
"It is exactly like China," Li said with a broad smile.
It was Columbus Park, the quiet, beating heart of Manhattan's bustling Chinatown. One difference from her strolls in China is that no one seemed to recognize her Monday afternoon, seeing only a young woman in jeans and a black cap, not China's best tennis player and a quarterfinalist at the United States Open.
Li, 27, is not only a long way from home, but she is also as far into a Grand Slam tournament as she has ever been. The day before her match against the resurgent, unretired Kim Clijsters, the 18th-seeded Li took a taxi from her Midtown hotel and spent a couple of hours strolling Chinatown and having lunch.
"I love New York City," she said. "People in China say: 'If you love your children, send them to New York. If you hate your children, also send them to New York.' "
She laughed at that lesser-known Chinese proverb. In news conferences, when asked to address questions in English, Li seems unsure and introverted. Alone, on the street or at a restaurant table, her English is near perfect and she continually punctuates jokes with a disarming grin.
When she plays at Flushing Meadows, she is about a mile — one stop on the 7 train — from the bustling Chinatown in Flushing, Queens, which some say has overtaken the Manhattan Chinatown in recent years as the largest concentration of Chinese in the Western Hemisphere. Li has stayed at a house in Flushing with other Chinese players and coaches the three previous times she played the Open, but she wanted to get a close-up view of Manhattan this time.
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She laughed about how people from outside China get confused about her name. Li is her family name, she said. And Na is her first name, even if the Chinese place it at the end.
She has heard people see her name and call her "Lina." Or "Nali."
"If you see the draw," she said of the tournament bracket, "it's easy to find my name. It's so short."
It is increasingly easy to find her name on the bracket now that Li is among the final eight women. The only other time she reached a Grand Slam quarterfinal was at Wimbledon in 2006. She lost to Clijsters.
"I still can remember the second set," Li said. "I had set point. I was 5-2 up, had set point, 40-30. I served, and she returned the ball so fast."
Clijsters won that match, 6-4, 7-5. But Li won in three sets the last time the two met, in 2007 at Miami.
At this Open, Li slid easily through the fourth round with a 6-2, 6-3 victory over Francesca Schiavone. Afterward, to soothe a sore right knee, Li dunked her lower body into an ice bath for the first time in her life.
"I thought I was going to die," she said. A decision was made not to practice Monday.
That is why Li sat in a booth at an unassuming restaurant down a covered alley between Elizabeth Street and the Bowery. The place called itself "Coluck" on the menu, but the light-up sign, in Chinese, reads, "First Chinese Western Restaurant," Li said.
She ordered kimchi bokumbop, a traditional Korean fried-rice dish, and iced milk tea.
"They say it is not good for the body," Li said of the milk tea. "But I like it a lot." (She also likes beer, like Tsingtao, but not during the season. But if she wins the Open? "For sure.")
She rated the rice dish as "not 100 percent."
"Maybe 85 percent," she said.
From the huge central China city of Wuhan, Li was deemed a badminton player when she was 6. A coach kept telling her that she looked as if she were playing tennis.
"In badminton, they use a lot from the wrist," Li said as she demonstrated the arm action. "But I use a lot from the shoulder."
When Li was 8, the coach asked her parents — her father died when she was 14 — if she could switch to tennis.
"They said, 'What's tennis?' " Li said.
Li went on to become the first Chinese player to reach the top 30 (in 2006), then the top 20 (in 2007).
Problems with her right knee forced her to miss the second half of the 2007 season, but Li has since made a habit of reaching the third and fourth rounds of important tournaments.
Her best moment came a little more than a year ago, at the Beijing Olympics, where Li reached the semifinals by beating Svetlana Kuznetsova and Venus Williams. The stadium echoed with chants of "Li Na!" But she then lost twice, missing out on a medal.
Smatterings of fans tend to make it to Li's matches at the Open, chanting encouragement in Mandarin. It will be hard to drown out the affection certain to shower Clijsters.
Still, Li says she loves that she can find pieces of home so far from home.
"Sometimes, I think it's funny," she said as she weaved through pedestrians on Bayard Street. "You're in America, but everyone is speaking Chinese."
Where Can I Get Good Jeans in China Chinatown
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/sports/tennis/08lina.html
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