Ping Pong as a Survival Skill -a Story from the Chinese Cultural Revolution

When we think of survival skills, many don't think outside the box or limit the range of such skills. Recently, I spoke with a Chinese friend who is from Wuhan, epicenter of the coronavirus. While he teaches at a college far from Wuhan, his parents still live there. As the entire city has been quarantined with no one going in or out, there is good cause to worry.

He said they are doing well but running low on food. He said he has been ordering food off the internet to deliver to them but it takes a long time to get there and he is worried. I asked if there was anything I could do. Of course, there's not really, and reminded him that his parents had survived worse and that his mother had once survived based on her ping pong playing skills.

Apparently, during the Cultural Revolution, a period of total chaos and dysfunction in Chinese history due to insane political extremism, at some point she'd found herself homeless and adrift in territories far from home. (I'm not sure how this happened, but it was not uncommon at this time. The authorities would occasionally order urban people, particularly intellectuals, to move to the countryside to "learn from the peasants" and since the peasants (farmers) often didn't particularly want them there, and society was falling apart, people would find themselves far from home without resources or food or means of making a living. It didn't help that young people were joining the Red Guards, roaming around unsupervised and trying to force the implementation of poorly thought out government mandates. They'd sometimes quite and try to find a way home too.

So this young woman, all by herself, far from home, found herself in need of food and shelter. Often one step in doing this was to find the local ping pong table where she happened to be and use it to make friends with strangers. Which often led to offers of a meal and food for the night.

(As an aside, due to China's high population density, people tend to often live in small, crowded houses or apartments. In a city like Wuhan, this would have made it difficult to stockpile a long term food supply, although a lot of the Karen (Burmese hilltribe) refugees I know in the USA have a few 50 pound bags of rice around somewhere in their houses or apartments. It's not a bad idea dn it makes them happy.)

Current Reading: Endurance, Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, by Alfred Lansing

Endurance, Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, by Alfred Lansing. 1959. Carrol and Graff Publishers. New York. 282pp. 

In 1914, a British expedition set sail for Antarctica. Carrying 27 men, its goal was to land on the southern continent and be the first men ever to traverse the continent on foot. Unfortunately, the expedition soon met with tragedy. The ship, The Endurance, became trapped in the ice and unable to escape. As the ice shifted and pressures on the ship grew, it became clear that the ship was going to be crushed and the only sane course of action was for the men to abandon the ship and set up camp on the Antarctic coast. Trapped, with no way home, but fortunately still equipped with a shipload of supplies, these men under the command of Ernest Shackleton survived six months alone and abandoned and out of communication with the outside world, moving camp and travelling several times in the process. And not a single one of them died despite these harsh conditions in one of the most dangerous places on Earth.

It's an amazing story and one that's been told many times in many formats including both books and documentaries. Yet this book is considered the classic. It often appears on lists of recommended non-fiction or top 50 non-fiction books you must read and so on, It's been on my personal list of desired reading for years, I think, and it's often recommended reading in schools or courses on leadership. Much can be learned of leadership and management from following the actions of Shackleton as he kept his men together, united, and focused despite challenges from weather, boredom, a sense of feeling trapped and hopeless and more, 

I'm about  a third of the way though this book but enjoying it greatly.