A few photos from their Girls' Swimming Academy:
Posted on 08/01/2012 4:16:31 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Right after Chinese diver Wu Minxia won her third Olympic gold medal, her family decided it was the right time to tell her a long-held family secret: her grandparents are dead.
Wu’s parents decided not to tell her about the death of her grandparents (or her own mother’s years-long battle with breast cancer) until after she had won the 3-meter springboard in London. Their reasoning? They didn’t want to interfere with Minxia’s diving career. “It was essential to tell this white lie,” said her father Wu Yuming.
A little bit you have to understand about Chinese Olympic athletes: they are crazy dedicated. Olympic athletes from China are government-backed, and have a harsh, almost militaristic “win-at-all-costs” mentality. Athletes in China are often taken away from their families at very young ages to train for hours on end. In the case of Wu Minxia, she began diving training at age 6, and left home at 16, bound for a government aquatic training institute, according to Yahoo!News.
Minxia is one of her sport’s shiniest stars, and part of that is thanks to the price paid by her personal life.
“We accepted a long time ago that she doesn’t belong entirely to us,” Wu Yuming told the Shanghai Morning Post. “I don’t even dare to think about things like enjoying family happiness.”
Wu’s mother decided to wait until her breast cancer was in remission before breaking the news to her daughter of her condition. Understandable, I suppose. But her grandparents have both been dead for over a year, and Minxia only just now learned about it.
I don’t care what anyone says, that is sick. S-I-C-K. sick.
I have come to the conclusion that olympics or any sport is completely useless in society. They are simply modern variations of ancient gladiator matches.
The Chinese government is using their athletes as propaganda/pride/showoffs of their might. Rest of the world’s governments do not have to, because their people already worship their athletes to the point the government only has to wrap them around their flags and... voila... teary eyed, gawking public celebrating how their doped up swimmer beats other swimmers by split seconds in reaching the end of a 50m pool. Utterly useless and pointless.
“I don’t even dare to think about things like enjoying family happiness.”
What a sick, twisted society.
Wow, she missed the chance to have Bob Costas do the “human interest tragedy dance” over her.
Yes, and remember: is the society which is admired by the likes of Valerie Jarret and Rahm Emmanuel.
Unbelievably cruel. They could have least let her enjoy her Olympic wins for a couple weeks before dropping that bombshell.
Mao started this denial of individual human emotions and family love for the benefit of the collective. In the communes, children were taken from the parents and raised separatly so they could be trained to venerate the state only. That may have passed but the underlying attitudes have not. Individuality is wiped out.
I am sorry for the individual athletes. What a way to live, denying human nature, the nature of man.
How sad!
I was reading a little about the 16-yr old female Chinese swimmer (the one who swam faster than the fastest male swimmer the other night ... hmmmm). There was a line in the article about how her teacher noticed she had unusually large hands and legs, and reported this information to “authorities”. I found that so chilling. Send your little girl (and most likely only child) off to school and they’re snatched up and sent to “swim camp”. Bye-bye family!
I do wonder what will happen to their women’s sports programs as the one-child policy really filters through and there are so few girls to pick from.
Peoples’ Commissar of Sports Says: “You no win medal, you go visit grandma!”
A few photos from their Girls' Swimming Academy:
It wasn't "essential"
It was a different color.
She might've noticed that grandma and grandpa hadn't called or written to congratulate her after a few days, I suppose.
This reminds me of a documentary i saw a while back that had a segment featuring an up-and-coming girl gymnast of around 12 years of age. At one point it mentioned that she had wanted to quit and go home. Then it showed the father talking in a matter of fact way about having to beat his girl to make sure she wouldn’t quit. All his hopes and dreams were riding on her excelling as a gymnast. Throughout the program it was shown that this was one of the major problems with the one-child policy, since there is so much pressure on the kids to succeed for the sake of the family.
I learned later (the documentary was filmed around 2004) that she never qualified for the Olympic team.
Chinese culture is unexplainable, the whole infanticide thing aside. What they do to their athletes is probably close to torture, physical AND psychological.
And Elizabeth “why isn’t the USA more like china?” Warren, aka Truth Eludes Her.
Government in its "infinite wisdom" didn't ask the girl, who may have wanted to be a pianist, or a scientist, something else, instead, and perhaps have done something by choice that would have been far better than what the government had planned for her. But she'll never know because the government stole such a huge part of her life and potential that she has missed the opportunity to try.
Chinese culture is unexplainable, the whole infanticide thing aside.
Having lived over in that part of the world as a young man I can say that to an American the Chinese culture is pretty inexplicable but not unexplainable.
For their entire history the Family was #1 but with the emphasis on the #1 Son and the Family Patriarch/Matriarch. Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth is a good book to read as it does give a good look into the Chinese Psyche.
The downside to this sort of arrangement is that it De-emphasizes the individual in favor of the collective which historically was the Family and with the Communists was redirected to the State.
The last portion of the Puzzle is the relationship of Daughter and Sons. Historically when the Daughter left her childhood home that was that. No further contact, she also effectively became the slave of her Mother-in-law since the married children lived in small rooms in the Family compound. That status would only change upon presenting a MALE grandchild to her Husband and his parents.
Under the One Child Policy that meant that a Daughter would leave her parents home and that Family line died at that point. With no children or Grand children to provide for the parents after they could no longer do hard work meant that they also died soon thereafter.
Daughters therefore became even less desirable than they had been before the one-child policy. They became total liabilities.
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