The joy that normally attends the birth of a son in China was muted, in Yao's case, by his family's sense of uncertainty. The end of the Cultural Revolution, which followed Mao's death in 1976, had ushered China into a new era of hope and economic opportunity under Deng Xiaoping, the former Communist Party secretary who had returned to power after three stints in political exile. But Deng was not the only one who had risen from the ashes. Zhu Yong had also been rehabilitated, and Da Fang would suffer as a consequence.

When she retired from playing in 1978, Da Fang became assistant coach for the Shanghai junior women's team, a job that many assumed would soon lead to more prestigious assignments. But according to several former teammates and coaches, her fate changed when Zhu assumed a top position in the Shanghai sports commission, at which he would eventually become deputy director. After barely six months as a coach, Da Fang was shunted off to what one former teammate described as "the worst job in the sports system": doing menial work at a compound for retired athletes.

For a time the former national hero stocked bathrooms with soap. Later she would be transferred to a clerical job at the Shanghai Sports Science Research Institute. She would never work as a coach again, and she lacked the basic education to find other employment. Her husband, too, failed to land a job as a coach and would work his entire career in the Shanghai port. Together the couple made less than 80 yuan per month—about $50 at the time—barely more than half the average salary of an urban Chinese household and hardly enough to raise a rapidly growing child.

The vendors at the outdoor food market on Shanghai's Wukang Road got to know Da Fang well. Nearly every evening at dusk she would appear before them in worn clothes, quietly bargaining for day-old cuts of pork or surplus rations of rice. She and Da Yao spent nearly all their income on food, and yet they often sat at the table watching their son eat while they themselves went hungry. By the time Yao Ming turned four, he measured well over one meter and weighed a whopping 27 kg.

Four years later Yao was already 1.70 m, and his potential as a basketball player was literally too big for anyone to ignore. By then Zhu Yong had retired from the sports commission, and one of Da Fang's old friends from No. 651 Nanjing Road, Xu Weili, wanted Yao Ming for the Xuhui District Sports School, where she was the top party official. It would not be easy to pry the boy away from his parents, who were keen to give him the education they had been deprived of. But Xu gently reminded Da Fang and Da Yao that their son's talents belonged to the nation—and that the Xuhui school could provide him not just with training but with nutritious food. Yao's parents eventually acquiesced, grudgingly accepting that their only child might have to follow in their footsteps. "We didn't choose this career for him," Da Fang says, "but we were basketball players. All of our old colleagues and coaches had their eyes on Yao Ming since he was young."

Born on the cusp of China's economic resurgence, Yao Ming was part of the first Chinese generation in 40 years that could entertain personal ambition. As a child he fantasized about being an explorer traveling into new worlds rather than his parents' old one. "I've always wanted to be an archaeologist, to go looking for adventure everywhere," Yao said, adding that "it would be hard for me, of course, to crawl in and out of those small caves." Nevertheless, when his parents told him he would have to start basketball training, Yao—not yet nine—didn't protest. Ever the obedient child, he agreed to stand outside his primary school, waiting for his coach to come and guide him by bicycle through the maze of Shanghai streets to the Xuhui Sports School, where the boy would initially train five afternoons a week and on Saturdays. Yao hated basketball, but he resigned himself to attending practice "purely for my parents, because I respect them so much."

Yao's size and clumsiness made him the object of ridicule at first. But the teasing wasn't nearly as painful as the training. Every day, the boys ran until they almost collapsed, jumped until their legs burned and shot baskets until they couldn't lift their arms. What often seemed even harder to take was the numbing boredom of repetitive training, a process the sportswriter Zhao Yu likened to "trying to create a tiger by copying the drawing of a cat." It would take nearly a decade before Yao took a genuine interest in basketball.

When Yao came home from practice demoralized and wanting to quit, his father would take him behind their building to shoot at the hoop hanging above the bicycle garage. For every basket Yao made, his father promised to buy him a little gift. "My father bribed me into playing!" Yao recalled with mock incredulity. His mother tried a different tack. One day when Yao was nine, Da Fang snared a pair of tickets to see the Harlem Globetrotters. Never before had they seen basketball played with such joy. These visitors made the sport seem not so much a duty as a source of pleasure, even exhilaration. "I think that experience had a strong influence on Yao Ming," Da Fang said. "They turned basketball into a great show, a form of entertainment."

Nonetheless, Da Fang feared for her son's future. A life in basketball seemed to offer little reward. If China were truly opening up to the world, then Yao needed to prepare to seize the opportunities that would come outside the old socialist sports system. Da Fang's true redemption would be to give her son an education and a chance to lead what she wistfully called "a normal life." In the name of normality Da Fang did something quite extraordinary: she tried to pull her son out of the sports system. In 1992, when Yao finished sixth grade, Xu Weili put pressure on the family to send him full time to Xuhui, where academics took a backseat. Da Fang not only rejected Xu's plea. She removed him from Xuhui and enrolled him full time in a middle school known for its academic rigor. "Da Fang only wanted Yao Ming to study," Xu recalls. "She didn't care if he played basketball again."

The scheme soon unraveled. Halfway through his first semester, Yao was floundering in the classroom. His teachers didn't fault his effort or intelligence. The 11-year-old loved books about foreign lands and China's imperial history. But Yao had started the semester too far behind, and he couldn't keep up. Within a few months Xu Weili was back, and Da Fang felt compelled to enroll Yao full time at Xuhui, his experiment with education in the real world a disappointing failure. "Leaving school to play basketball," says one of Yao's close friends in Shanghai, "was his biggest regret."

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