Basket full of dreams
A set of photos of a boy carrying his tennis rackets in a bamboo basket has gone viral (走红).
The boy, Wang Fa, 14, is a member of the Va ethnic group (佤族) from Yunnan. After wining the under-14 title (冠军) in the Guangzhou stop of the 2022 ASICS Tennis Junior Tour, an audience (观众) member from Yunnan gave him the bamboo basket as a gift and the photos were taken.
"We always carry bamboo baskets when we work in the field. This is a typical farming tool of the Va ethnic group. I carried my rackets in this basket to honor my hometown," Wang said after the match.
Before tennis, Wang was just an ordinary boy from a village. But in 2016, he was chosen by a local club as one of the first 10 local children to learn to play professional tennis, "I was nervous at the beginning because the outside world was so different from my home," he said, adding that tennis has helped him make more friends and get a better education.
Over the past six years, Wang, along with other players at the Yunnan Wild Elephants Tennis Club, has trained hard to improve his skills and physical strength. The children would get up at 6:30 a. m, and practice for more than six hours a day, Every day, they need to swing a racket more than 7,000 times and run 9 kilometers.
"If it were not for tennis, I would still be helping out my family with farmwork back home," Wang said
Wang's parents didn't want him to learn tennis at first because they couldn't afford it. But the tennis club offered to teach him for free. Wang's hometown, the mountainous Cangyuan Va autceomous county, was just lifted out of poverty (脱贫) in 2019, reported China Daily. For Wang, winning the ASICS Tennis Junior Tour title was the beginning of a hopeful future. "I will aim for the top spots (位置) on the professional stage," he said.
