Teen’s dream
Erica Wu doesn’t expect to medal in table tennis at the Olympics, but she is living her dream.
Erica Wu, 16, is an Olympian in table tennis, but she doesn’t expect to medal.
Erica Wu’s mother is an actuary, so she knows her way around a spreadsheet. And her daughter’s table tennis career, she says, sure looks bad on paper.
“It’s really not a good investment,” Johan Pao says with a smile.
But then how do you measure the cost of your child’s dream? What should the adventure of a lifetime be worth?
Pao admits she doesn’t know — but she does know what she and husband Peter Wu have spent.
“On the average, probably $3,000 a month,” she says. “That’s just to support her interests, her passion. But now she’s an Olympian, so we figure everything is worth it.”
Which is Pao’s way of saying there may be cheaper ways to get to London, but few will be as memorable. A 16-year-old sophomore at Westridge School, a private allgirls academy in Pasadena, Wu will be among the youngest athletes to march in the opening ceremony at the Summer Olympics. And she’ll probably be among the most relaxed too, given the medal prospects awaiting her and Ariel Hsing and Lily Zhang, the two other 16-year-olds on the U.S. women’s team,
“None at all. We don’t have any chance of taking a medal,” Wu says with a laugh. “Making the team was the biggest goal for me. I’m going to the Olympics basically for the experience and to see what I can learn from other people.
“But medaling is not one of my goals.”
Wu, who began playing at 7, is ranked 465th in the world, according to the International Table Tennis Federation. But when she beat New Jersey’s Judy Hugh in last month’s North American Olympic trials, that was good enough to earn her a place on the team for London.
“Sometimes I can’t believe it and I’m so happy,” she says. “And then other times, it’s like I’m kind of disconnected.”
She suspects many of her classmates feel the same way.
“It’s hard for them, I guess, to see me actually in the Olympics,” says Wu, who turned 16 on Wednesday. “It’s the biggest sporting event in the world and I’m just me. And then I’m with, like, Michael Phelps. And they’re not seeing that.”
That’s because, in many ways, Wu is just like the other 480 girls at her school. She likes ponytails, hates soggy cereal, and loves “The Hunger Games.” And when she talks, her words tumble out so fast it’s hard to tell where one thought stops and the next starts.
“She’s one of my best friends,” Hsing says. “I really, really love her. My iPad wallpaper is her face.”
Then there are the ways in which she’s different from most teenagers. In addition to table tennis, Wu practices piano and plays flute in the school orchestra. And she has received only one grade lower than an A—a B+ — at Westridge despite an academic load that includes chemistry, honors algebra, Chinese and English.
“She’s very modest,” says Betty Cole, who has Wu in her AP European History class. “She is just incredibly self-disciplined. Also very, very uncomplaining. She’s ambitious in the sense that she wants to do very well at everything that she does.”
Sometimes too ambitious, worries her mother.
“I don’t ask her to maintain straight A’s. I have never said that,” protests Pao, whose only requirement is that her daughter continue her piano lessons if she wants to play table tennis. “I say it’s OK to get Bs with your schedule. She does that all by herself. I don’t have to worry about her homework. She just does it.”
If Wu had a pet peeve — and judging from her incessant smile, her complaints are few — it would be that few of her classmates understand the chasm separating recreational ping-pong from world-class table tennis, which was added to the Olympic calendar in 1988, long before any of them were born.
“The only thing that she ever expressed any frustration about was just, ‘I don’t think people really get table tennis as a sport,’ ” Cole says.
So two weeks after qualifying for London, Wu staged a demonstration for her classmates at Westridge, where she is the school’s third Olympian, following sprinter Inger Miller, a gold medalist in 1996, and equestrian Anne Kursinski, who won silver medals in 1988 and 1996.
Wu first picked up a table tennis paddle in grade school, when she was an energetic, if not particularly talented, soccer and basketball player who had become adept at collecting trophies for participation but not achievement. So when, at 9 she won a prize in a local table tennis tournament, she was hooked.
“I really felt like I earned it because I practiced for it. And that was, like, an amazing feeling,” she says, looking back. “It kind of just snowballed after that.”
As Wu improved, she was forced to look outside the country to find practice partners. So Pao, who came to the U.S. from Taiwan more than two decades ago, quit her job and began taking her daughter on two-month summer training trips to China, where both the table tennis and the mosquitoes are relentless.
“She hates the mosquito bites the most,” Pao says. “She can get a hundred a day.”
During the school year, Pao and her husband, Wu, a director for Deloitte and Touche in Los Angeles, import practice partners from China, who stay for as long as six months, guiding Erica through more than 20 hours of training a week — sessions that feature weightlifting, sit-ups, running and jumping rope in addition to working on serves and returns.
And for much of that work her mom has to drive her to an El Monte table tennis club because Wu, who doesn’t have a driver’s license, long ago outgrew the tiny space to which her home ping-pong table is confined.
“We use that for Thanksgiving now,” Pao says. “When someone visits we put a nice tablecloth [down] and put food on the table.”
Wu counts fluency in the Mandarin she has learned from her coaches and training partners among the things she has learned from her sport.
“It just taught me how to perform well under pressure, something that’s really important,” she says. “I still have a lot of goals, like getting to college, getting a job. It’s just in different areas.”