Bouncing around the globe to Ping-Pong pinnacle

"That was the first time I won a medal at a top-level international table tennis competition," Cheng said.

Twenty-four years later, Cheng's desire to win is acutely shared by Zhang, whose own life story reflects that of his predecessor, in both the distance it has covered and the scale of the ambition.

Back in 2011, Zhang was a promising 14-year-old training frenetically with the best team in Beijing, with the sole expectation to join the Chinese National Team and compete on the world arena in the not-so-distant future.

In October that year, Zhang, together with his parents, had a weeklong vacation in the US. "We were told by a friend of my father that by the time we were arriving at New York, there would be a tournament at a ping-pong club in neighboring Pleasantville, a suburban village just a 50-minute train ride north of Manhattan," he said. "We made sure to show up in time."

So there was Zhang, coming out of nowhere to fight his way into the top eight among the 162 participants in the first-ever tournament held by the newly opened Westchester Table Tennis Center.

However, the teenager didn't make much of an impression on Will Shortz, one of the co-founders of the club who's a ping-pong fanatic plus crossword-puzzle master of The New York Times.

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