2012 Olympics: Lily Zhang of Milpitas will represent USA in table tennis

MILPITAS, Calif. — The table tennis club was built by Indian immigrants who made their fortunes in Silicon Valley. Its coaches were imported from around the world. And its star players were born to immigrant parents from China and Taiwan.

This year, it will send three players to represent the United States in table tennis in the 2012 Olympic Games in London: Lily Zhang, 15; Timothy Wang, 20; and Ariel Hsing, 16. All three teenagers trained here, in a nondescript warehouse, sandwiched between a strip mall and a trailer park, known as the India Community Center Table Tennis Center.

Almost overnight, the club has become an unlikely incubator for talent. Of the four American players who have qualified for the 2012 Olympics, only one is not from the I.C.C.: Erica Wu, who is from the Southern California town of Arcadia.

Zhang’s father represented his local county in the Xi’an Province of China. One of her first memories of table tennis is watching her parents playing a game in the laundry room of the faculty apartments at Stanford University in Palo Alto, where her father taught math. Their clothes spun in the dryer. Zhang was a toddler at the time.

By age 5, she was hitting the ball. By 10, she was on the national cadet team. By 12, she was taking lessons at the table tennis center. The schedule was grueling: 7 to 9 p.m. every weeknight and more than four hours each day on weekends. It still is. English papers are written late into the night. Tournaments eat up several days of school.

The playing table still has pride of place in the Zhang family. It sits in the living room of their Palo Alto condominium. “Sometimes, we eat on it,” Zhang said. “It’s way more convenient. If we want to play we take the covers off.”…

via 2012 Olympics – U.S. Table Tennis Team Has Diverse Origins – NYTimes.com.