A sport beloved
in Asia takes root in
suburban California.


By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN

MILPITAS, California - Young people who were serious about table tennis used to have to make the trip to Beijing, Stockholm or Moscow to train with world-class coaches.

Now they go no farther than this Silicon Valley suburb.

“I’m trying to become one of the greatest players in the nation,” Srivatsav Tangirala, 14, said matter-of-factly between drills at the huge new table tennis facility here.

This is the largest training program for youths in the country, run by the India Community Center in an area that is 60 percent Asian. Many of the players’ parents grew up with the sport in Sichuan Province or Hyderabad.

One of 12 table tennis clubs in the area, up from 5 clubs in 1990, the India Community Center’s Ping-Pong facility was started last year with seed money from two Indian entrepreneurs and has already become an influential hatchery for Olympic hopefuls, most of whom banter in Hindi or Mandarin at home.

Ariel Hsing, 14, the top-ranked United States junior, from San Jose, and Lily Zhang, 13 and ranked No. 2, from nearby Palo Alto, are a fearsome twosome, with matching teal braces, bulging calf muscles and a dream of playing in the 2012 Olympics. Ariel cradles the ball in her palm like a baby chick - before she lets go and smashes it.

They and more than 100 other teenagers, many the daughters and sons of technology professionals, are being coached by talent from around the world . In the past, top players grew up in China and became American citizens in order to play for the United States Olympic team. Today, 80 percent of players age 14 and younger are Asian-Americans, according to USA Table Tennis, the sport’s national governing body.

Ariel’s mother, Xian Hua Jiang, a 46-year-old hardware engineer, was weaned on two-volley games in the schoolyard in Henan Province. Growing up poor, she had to borrow white shoes to participate in a tournament.

Today, she and her husband, Michael Hsing, a software engineer from Taiwan, spend at least $40,000 a year fostering their daughter’s talent .

Although the sport’s visibility is growing nationally, it does not yet have Little League baseball-style cultural clout in the United States .

Randy Capps, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, said Silicon Valley’s rapidly growing Ping-Pong scene reflected California’s demographics; half the state’s schoolage children are the offspring of immigrants. “The parents have competed hard to get where they are,” Mr. Capps said. “They expect their children to do the same.”


Ariel Hsing, 14, dreams of playing in the Olympics. / HEIDI SCHUMANN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES