The wall cabinet was filled with trophies and footballs, and Fat Sister pointed to the vacant place in the upper left corner, where there was once a gold cup and is now being exhibited elsewhere.
The trophy is the honor of the deaf women's football champion at the 2015 Guangdong Paralympic Games, which was the first time that Fat Sister and the team members participated in the competition.
"After the gold medal was won, my parents were very happy, the family invited guests, and relatives came." Zheng Guodong relayed the sign language of Fat Sister, who is the coach of the Zhanjiang women's football team, a Language teacher at zhanjiang Special Education School, since 2003, he has brought out more than 70 deaf players, won countless awards in major competitions, and in 2013 he formed a women's team, Fat Sister is the goalkeeper in the team, "is the 'Optimus Prime' in the women's football team," he said.
Fat sister named Chen Zhizhi, play small physique good, strong, 1 year old after the injection after the hearing disappeared, since then has not been much sick, in addition to the "fat sister" nickname, she also has another little-known title - "Asian deaf indoor women's football best goalkeeper", in 2019 the third deaf indoor football Asian Cup, because of her outstanding performance, the organizing committee gave her such a title.
Those times of running on the green field are now in a bit of a trance in fat girls' minds, and since playing the 11th National Paralympic Games last June, the team has not conducted regular training for more than half a year.
After graduating from the special school, many team members left their hometowns, some entered the factory, and some went to the Pearl River Delta or beyond, and even lost contact. "There are only four or five female footballers left in Zhanjiang." Zheng Guodong said that in the past six months, he has begun to run around, seeking more job opportunities for this group of hearing-impaired children.
The pandemic has also brought training and competition to a standstill. Fat Sister is used to a new life, she works two jobs a day, fried chicken at McDonald's before four o'clock, and fried skewers in a small shop after four o'clock.
What can "football" do?
We had only heard a little about this team before, but in the last week of February, for work reasons, we went to Zhanjiang to visit "Fat Sister" and Coach Zheng.
Zhanjiang is located on the Leizhou Peninsula, and crossing the Qiongzhou Strait is Hainan Island, which is supposed to warm up after spring. The cold wave suddenly moved south, the wind on the coast blew, although it was the end of February, and local taxi drivers said that they had never been so frozen in all these years.
Fat Sister's "dormitory" is in Xiashan District, a second-hand house of more than 130 square meters, completely furnished, transparent and bright. In fact, this is Zheng Guodong's house, Zheng despite the opposition of his family, gave the house to Fat Mei and two other female members of the team for free. At market prices, such a house is rented out in Zhanjiang for at least 3,000 yuan.
"If there are training or competitions, there can be up to 6 to 8 female players, three rooms and a bed to sleep 2 people, sofas can also sleep, I also bought two separate folding beds."
Zheng Guodong began to make tea after we sat down, and Fat Sister rested in the house, because of our visit, she went home directly after work from McDonald's, and did not rush to another snack bar as usual. The coach explained.
Fat girls usually go to work at eight o'clock in the morning and come home after eleven o'clock in the evening. He was awarded the "Excellent Employee of McDonald's" and is very confident in his technique of blowing things up.
"The experience of football in the past few years has made her more exposed to the world and more able to work in society faster." Mr. Cheng said it was very different from when he first came into contact with her. "She was introverted, sparkling, didn't like to communicate, couldn't stand up, and wasn't at all unremarkable."
Fat Sister is also a little different from other female classmates, she is not afraid of the ball, "watching the ball flying in front of her, being hit, it hurts, but soon get used to it." Fat Sister made a few gestures, and the coach was responsible for relaying it.
Fat Sister is not good at catching the ball, but the kneeling, blocking, and splitting skills are quite exquisite, but a technical action requires Zheng Guodong to spend ten times more energy than ordinary people to guide. Deafness has an impact on the coordination of the body, it is difficult to hear and difficult to communicate, and Zheng Guodong can only kneel on the ground, fix her body and limb angle with her hands, and correct her movements. In order to facilitate training and game conducting, he also developed a tactical sign language that only his team can understand.
During the game, the coaches of other teams stood next to each other and shouted, Zheng Guodong was different, he played his own original sign language, which not only facilitated communication with the players, but also ensured that the tactics were not known by the opponent, killing two birds with one stone. At the mention of this, Zheng Guodong laughed loudly, and there was some naughtiness in the laughter.
Zheng Guodong conducts "combat command" at the stadium Photo by: Pixel Notes
Fat sister can bear hardships and dare to fight.
In Thailand, the most injured, indoor football field is a assembled rubber board, she blocked the ball with all her strength, fell heavily on the rubber board, after the game, a blue and purple piece, the head was also injured. That time lost very completely, 13th, 2 years later, the group of girls came back to Thailand and won the championship in one fell swoop.
"At that time, I just thought I would try to play, and I didn't have anything to do in school anyway." And the team training also has milk, meal supplements. ”
What can football do? Fat Sister didn't think so much at the time. "But I didn't expect to be able to participate in so many competitions everywhere and go abroad later."
In the fat sister's dormitory, there are active oils and analgesic creams everywhere
Go to Samsun
In 2016, the family asked the fat sister to go home and marry, and there was a disabled person in the hometown who was willing to marry the fat sister.
"She said that the family did not have the ability to support her to go to high school anymore, let her marry, while someone wanted her, and her husband would be responsible for her later, and they would not have to worry about her food and housing." Zheng Guodong said.
Fat Sister's hometown is in Suixi County, an hour's drive from Zhanjiang City.
Suixi is rich in sugarcane and dragon fruit, is China's first sweet county, the fat sister's family originally had a sugarcane field, but she did not like to farm, the sugarcane field was wet, the roots were much taller than her, and the body was dirty and itchy after a day of work.
Fat Sister told her family no, she didn't want to marry, she didn't want to go back to the sugar cane field, she wanted to play football.
Later, Fat Sister won the provincial games championship, she got six or seven thousand yuan bonus, paid the high school tuition, her parents also feasted on relatives for this purpose, and no longer mentioned the marriage.
We decided to go to Fat Sister's hometown to see.
When I arrived in Suixi County, it was still raining. The fat girl's house in the village is a small three-story building, but the house is empty, and now there are few people living there. Fat Sister has two older brothers and one older sister, and her parents often live in the second brother's house in the town. My father was not in good health, and it cost twenty thousand yuan to be hospitalized not long ago, and the fat sister's mother said, "She is so pitiful to have parents like us." ”
In order to avoid the "dilemma" of filming the "four walls of the family", the accompanying film crew returned to the town, but the shooting environment in the town was not much better than that in the countryside.
Fat Sister's second brother has two children, a man and a woman, who are in the first and third grades in the county. In order to facilitate the children's schooling, the second brother rented this "yard" in the county, 250 blocks a month, the electric lights in the two rooms flickered on and off, when the sky darkened, through the closed window to look at the cold rain outside, people could not help but shiver. Fat Sister's nephew is not afraid of the cold, and after bathing, he can still run naked in the yard, barefoot on the cold ground for a while.
Among the siblings, fat sister is the smallest, but there are many places to go, and the furthest city is Samsun in Turkey, a coastal city on the Black Sea coast.
In 2017, Zhanjiang Deaf Women's Football Team represented China in the 23rd Deaf Olympic Games held in Samsun, which was also the first time in more than 90 years that a Chinese team participated in the football program.
In Samsun, Fat Sister quickly made new friends, and the "universal" sign language allowed them to cross the language barrier.
In Turkey, she communicated with many foreign friends.
Fat Sister likes Samsun and feels very comfortable here, which is somewhat similar to Zhanjiang. She enjoys practicing on the beach in her hometown, where the sea breeze brings a faint salty and wet taste of the sea, the bay bridge at sunset, and some warships on the sea, which accompany her for many years.
Chen Zhihui often practices ball by the sea Photographer: Pixel Notes
There have been a few times when the team qualified to go to Italy and Switzerland to participate in the Deaf World Cup, but it did not go because of funding and other reasons. The girls were very disappointed, and Coach Zheng took them on a walk-and-go trip, and in 16 days, they went to Guangzhou to visit shopping malls, climbed Lushan Mountain, and saw Tiananmen Square in textbooks in Beijing.
Wu Gang is the assistant coach of the team and the "coachman". Wu is a junior high school classmate of Zheng Guodong, who previously worked in the salmon business in Haikou and later did finance for a while. Later, he returned to Zhanjiang to participate in the assistant coaching work of the team, without any daily remuneration.
Like Zheng Guodong and his group of children "traveling through the mountains and rivers", he often drives the team members to play games everywhere. "Go to the surrounding cities and play with able-bodied people, we are very good, physical strength is good, and few amateur teams can win us." Wu Gang said.
Zheng Guodong said that he was ready to organize the team to leave again next year to participate in two deaf World Cup events (eleven - five-a-side) in South Korea and Brazil, and Fat Sister knew that the last two eyes were shining, and she was very excited. "I haven't had time to tell them before." Zheng Guodong said.
We returned to zhanjiang at night, and the ground on both sides of the road was planted with dragon fruit, and it is said that in order to maintain the light, the dragon fruit field was lit with dotted headlights, and looked out from the speeding bus, like a milky way flowing on the ground, this road is the brightest place on this country road at night.
Ichii Life
"Please come to the 0012 exit to pick up your meal." Fat Sister pressed the call button, and the guest followed the sound. A few months ago, she came to the skewer shop and started working two jobs a day.
The owner of the fried skewer shop is a friend of Zheng Guodong, the employees in the store are deaf, and the name of the shop is called "Ichijing Life Silent Shop".
Opposite the small shop is the No. 25 Primary School in Zhanjiang City, and a noisy sound is heard after class. Next to it is the Twenty Middle School, after noon, many students patronize the small shop, most of them are girls, the same sister head.
One of the twenty schoolgirls ordered a large skewer, saying she knew they could play, but didn't know it was the champion. Even several golden trophies are placed in the store.
The walls of the silent shop are plastered with photos of the team's "conquest", and wish stickers by: Pixel Notes
There are two other hearing impaired people in the store, one is Li Haiyang, the captain of the Zhanjiang deaf men's football team, nicknamed "Hippopotamus", who works in the small shop all day long, and his mother does the medicinal materials business and sometimes goes to help. His hair was very tuggy, leaving only a tuft above his head, like a star, and he liked to wear headphones, saying that although he could not hear the sound, he could feel the drum beats vibrating in the music. The songs with the most loops are Tan Yonglin's "Friends" and BEYOND's "Like You", and the favorite singer is Jacky Cheung.
The other is a younger girl, Jing Yi, who is the roommate of the fat sister, from Henan, through the circle of friends to learn that zhanjiang deaf friends are playing football, very interested, so they went south to join the team and persevered. "The school over there doesn't have a football field, and I don't want to go back to school." When Jing Yi was about to go to high school, she decided to stay in Zhanjiang.
"She almost didn't smile before, her selfie photos were very serious, and her personality changed a lot since joining the team." Zheng Guodong said. Although she is only 17 years old, everyone calls her "Jingyi Auntie", and in the WeChat group, the team members' self-made "Jingyi Aunt Emoji" often brushes the screen. Because from the north, as soon as Zhanjiang cooled down, Jing Yi's cheeks were frozen red, and Wu Gang put his hand on his forehead, comparing the action of a monkey looking away, which meant that she blushed like a monkey and made her laugh.
The lady who sells pork chops next door has been here for four or five years, and it wasn't until the silent shop opened that she didn't know that deaf people can also play football and play so well, she said she could see that they were very cheerful.
"Wayward, suspicious, closed, grumbling, hearing impaired groups generally have a temperament, and kicking football can change it." Zheng Guodong said.
Near 11 o'clock, Chen Zhihui packed up the storefront and prepared to go home to shoot the person: Pixel Notes
Next Golden Cup
2 years ago, Zheng Guodong and his friends had plans to open a snack bar for the deaf, but because of the epidemic, they stopped training for half a year, and the small shop officially opened. This is the first step in Zheng Guodong's attempt to help the team members find employment.
"People with hearing impairments seem to have a wall with the real world." Zheng Guodong said. The deaf team members look physically fit, have different mental outlooks, and find jobs that are not difficult. But Zheng soon discovered that it is not difficult for deaf people to find jobs, but often some mechanized, or assembly line jobs.
Most deaf people are also not good at communicating with auditors and are even isolated in factories. "In a month or two they change factories and always apprentice."
Later, he found that compared with ordinary deaf people, team members are more inclined to start a business, "Some of our team members returned to their hometowns to open their own shops, communicate recharge, repair mobile phones, sell old people's machines, and also drive spicy and hot, and wash cars."
"Because of playing football, they see more." He wants to gather the team's players to take the collective entrepreneurial route, such as doing a deaf workshop, because the epidemic has not been realized, but he is still trying to promote.
Recently, he began to learn some new fields of knowledge, such as e-commerce, micro-business, community group buying, hoping to use some Internet tools to help deaf people find new employment opportunities.
Next to the wall cabinet, it is a live broadcast prop given to Zheng Guodong by a friend.
"They broadcast live in sign language, and the coach is the assistant, translating on the side, and the voice is converted into subtitles in real time." Coach Zheng envisioned it this way. It's just that the silent live broadcast, whether anyone is willing to watch it, is a problem.
Zheng Guodong wants to integrate deaf people into the circle of hearing people.
"Deaf people kick a lot and let go a lot, before they were very mindful of using sign language in the crowd, afraid of different eyes." He also paid attention to many mobile phone manufacturers and communication operators to make new products for the hearing impaired, so that the latter can communicate with the hearing people.
Fat Sister uses the Unicom Listening King Card, which can be used to communicate normally with her family through real-time translation of voice and text. "In the past, I used to use video to determine that the courier and takeaway arrived and went downstairs to get it. Now you can see each other talking, which is more convenient than before. ”
Through the "Listening Little Assistant" equipped with Tencent Tianlai AI voice enhancement technology, Fat Sister can smoothly "call" with coaches and family Photographer: Pixel Notes
Fat Sister brushed up a short video between interviews, although the sound of the video was only audible to us. After a while, her WeChat rang the ringtone of the video call, after connecting, the opposite was a girl with silver and white hair, Coach Zheng said that it was a friend of the fat sister Chen Chi, who was once a member of the team, and now works in Shenzhen, and chats with the fat sister after work.
Zheng Guodong wants this group of "graduated" deaf players to return to the stadium, and he feels that the best result is that the players can support themselves by playing football.
A few years ago, Zheng Guodong established the first deaf football club in China, "Longren", which belongs to a non-governmental non-profit organization. Now, he is pushing for the formation of the country's first professional club for deaf people, which, if realized, could bring some fixed income to deaf players.
"In fact, it is semi-professional, deaf people can still work to earn money, and come back when there is a game, not only to ensure that the dream of playing football can continue, but also to get some additional income." We are designing a league system. In the future, deaf coaches, referees, first responders and more football-related professions can be derived. ”
Zheng Guodong showed off his green mobile phone case, on which was the professional club logo that had been designed long ago, and last year Fat Mei wore the green team uniform of the club with this logo printed on it and stepped onto the green field.
The women's asian cup won the championship, and Chen Zhizhi sent a circle of friends
"I didn't dream before I played football, but after playing football, I hope to participate in more games, fight for more honors, and make more money." Fat Sister also wants to hold back the next golden cup.
"Back on the pitch, will you be born?" I asked.
"Definitely. But if you play for a few days in a row, you will soon become familiar with it. She said.