Tania Zeng (57 years old, Foshan, China) is a woman who, when she speaks, laughs. And, when she laughs, she laughs hard. She receives EL PAÍS on a rainy Friday in June in Santiago, Chile. It is 11 in the morning and she has just finished training with the Chilean table tennis team at the National Olympic Training Center, in the commune of Ñuñoa. Before the interview she puts on her red jacket, typical of the national teams, and her husband, Arturo Aravena, fixes the collar of her shirt.
The table tennis player captured the attention and also the hearts of Chileans by representing the country at the Santiago 2023 Pan American Games. In her first match of the individual competition she defeated the Dominican Eva Brito, born in 1995, overcoming a score of 2-0. In the second round, she lost to American Lily Ann Zhang. In the group competition, along with Paulina Vega and Daniela Ortega, she won the bronze medal.
In Santiago 2023 she was the oldest athlete in the national delegation and, despite having arrived from China at 22 years old, she felt like just another Chilean. Last May 18, in the Table Tennis Pre-Olympic held in Lima, she qualified for the Paris Olympic Games and will become the oldest athlete representing Chile in this competition.
On June 29, she travels to Portugal to train prior to the world event, as she has done since she began her life as a high-performance athlete in 2019, and she is not going alone. Her husband, 68 years old and already retired, follows her: “As a married couple we are having a great time and I feel very relaxed being accompanied by Arturo to the competitions, because he worries about the suitcases, the schedules, everything.” ” she says about the man she has been married to for 30 years.
Zhiying Zeng was born in the city of Foshan, Guangzhou Province, southern China, on July 17, 1966. From the age of nine to 21, he played table tennis competitively. His mother, who died in 1995, was a coach in this sport.
In 1989, Zeng received an offer from a table tennis club in Arica, in the far north of Chile, to coach schoolchildren. In Spanish that was difficult to understand, he introduced himself: “Hello, I am Zhiying Zeng.” Some confused eyes looked at her and she knew that another name was necessary and she adopted Tania’s: “Zhiying was a difficult name to remember, even if she repeated it once, two or three times, but everyone remembers Tania,” she says. . Her husband jokes and says that Tania is her stage name.
Her job as a coach was only during the afternoons and, for a 22-year-old girl, the days were slow: “I started touring the city, meeting many Chinese merchants and they asked me: Why don’t you go into business?” . After a year and a half as a trainer, in Arica she opened an underwear store that she later complemented with hardware items. In 2005 she moved to Iquique – also in the north of the country – and she, together with her only brother, who had recently arrived in Chile, opened an office furniture store. Between the hustle and bustle of the business world and her family life with two children, table tennis paddles were left behind. In that movement from here to there, she was found by the pandemic.
In 2020 and 2021, some opened the puzzle boxes again, others accompanied the hours with wool and chopsticks, and many others used their hands to knead the bread. Tania Zeng returned to table tennis. She, an active woman—she and her husband love to go for daily walks along the beach in Iquique—did not see themselves sitting down.
“I didn’t play for 30 years and, during the pandemic, I wanted to move and I started playing table tennis at home to get a little exercise. And then I said, ‘This is my thing,’” she says about his return to the sport. After the quarantines, he went to play at a club in Iquique: “I went in to have fun, but I never thought about high performance. I traveled with my husband and my children to the championships and had a great time. “I started winning a cup, then another cup, and then another cup.”
With her children already educated, one is a lawyer and the other a commercial engineer, Zeng entered high-performance sports and was able to show that potential that she always had and that, close to 60 years old, she still has. He delegated the family business to his lifelong workers and his brother who, from China, where he once again took care of his 92-year-old father, manages the business. stocks of the store. “I have three people who have worked with me for 20 years. If there is a small problem, they take care of it and I am calm.” Neither her employees, nor her suppliers, nor the people who served her at the bank knew that she played table tennis so well.
Those who are also surprised and see her with different eyes are her children: “They are really proud of their mother. Before they always told me ‘mom I love you’ but now, with the achievements I have had, I feel that they look at me with admiration,” adds Zeng.
Age caused doubts, he says: “At first I was afraid because I was 56 years old, but when I joined the national team I saw that my body responded well, I could train every day without any problem and then I left my age aside (… .) I feel strong, I have some age-related injuries, but they are minor.” The goals she has in the sport also help her overcome: “I have always been climbing little by little and that keeps me strong and motivated.”
At the Ñuñoa Olympic Center he talks to everyone who comes to the gym, mostly young people between 15 and 25 years old: “The relationship with the youth has been super good, when training they treat me as an equal, they don’t say ‘be careful with her.’ who is older’ and on the court they also look at me as a competition.”
High-performance sport came with a fan base that was not expected, something that was experienced with special emotion at last year’s Pan American Games: “You feel very loved, people motivate you in the games, they follow you, they ask you for photos. All of that for me, to have achieved such great affection at my age, is a lot (…) I feel that Chile has given me so much, it has given me many opportunities, it gave me a family, a life and now they give me this opportunity to play I feel like another Chilean because here I have everything. “I am very grateful and I feel lucky,” she says about the country she arrived in 35 years ago.
She awaits the Olympic Games happy and prepared: “I dream of winning the first round. If that becomes a reality, I hope I can go up and win the second and third.”
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