What ping-pong taught me about life
2,303,056 views | Pico Iyer • TEDSummit 2019
Growing up in England, Pico Iyer was taught that the point of a game was to win. Now, some 50 years later, he's realized that competition can be "more like an act of love." In this charming, subtly profound talk, he explores what regular games of ping-pong in his neighborhood in Japan have revealed about the riddle of winning -- and shows why not knowing who's won can feel like the ultimate victory.
Growing up in England, Pico Iyer was taught that the point of a game was to win. Now, some 50 years later, he's realized that competition can be "more like an act of love." In this charming, subtly profound talk, he explores what regular games of ping-pong in his neighborhood in Japan have revealed about the riddle of winning -- and shows why not knowing who's won can feel like the ultimate victory.
This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.
About the speaker
Novelist and nonfiction author Pico Iyer writes on subjects ranging from the Cuban Revolution to Islamic mysticism, from Graham Greene to forgotten nations and the 21st-century global order.
Roger Bennett and Eli Horowitz | It Books, 2010 | Book
Everything You Know Is Pong: How Mighty Table Tennis Shapes Our World
It may not always be entirely reliable, but it's a tremendously fun compendium of astonishing facts and photos about the sport of (chiseling) kings. The perfect present for the basement fanatic.
Jerome Charyn | Da Capo Press, 2002 | Book
Sizzling Chops and Devilish Spins: Ping-Pong and the Art of Staying Alive
A veteran novelist, known for his work on Emily Dickinson, recalls his days playing ping-pong in Paris (former home of the ping-pong aficionado Henry Miller), often against the great chanteur Georges Moustaki.
Nicholas Griffin | Scribner, 2014 | Book
Ping-Pong Diplomacy: The Secret History Behind the Game That Changed the World
A compulsively engaging account of how ping-pong in 1972 brought China and the US together, of the sport's relationship to international intelligence and of its influence in Mao Zedong's China.
Howard Jacobson | Oberon Press, 2017 | Book
The Mighty Walzer
The prolific British novelist devoted this entire novel to lust and clumsiness and adolescent ping-pong.
Robert Whiting | Vintage Books, 2009 | Book
You Gotta Have Wa
The witty and brilliant dean of American writers on Japanese baseball — and therefore on Japanese-American relations — has written many fine books on the sport, but this may be the one to start with. (It's certainly the first book I urge on every first-time Western visitor to Japan.)
Donald Richie | Stone Bridge Press, 2001 | Book
The Donald Richie Reader: 50 Years of Writing on Japan
No foreign writer has ever caught every aspect of Japan, from its red-light districts to its temples, with more ironic sympathy and clarity than Donald Richie, who spent the better part of 66 years in the country without ever pretending to become Japanese, having arrived with the Occupation in 1947, and remaining in Tokyo almost every year until his death, in 2013.
Pico Iyer | Vintage (reprint edition), 2020 | Book
Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells
I hesitate to recommend a book by myself, but for anyone interested in how a ping-pong club sheds light on autumn and an aging society and hope and second childhood, in a generic, modern suburb of the ancient city of Nara, Japan, this may be the one book that stitches them all together. A companion work, A Beginner's Guide to Japan (Alfred A. Knopf), offers a wider look at values and assumptions in my adopted home of 32 years, including sections on baseball, on harmony and on the art of remaining invisible.
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This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.