COMMUNITY COMMENTARY:

Chinese President Hu Jintao was there, with past International Olympic President Juan Antonio Samaranch. In an effort to impress them, my Chinese announcer Cao Xue was nervous.

It was the U.S. women, with former Chinese volleyball star Lang Ping as their coach, versus the Chinese. Close to 18,000, mostly Chinese, chanting Jia Yuo at the top of their lungs. There’s no literal translation but liberally it means go China!

The start of the match was slow for the Americans, and the first four sets were close but a bit lackluster. The fifth set, however, was a runaway. Our girls ran up a 6-to-1 lead before China’s coach called a time out. The Chinese never caught up. It was the end of the first week of Olympic competition. The men’s team defeated its first four opponents on the way to the medal round and potentially the gold.

I am being treated like a “rock star.” I’ll be working on a script or the pronunciations of players’ names, and a group of young Chinese volunteers will snap a picture. The bolder ones ask if I’ll take a picture with them. When you pass them, they go out of their way to smile, and say hello. They try to help me with whatever I need. It’s one of the most pleasant environments I have experienced in a long time.

Many Westerners, me included, have this pre-conceived notion that this is a teeming population of unhappy, uncaring people, eking out an existence with not much to look forward to. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I have found, especially with the young people I have been working with, an exuberance and joy that abounds in everything they do. These are extremely happy individuals, who love to treat one another with the utmost respect, kindness and dignity.

Something that isn’t fun here is the smog. It’s just as bad as you’ve heard, probably worse. If it were their task to clean, the AQMD would all quit en masse. Looking out my hotel room at 7 a.m., it appears nuclear winter has set in, except it’s 95 degrees with 85% humidity. Oh, they’ve tried alternating days of travel with odd and even license plate numbers and paying huge sums for factories to curtail operations, but with close to 18 million inhabitants and more than 67,000 taxis, to rectify the problem would have been a Herculean effort.

The volleyball matches from here out are going to be more competitive as better teams are paired on their way to the ultimate prize. I’ll let you know more as I report.

Michael Villani is a contributing writer to the Daily Pilot, and as the venue announcer for indoor volleyball in Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games, he will file occasional columns.