Who needs to speak when you have ball and hoop?

A cross over dribble from above the key, left to right. Teammates pull the other defenders away from the ball. Right hand extends kissing the ball off the glass into the basket; first point of the game, one to nothing. Teammates slap hands and smile. The opponents wear a smirk that says that move is not going to work again.

Scenes like these are repeated hundreds of times at Dongdan Park everyday. Most of the time it is Chinese hands putting the ball into the hoop; this time it was my American hands.

I consider myself an outgoing person. But with no knowledge of Mandarin, being extroverted proved to be a difficult task for me in Beijing. All that changed however when I was introduced to Dongdan Park, a cluster of basketball courts near the heart of Beijing.

Basketball, as well as other sports, have brought people of different backgrounds together for centuries. The English introduced cricket to India and even today, in areas gripped by civil war, sports are often used to reunite an embattled people. I am not from a recently colonized country or from a war-torn state, but hoped that basketball would help me find common ground with people here.

Stepping onto the courts at Dongdan Park I felt more at home than I have since arriving in Beijing just under a month ago. One could hear the squeak of shoes on the concrete, the clatter of the ball as it hit the rim and even the grunts of men playing together with the same goal. The most difficult part for me was communicating with the players that I wanted to join their game but after that obstacle was overcome, with a series of gestures, I soon was playing, smiling and goofing around with them.

Sometimes I would miss when a person called a foul; at other times I would hand the ball to the other team thinking they had made a call; still everyone on the court remained understanding of the communication gap.