Zhang Jiaqi, Out of the Pool and on TV, Faces the Distance From Her Mother

On Saturday evening the retired Olympic diving champion Zhang Jiaqi posted nine photographs and a farewell. The reality show she had joined — "Wo Jia Na Gui Nü," roughly "My Girl" — had finished filming her first stretch of ordinary life, and she used the occasion to write, at length, about her mother.

"Growing up, the time I spent actually living with my family was never much," she wrote. "The years we missed, and the distance that built up because of it, are real. Time can't be turned back — but we still have to keep walking forward."

The arithmetic behind that paragraph is worth spelling out. Zhang won synchronized 10-metre platform gold at the Tokyo Olympics as a teenager, which means her childhood happened inside China's state sports system — dormitories, training halls, coaches, competitions, and a certain amount of ordinary life that never got learned. Her post is dotted with the evidence. She has recently discovered, she confides, that new clothes should have their tags removed and be washed before they are worn. What reads as self-deprecation is also a diagnosis: life on the team, she wrote, let her put off facing her family; retirement forced her to face them. The show arrived "at exactly the right moment" — perhaps, she thought, she could look at the relationship from another angle and find "a way of getting along, and a distance, that keeps the two of us in balance."

Viewers have been watching this relationship strain for weeks. Earlier episodes produced two stories this site has already covered: the gold necklace her mother bought to mark her Olympic gold and never gave her, and the revelation that her mother keeps her three bank cards — after which lawyers pointed out that under the Civil Code a young athlete's prize money is her own property, and guardianship ends at eighteen.

In the show's observation room, where parents watch the footage, her mother wept at the sight of her. "I thought you would give up on me," she said. On Zhihu, the scene is being picked apart: what kind of parent cries "I thought you'd abandon me" at a grown daughter, and why do so many Chinese parents turn tender only as they age? Zhang herself promises no tearful reunion. One widely shared summary of her post put the position plainly: not every family bond is close, and accepting your differences while you adjust slowly is itself a way of growing up.

Her readers mostly want to feed her. "As long as Jiaqi eats well and stays happy," one fan wrote beneath the farewell, "there will always be plenty of people who love you." Others praised her for naming the harm of her "family of origin" (原生家庭) — the shorthand Chinese youth use for the inheritance they did not choose — without drowning in it.

She closed with a line from a speech she once gave: "Mom, life is a wilderness. Like every ordinary girl working hard at her own life, I want to learn to take charge of it. I want a sounder, richer self." (妈妈，人生是旷野。) Her post was liked more than 23,000 times within two hours. And she announced her next role: returning to the show as an observation-room guest, watching other daughters from the seat where her mother once watched her. Whether the balanced distance she describes is findable while the bank cards, the lawyers and the prize money still sit between them is the one thread the farewell leaves deliberately loose.