The faint（微弱的） whispers of a genetic conspiracy（协同作用） coursed（运行, 流动） through the corridors of Shanghai No. 6 Hospital on the evening of Sept. 12, 1980. It was shortly after 7 p.m., and a patient in the maternity ward had just endured an excruciating labor to give birth to a baby boy. An abnormally large baby boy. The doctors and nurses on duty should have anticipated something out of the ordinary. The boy's parents, after all, were retired basketball stars whose marriage the year before had made them the tallest couple in China. The mother, Fang Fengdi, an austere（朴素的; 质朴的） beauty with a pinched（使消瘦） smile, measured 1.88 m—more than half a foot taller than the average man in Shanghai. The father, Yao Zhiyuan, was a 2.08-m giant whose body pitched（使向下倾斜） forward in the kind of deferential stoop（弯腰, 屈背） that comes from a lifetime of ducking under door frames and leaning down to listen to people of more normal dimensions. So imposing（给人印象深刻的, 难忘的） was their size that ever since childhood, the two had been known simply as Da Yao and Da Fang—Big Yao and Big Fang.

Still, the medical staff surely had never seen a newborn quite like this: the enormous legs, the broad, squarish（似方形的, 有点方的） cranium（头盖骨；脑壳）, the hands and feet so fully formed that they seemed to belong to a three-year-old. At more than 5 kg, he was nearly double the size of the average Chinese newborn. The name his parents gave him, from a Chinese character that unifies the sun and the moon, was Ming, meaning bright.

News of Yao Ming's birth was quickly relayed across town to the top leaders of the Shanghai Sports Commission. They were not surprised. These men and women had been trying to cultivate a new generation of athletes who would embody（使具体化, 使形象化, 体现） the rising power of China. The boy in the maternity ward represented, in many ways, the culmination（巅峰；最高点） of their plan.

The experiment had no code name, but in Shanghai basketball circles it might as well（何妨） have been called Operation Yao Ming. The wheels had been set in motion（使事物开始运转） more than a quarter-century earlier, when Chairman Mao Zedong exhorted（勉励、敦促、倡导） his followers to funnel（使汇集） the nation's most genetically gifted youngsters into the emerging communist sports machine. Two generations of Yao Ming's forebears had been singled out by authorities for their hulking（庞大的；笨重的） physiques, and his mother and father had both been drafted into the sports system. "We had been looking forward to the arrival of Yao Ming for three generations," says Wang Chongguang, a retired Shanghai coach who played with Yao's father in the 1970s and would coach Yao himself in the '90s. "That's why I thought his name should be Yao Panpan." Long-Awaited Yao.