After a historic US Open run that saw her come through qualifying and reach the quarterfinal, Zheng Qinwen is now back in her home country hoping to carry that confidence into the China Open. But before the tournament even gets underway, a question was asked that follows tennis players everywhere they go. 

In a Nike event in Beijing, dressed in red and posing for photos with fans, Zheng was interrupted by a voice from the crowd. “I want to marry you,” a fan called out. Instead of letting the moment slide, the host put Zheng on the spot to respond to the question. 

After a brief pause to think it over, she delivered her answer with a smile. “I like guys,” she said, sending the room into laughter. 

It is the kind of moment that keeps popping up around tennis. Just days earlier at the Laver Cup, Carlos Alcaraz found himself in an almost identical spot mid-interview, when a fan in the crowd shouted “Marry my sister, Carlos” while he was fielding a question from Sam Querrey. 

Alcaraz laughed it off in the moment. “What the heck? I’m too young still,” he said, before trying to pick the interview back up. 

The trend goes back to Steffi Graf’s iconic 1996 Wimbledon semifinal moment, when a fan from the crowd asked the German for a marriage proposal, and Graf dropped an iconic line, “How much money do you have?” From Novak Djokovic to Roger Federer to Rafael Nadal, and even Emma Raducanu, everyone has encountered this question and embraced it in their own way. Fans now expect players to be creative in their answers, and this trend has woven itself into tennis heritage.

This lighthearted exchange comes just as Zheng prepares to open her campaign at her home WTA 1000, where she will face a qualifier in the first round. It’s her fourth appearance in the tournament, and she arrives hoping to build where she left off last year. 

A long road back after an injury-hit season

In 2025, she retired mid-match in the third round against Linda Noskova after trailing 3-0 in the decider. She had come back in the tournament after going through right elbow surgery, and the pain flared up during the match, being the cause of the retirement. Afterwards, Zheng even admitted that she was competing at only “80%, 70%.”

Back in 2024, she had reached the semifinals in Beijing as the fifth seed before falling to Karolina Muchova in straight sets, 6-3, 6-4, a result that came the same week Muchova also knocked out top seed Aryna Sabalenka en route to the final.

That injury kept costing her well into this year as well, forcing her to withdraw from the 2026 Australian Open, a tournament where she had been runner-up just two years earlier. As a result, her ranking slid all the way down to its current position of world No. 52, a steep fall from the career-high No. 4 she reached in mid-2025.

Against that backdrop, her US Open quarterfinal run is a significant one. Playing her way through qualifying and into the main draw, Zheng produced back-to-back comebacks from 0-5 down, first against Madison Keys in the deciding set and then, remarkably, against former US Open champion Iga Swiatek in the opener, before her run finally ended against eventual champion Elena Rybakina. She became the first female qualifier since Raducanu in 2021 to reach the quarterfinal at the US Open. 

She’s back on the same court where she had to bow out twelve months ago, now with a completely fit body and a new sense of confidence after making it into the second week of a Grand Slam.