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On Sports Heros And Asian-Americans. A Reluctant Part II.

By Dan Harris on Posted in Recommended Reading

Last week, in response to reader emails and the quality and the provocativeness of an article, I did  a post on Asian-Americans. I am not even sure my doing so came within the Mission of this blog, but I could not resist.

Now here I go again.

I never see good articles on Asian-Americans, but now two in one week? Maybe as a rabid sports fan I am biased, but I just loved this article, “Can I Write Check?” on what Yao Ming meant/means to Asian-Americans. (Hat tip to China-based Celtics fan, Jeremiah Jenne of Jottings from the Granite Studio).

The article is by Jay Caspian Kang and it would be worth reading if it said nothing more than the following paragraph comparing Yao to Ichiro:

It was this size and his Chineseness that initially alienated American fans. Regardless of who you are, it is nearly impossible to really identify with a 7-foot-6 foreigner. But the skepticism, at least among Asian-Americans, also had something to do with the fact that Yao’s first game in the NBA had come a mere 11 months after Ichiro took home the American League’s MVP Award. The role of Great Yellow Hope had already been filled. What’s more, when compared side-to-side, Ichiro made for a much better hero. He was cool where Yao was awkward. He was mysterious where Yao was opaque. Neither men spoke English particularly well, and both communicated through translators, but Ichiro somehow made it seem like he was too cool to speak English, whereas Yao’s press conferences felt canned and foreign. Despite not saying much, Ichiro branded himself through glossy magazine shoots and public appearances. Yao just kind of frowned a lot. Neither man gave up much in terms of personality. But Ichiro at least gave us dominance on the field. Early Yao seemed as if he was only playing for the glory of his homeland — a mercenary sent to showcase the glory of Chinese genetic manufacturing.

One of the hallmarks of great writing is that it reflects what you are thinking even before you even quite knew you were thinking it. I had never coherently thought about Yao in the way the article describes him (though I had definitely thought about Ichiro in that way), but now that I see him described this way, I realize I had thought about him like that all along.  

In law school, I took Labor & Employment Law II from the same teacher from whom I had taken Labor Law I. Labor Law I was either a required course or I took it because I knew that it would be helpful for my planned business law career. I took Labor Law II simply because the teacher was so good I simply believed  I would be better off as a lawyer learning a ton about something that might prove irrelevant than taking a facially more relevant course from a lesser teacher.

I feel the same way about the two articles on Asian-Americans on which I have posted. I am not sure they are relevant, but they are so good and so informative and such a joy to read, that in a round-about way, I feel they almost have to give us a better understanding of China. Does anyone see where I am coming from on this? Does anyone agree with me on this? 

Plus, as someone who has always thought of himself as an immigrant, as someone who is constantly “hanging” around immigrants, and as someone who has both parents and kids, I just really related to the following: 

Every child of immigrants knows the dread of watching a parent stumble through a PTA meeting or a car purchase or even an interaction with a grocery store clerk or waitress. Your sphincter constricts, your breath freezes. Every catastrophic scenario is projected — your mother’s English will break, she will say something stupid or ignorant and the grand illusion of sameness, or, at least, the attempts at sameness, will atomize and disappear.

With Yao, I always felt that same dread. In an absurd, yet still significant way, watching him over the past nine years was like watching a video of my parents. I worried he would mispronounce a word, bomb a joke, or say something awful about his black teammates. Yes, I should probably not compare a 7-foot-6 Chinese basketball player who can carefully select his televised moments with an immigrant parent who has to make his or her way through a skeptical and oftentimes cruel country, but when the scope of available cultural references goes from Jackie Chan to Jet Li to Bruce Lee to Ichiro to Yao to Yan Can Cook, you sometimes have no option but to inflate, conflate, and, at times, fabricate. We live in an era in which self-identification is just the pastiche of relatable characters we piece together while staring in the mirror. Where else could we look for that story? Margaret Cho? Tiger Mothers? The Joy Luck Club?

I apologize to Mr. Kang for having pulled such large chunks from his article, but I blame him for having written it so well. Go here and read it. I recommend it.

Oh, and please do let us know what you think. Did you too relate?

  • http://www.politicomix.net Roberto

    “Regardless of who you are, it is nearly impossible to really identify with a 7-foot-6 foreigner.” More accurate would be that regardless of who you are (with the possible exception of Shawn Bradley), it is nearly impossible to identify with a 7-foot-6 human being.
    As for Ichiro, “the Great Yellow Hope”? Really? Setting aside for a moment my limitless respect for Ichiro’s athletic ability, and the role he carved out for himself in baseball (both NPB and MLB), he reminds me of Winston Churchill’s great line about Clement Attlee: “An empty taxi arrived at 10 Downing Street, and when the door was opened, Atlee got out.” I prefer my athletes with a bit of personality; I was a fan of Ichiro’s former teammate, pitcher Shigetoshi Hasegawa, who appeared thoughtful and intelligent in interviews (and who had a very solid career).
    Plenty of great athletes fail to capture our imaginations, and our hearts. Among basketball centers (who as noted above are difficult for “normal” humans to relate to) that’s probably even more true. Was Kareem Abdul Jabbar “loved”? More important, does it matter?
    Millions of children around the world have grown up wanting to emulate the feats of heroes such as Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, Lionel Messi, Pele, Muhammad Ali and Usain Bolt. For the huge majority of those kids, their hero’s race was irrelevant and unseen. As it should be.

  • Twofish

    Kang: Every child of immigrants knows the dread of watching a parent stumble through a PTA meeting or a car purchase or even an interaction with a grocery store clerk or waitress.
    I really have problems with the statement “every child of immigrants.” I never had this problem with my parents. This had to do with who my parents were, who I was, the part of the country that I lived in, etc. etc.
    Also a good number of Chinese people I know in my generation have been learning English since kindergarten and are better native speakers of English than people born in the United States. The internet also changes things. One thing that has really eased the transition of moving from country to country is that you now have internet forums, so if you want to know how a Chinese immigrant to the United States or Sweden or South Africa should buy a car, you can find that information online in the right chat group. This wasn’t true in the 1970′s.
    Harris: I feel they almost have to give us a better understanding of China. Does anyone see where I am coming from on this? Does anyone agree with me on this?
    Curiously I don’t. One reason I’ve never thought of myself as an “Asian-American” is that the people I knew that identified themselves as “Asian-American” tried to do everything they could to avoid anything dealing with China or the “old country.” Ironically, I think this hurts them when they try to integrate into American society. I can go into “Chinese” mode or “American” mode, but when I’m “acting American” I’m for all intents and purposes “white.”
    Also, if someone whose parents are Chinese wants to forget everything about China, then that’s fine. One good thing about the United States is that to a large extent you can forget where you came from if you really want to, or not if you don’t.
    Something about Yao Ming is that he really doesn’t have that much incentive to focus much on the United States. Yao Ming is a national hero in China, and you see all sort of posters with him literally wearing the Chinese flag (i.e. he is always wearing his red and yellow olympic uniform with CHINA written on it).
    Also, there does seems to be a big difference between different Asian-American groups. One thing that I can do is to be both “Chinese” and “American.” People that I know of Japanese ethnicity have been totally unable to do this because if you identify yourself as “American” that makes you somehow less “Japanese” when this doesn’t seem to be the case with Chinese.

  • Twofish

    There are many ways of telling a story, and sometimes the way that you tell a story is more interesting than the story itself.
    One thing that I find interesting is that immigrant stories fall into the standard narrative of the “melting pot.” It’s interesting because on the one and most people are unaware of where that narrative developed and on the other hand, you start missing some parts of the story if you look at things only with the view of the melting pot.
    What’s interesting about China is that there is a different narrative of the “patriotic overseas Chinese” that leaves China for a few years or few decades, makes it big overseas, and then returns home a success.
    Something that I personally find interesting is that story of the global village. In the 1970′s when I grew up, talking about China from the point of view of the United States seemed to be a lot like talking about Mars. China was this far away place, that just existed in memory, and it was somewhere that my parents really didn’t expect to go back to. Today, talking about China from the point of view of the United States seems a lot like talking about a suburb. When you talk about “going to China” in 1975 it felt a lot like talking about “going to Mars.” Today saying that you are “going to China” it feels like taking a subway to an outer borough of NYC.
    So what does it mean to be an immigrant in a global world? Interesting question.

  • http://www.politicomix.net Roberto

    “Something about Yao Ming is that he really doesn’t have that much incentive to focus much on the United States. Yao Ming is a national hero in China …”
    Twofish makes a good point here, and it’s especially true of the Japanese athletes who export themselves. They don’t speak English in interviews because their interviews (and attendant press corps) are focused on the home market. They nearly all make more from home country endorsements than from their salaries, no matter how large those salaries are. They are expats only for the time they are on the court, or field.
    Some baseball games feature advertising behind home plate that is from Japanese companies, written in Japanese, and aimed at Japanese (and other Asian) consumers.
    If e.g. Ichiro had any interest (I’m sure he doesn’t) in connecting with American fans, he would presumably, in ten years living in the States, have made some effort to speak English in public (I imagine his English is quite okay in the clubhouse and in the checkout line at his local Whole Foods). But he doesn’t have to, and he doesn’t care to. He was a wealthy star before he swung at his first MLB pitch.
    The same is true for the young golfer Ryo Ishikawa, for Michelle Wie and so on. The money has changed everything. A few years ago Martina Navratilova or Chris Evert said the tennis tour is completely different now: players have 3-6 person entourages, they walk around 24/7 with earbuds in, they stay in 5-star hotels, and … they don’t interact with one another. There is no camaraderie, just a few hundred globetrotting gladiators trying to maximize their prize money and endorsements.

  • http://gunshi.wordpress.com/ David

    On the other end of the world, what peaked my own curiosity was pretty much the opposite of Kang’s cultural inquiry. In other words, the effect that cultural icons in the universe of sports, such as Yao Ming, have on those with a similar nationality. More specifically, what is it about the National Basketball League that causes the younger generation of male adolescents to designate their english names after their favorite NBA stars. This is no fabrication, two out of five students in a particular group of students I had in Yinchuan, Ningxia named themselves James and McGrady. An even larger population of Chinese youth sport NBA gear on a daily basis and express ‘playing basketball’ as there favorite hobby. In Yinchuan I had the pleasure of visiting a beautiful and large gated high-school that could easily have been mistaken for a small University. Once inside I was invited to participate in a game of badminton with members of the faculty. Upon walking into the gymnasium I was shocked to find a handful of 5 v 5 basketball games taking place. I recall particularly one student who stood above the rest, dominating the floor and draining outside shots with perfect form. For a good moment I truly felt like a NBA scout and imagined myself in a Chinese version of Blue Chips.
    The fascination and self-identification of a good percentage of China’s youth to the NBA is widespread and ever-growing. Yet unlike the content of Kang’s essays, which articulates a cultural impact from the insular lens of America, these students were more passionate about NBA’s all-stars: Kobe, McGrady, Lebron, Nash and so on. Concerned more accurately with talent than origins. Perhaps Yao was a bit before there time. However, it should be expressed that Yi Jianlian was given respective air-time amongst the voice-cracking conversations.