The Ashcan

Jeremy Lin: The Great Reticent Hope

Posted on 30. Jan, 2010 by Simon in Pop Culture, Race, Sports

The Legend of Jeremy Lin continues to grow.

A second ESPN article popped up last week while the Harvard senior got a shout-out on Deadspin today, surely sending all new scores of basketball fans scurrying to YouTube. This is not a story about basketball though. Whether he likes it or not (and the answer seems to be not), Lin’s scenario clearly reveals raw cultural nerves rooted deeper than mere athletic achievement.

I don’t know how to say the following without coming off sounding ignorant (great preface) but: I think Asian immigrants to North America, and particularly their naturalized lineage, are apt to want nothing more than pretend society is now post-racial (at least, insofar as it applies to us). I’m not saying we believe this. I’m just saying, a lot of times, this is how we act.

Like many minorities, Asians (I’m using the umbrella term, but I’m Chinese, so feel free to correct my many vague assumptions) are well aware and proud of their respective cultures. We form university cultural clubs that parade as charities; we flock to the same clubs because we are all searching for the bar with the cheapest drinks; we brag about our dexterity with chopsticks; we drink bubble tea.

At the same time however, in my personal experience, these are all just ways of dealing with internalized desires. Minorities hang out together because it’s nice to, literally, see familiar looking faces sometimes.

What’s less common I find is “Asian-ness” affecting my external worldview. Personally, I have never read about an election and thought about how the outcome will affect me as an Asian-Canadian instead of simply as a Canadian. I just don’t instinctively identify myself as an Asian in macro matters (unless something is specifically related to my ethnicity).

I’ve not once considered whether I did or did not get a job because I am Chinese and someone else is not. I don’t worry about looking out for the Asian-Canadian community, what specific problems we face as a minority, who in government and business is looking after the Asian-Canadian interest and who is not. I don’t worry about these problems because I honestly don’t think such problems exist. And, though I certainly am generalizing, I can’t be completely alone — after all, there is no Asian Jesse Jackson.

Now about Jeremy Lin. Reading the above linked ESPN article, I must make some off-the-bat observations:

• The writer is named Diamond Leung
• One streeter plays for an Asian-American basketball team called “The Dragons”
• Lin’s Harvard teammates say the crowd “looked like Hong Kong,” because it was so full of Lin fans
• Another source in the story is wearing a Bruce Lee tshirt
• 400 Asian basketball fans went to this game mainly because the tickets were offered at a huge discount
• Lin has fans just because he’s Asian

If you understand the nuanced line that make the above points more completely unsurprising than they are ironic, or even salient, more than likely, you are Chinese. Or at least, play a lot of basketball with Chinese people.

That piece is a great ESPN human interest story about basketball. It also however really captures a sub-cultural zeitgeist without even really attempting to do so.

Lin has been heckled mercilessly as he captains his upstart Harvard basketball team to its improbable success this season. People call him derogatory terms (rhymes with ink, starts with ch) and quote random Chinese food names at him, such as Wonton Soup or Sweet-and-Sour Pork. They make fun of his eyes, the colour of his skin, telling him to go back to China (a double whammy since he’s Taiwanese).

My question is: can you imagine what kind of media story Lin’s treatment would be if he was Black, or Latino, or Jewish, or Arab? If John Wall, for example, was heckled by shouts of the N-word from a crowd while people screamed “fried chicken and waffles!” at him? Sure, Asian’s are taught to be stoic but why is the media so casual about these incidents? Is racism a story only when it affects specific races?

Let’s be honest: Jeremy Lin is probably not going to make the NBA. He is however, the most successful Asian-American basketball player of this decade. Perhaps the last five decades, frankly. By far. I empathize with Lin’s reluctance to be a role model, being a 22-year old kid who has to juggle all this junk with an Ivy League workload and NCAA D1 athletic schedule.

But my advice to Lin is as follows: embrace the opportunity you have been placed in. Asian-American role models can be counted on one hand, especially if your interests don’t involve engineering or being a doctor. It’s easy to pretend race doesn’t matter, but sometimes it matters in a good way. And sometimes, although your entire community may say you should be demure, and stoic, and humble and post-racial — what they actually mean is that they are craving for someone like you to be proud of and bunk all those stupid Asian stereotypes. Asians are often passive aggressive like that, call me racist but I think it’s true. And by “Asians”, sometimes I mean me.

Also, shave your head. People always think you’re better at basketball if you have a shaved head.

Tags: Asian, Basketball, Deadspin, ESPN, Harvard, Jeremy Lin, John Wall, Minorities, NCAA