Jeremy Mother Fuckin' Lin →
“I defended China because no one at the basketball court ever called me “Taiwanese”, they called me a “chink”. I was Chinese whether I liked it or not. In America, it really doesn’t matter if you think you’re Taiwanese, Colombian, Peruvian, Dominican, Vietnamese, Korean, or Japanese: we’re all chinks and Mexicans to the untrained eye. I had no choice or way to reason because there were no examples outside Bruce, Yao, Long Duck Dong, and William Hung. Chun-Li and Raiden were dope, but they existed only in 64-bit fantasy worlds where we can take down giant Russians like Zangieff with blue fireballs. This is the Chinese American landscape because they are the only archetypes America has seen.
Then this came along: Jeremy mother fuckin’ Lin. For 29 years, I’ve been waiting to see a Chinaman on television that speaks English with some cot damn bass. He’s not some uncoordinated, slow footed, giant in the style of Yao, Wang, or Mengke Bateer, who I swear must be Mongolian. Watching him drop 28 and 8, you can’t believe it’s happening. His teammates are stuck between cheering and laughing. He’s not leaping over cars like Blake Griffin or wetting people from the volleyball line like Ray Allen, he’s playing under the rim, 18 ft and in, just like every one else at the YMCA. Lin plays like a slower, shorter, Manu Ginobili splitting double-teams like a yard sale flailing arms and legs to get the And-1 calls. He celebrates, he drinks gatorade, and he crashes on his friend, Landry Fields’, couch. Shit, he might have even gone to Prom! Jeremy Lin is for all intensive purposes: normal… ”
