When Yao Ming Was the Center of the World And What He Meant for Asians and Asian-Americans

By Hua Hsu

In the late nineties, before low-grade video clips of obscure basketball leagues circulated the Internet with ease, I remember hearing about Yao Ming, a Chinese basketball prospect who was exceptionally tall, even by the standards of the National Basketball Association. His parents, people said, were giants as well, and the Chinese government had apparently marshalled their resources to insure his development as an agile, skillful, all-world center. For some reason, I was immediately overcome with a desire for Yao, whom I had never seen play or heard speak, to end up seeming like more than a novelty.

That strange feeling of sentimental entanglement came back to me earlier this week, when the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame announced that Yao was among its 2016 class of inductees. On-court achievements aside, it was a group of enormous cultural significance, from Shaquille O’Neal, a worldwide superstar and pioneer of celebrity self-branding, to Allen Iverson, who became iconic for bringing hip-hop swagger to the game. A bridge between America and the rest of the world, Yao Ming symbolized something, too—but what, exactly?

By the time Yao was drafted first over all by the Houston Rockets, in 2002, plenty of international superstars had made their way stateside. But Yao was a new kind of presence—in the parlance of racial stereotype, he was inscrutable. When the N.B.A. first began welcoming international stars, in the late nineteen-eighties and nineties, as the Cold War ended and borders loosened, the narrative of a global “American dream” was readymade. Yao represented a moment after all of this. It was inevitable that, one day, a star would arrive with ambitions unfamiliar to us, that our sense of who was chasing whom might be scrambled.

Ex-players and analysts wagered that Yao would never be able to score in the N.B.A. Smaller players thirsted at the prospect of being the first to dunk over him. Many wondered what he ate. It was the kind of casual disrespect that is the lingua franca of American sports, but it was strange to feel implicated by it, regardless of how foolish this feeling clearly was. For Asian immigrants, Yao was a bridge across the Pacific Ocean, to a world that most Asian-Americans understand only with a hazy longing. He seemed to represent the potential of Asia, something that one could feel a part of and claim, even if it was merely an imagined connection.

Within the vague hierarchies of American identity politics, a Chinese player was not the same as an Asian-American one—but, in the early two-thousands, “Linsanity” seemed as inconceivable as a black President. Yao would have to do. And, besides, it’s not as though the distinction between Asian and Asian-American mattered to most people, as far as I could tell.

Is there anything rational about the feelings of attachment that we develop to characters, seen at a distance, sprinting up and down one playing surface or another? Somehow, a style of play or a star’s temperament comes to stand in for how we would like to understand ourselves. Our beliefs are rewritten according to someone else’s hard-nosed upbringing or imperial persona. It’s all a game about a game, and we know it, but we contort our minds to believe that this is the realest, most honest thing that still exists. To fold the clumsy affiliations of identity into this equation places a different kind of stress on one’s sporting allegiances—and yet it only seems to literalize the twisted, imagined allegories of race or gender which get projected every day onto an athlete’s swagger or lingering glare.

In Yao’s first game as an N.B.A. player, on October 30, 2002, he posted zero points and picked up three fouls in eleven minutes. I remember feeling a mild worry, well into the game, that Yao had yet to score. The early weeks of the season were a search for equilibrium, both in Yao’s game and in our expectations for it. There were glimmers of skill, but he lacked the cunning and craft of players far less physically gifted than him.

Eventually, he started putting together better performances, and each time he arrived at a new N.B.A. city one could be assured that local Chinese student groups had bought a section of tickets. When he arrived in Miami in December of that year, the arena distributed complimentary fortune cookies. While many bemoaned this caricaturization of Asian culture, Yao was slightly baffled. Having never seen a fortune cookie while growing up in China, he figured, correctly, that this was an American invention. In moments like these, he disrupted the logic of our available identities. On the one hand, how could it possibly have seemed like a good idea to promote the arrival of a Chinese star this way? On the other, what was at the root of this offense? And was Yao obliged to inherit it?

In January, he faced Shaquille O’Neal for the first time. (Their teams had played once before, earlier in the season, but O’Neal was out with an injury.) “Tell Yao Ming, ‘Ching chong-yang-wah-ah-soh,’ ” the comfortable, gregarious O’Neal told a reporter in the days leading up to the game. Again, Yao found himself part of a controversy he wanted no part in. While O’Neal’s garbled, exaggerated approximations of Asian speech insulted Americans, Asian and otherwise, Yao pleaded ignorance to our standards of civility and decorum. Some might be offended, he said, and they were entitled to feel that way. But he knew that O’Neal was merely joking around.

I was in Boston then, and when the Rockets came to the city, in late February, I wanted to see the show up close. Not the game, which had sold out months in advance, but everything that surrounded it. I sent some e-mails inquiring about pre-game press conferences, and showed up one gray morning at a side door of the Fleet Center that was marked for media. A sentry waved me through, saving me the trouble of producing vague e-mails from a Boston Celtics media liaison and the book-reviews editor at the Village Voice.

A pool of reporters gathered on the edge of the court, before the team’s light afternoon workout; a door to one of the tunnels opened, and  players slowly sauntered toward us. We eventually managed to surround Yao, giving him just enough room not to suffocate. His head alone was enormous. He was stiffly polite and accommodating, but he had yet to learn how disarming a forced chuckle could be. There was a group of Chinese reporters who seemed to think that Yao would treat them like long-lost friends, and I remember trying to stand as far apart from them as possible. Everyone started asking questions, waiting patiently for his translator, Colin Pine, to select one and relay the message. We all laughed too heartily at Yao’s jokes, if they were even jokes. I posted up next to the veteran forward Glen Rice, whom nobody wanted to talk to, and folded my arms, just like him, trying to take in the scene from his vantage.

As for Yao, he looked burned out. I was a bit homesick, and I remember how sweet and comforting it was for me to hear him speaking in Mandarin. But every now and then he would furrow his brow, or cut off the translation at the wrong moment, as though he had actually apprehended the question the first time, when it was posed in English. His translator seemed to be more of a buffer than anything else—a ten-second delay, so that Yao could summon the most judicious response, or serve as a supposedly faulty instrument when Yao encountered a question that he did not want to answer.

There was a moment in the press scrum that I still think about. A reporter referred to a Visa commercial, in which Yao browses in a Manhattan souvenir shop, trying to pay for a Statue of Liberty replica by writing a check: “Can I write check?” he asks. A clerk offers him a skeptical “Yo…” and motions toward a sign that reads “Absolutely no checks.” Yao offers a cheerful correction: “Yao.” The exchange repeats a few times, and Yao eventually leaves without the souvenir. The reporter jokingly asked whether Yao ever got the trinket, and before Pine could translate Yao brusquely muttered something about returning to New York to buy the actual Statue of Liberty. There was the slightest collective gasp, a few nervous chuckles, and then questions returned to basketball.

In later years, when the Rockets traded for the affable Tracy McGrady and installed the sardonic Jeff Van Gundy as head coach, Yao loosened up more. But there was an aspect to Yao that resisted assimilation. He was humble and respectful toward his host, but he rarely seemed covetous. Maybe this only mattered because we had grown so accustomed to the idea of the immigrant who arrives and hopes to stay, and to stories of Chinese boys adopting American names cribbed from the N.B.A.: Bryant, Earvin, Michael. Yao wasn’t like this. In the decade of his N.B.A. career, he never came to seem more American.

Yao retired in 2011. He had been vexed by injuries during the latter half of his career, and the Rockets never surrounded him with a strong enough supporting cast to contend for a championship. He was a fixture on the All-Star team, largely because voting was open to anyone on the planet, and he had many fans back home. But by the mid-two-thousands Chinese basketball fans no longer felt the need to fix their fates to Yao. In China, Kobe Bryant’s replica jerseys far outsold his; by 2007, Yao was barely in the top ten. The year he retired, the former N.B.A. star Stephon Marbury was starring in—and helping to legitimize—the Chinese Basketball Association. Yao returned to a China with a thriving basketball culture of its own. (This summer, a seven-feet-two center named Zhou Qi is projected to be the first Chinese player in nine years to be selected in the first round of the N.B.A. draft.)

In the years since Yao’s retirement, many former and prospective N.B.A. players have gone to China to play professionally. Kobe Bryant started making nearly annual trips, touring various provinces, visiting factories, hosting exhibitions and clinics, launching children’s initiatives, and meeting dignitaries. He even starred in his own Chinese reality-television series. “In terms of opening up doors for Chinese basketball players to come to the N.B.A., or for the youth here in China to believe that it’s possible to achieve the dream of being an N.B.A. player, all that started from Yao,” Bryant told a Chinese reporter in 2011.

Depending on your expectations, you could argue that Yao both over and underachieved in the N.B.A. But the most enduring numbers associated with him will be counted in billions: the legions in China who carefully monitored his progress in the N.B.A., and, of course, their absurd sums of disposable income. These days, the undersized playmaker Stephen Curry offers a much more relatable hero. But Yao represented a new scale of possibilities for the league. Even if he had just been decent, he would have been a star, because there was an investment in promoting him as anything but a failure. In an odd way, this seemed to diminish him somewhat. He was outlandishly large, and yet he would never seem as big as he needed to be.

Source: When Yao Ming Was the Center of the World – The New Yorker