Asian-American male writers talk about how they do and do not see themselves in Jeremy Lin
Lin’s Appeal: Faith, Pride Points - Michael Luo, The New York Times
Lin-Glorious Bastard - Chuck Leung, Slate
Jeremy Lin and the limits of the ‘hardworking Asian American’ narrative - Edmund Lee, Capital New York
Person of Interest: Jeremy Lin - Jay Caspian Kang, Grantland
Actually, the best thing I’ve read on Jeremy Lin I actually read a year ago on what I think was FreeDarko. By “best thing” I really mean the thing I liked the most, so it’s not really about basketball but about being Asian American.
Jeremy and Jin - Jay Caspian Kang (yes again and this essay is better)
If we, indeed, tell ourselves stories to live, the children of immigrants find themselves with the odd task of having to make one up as they go along. The stories projected upon me by my parents were episodic and told in a language of destinations. On the first page, my sister and I sit with the other pilgrims at the tabard. On the next page, we arrive at the Archbishop of Harvard’s door. What happens between those two markers is what a friend of mine once referred to as, “our leg in the blind sprint towards whiteness.” For him and me and the Asian-American kids I grew up with, the verbs and the adjectives in our narratives are disposable, circumstantial. What matters is the tyranny of nouns. If we see another Asian kid in the classroom or in the workplace, we simply assume that they got there the same way we did. Why bother asking? We are the Son-at-Harvard or Nephew-at-Columbia or the Son-who-works-at-Goldman or the Daughter-who-just-got-into-Stanford Medical School. When the weight of our common hyphens forces us into naming some other connection, we summon the only metanarrative we know, collected from our own memories and the commonalities we assume—fathers who are computer programmers or dry cleaners, insane mothers who only shop at Costco, piano lessons, Asian Church, pickled immigrant foods and 1500s on the SATs. For the most part, the metanarrative is enough.
The only stories that might make us pause and reconsider the paradigm of endings are the ones that provide us with an alien set of destinations—the stand-up comedian, the police chief, the mass murderer, the potential first round pick in the NBA Draft. In other words, those stories that belong to other races.
