Each of my grandparents had passed by the time I was able to share their stories with my class. In an unselfishly selfish way I talked about them because I wanted my show-and-tell to be radically different from the rest of the class. I didn’t have a hamster or a goldfish. I didn’t want to share my favorite book or a favorite fictional superhero. I wanted to talk about the heroes of my life. I talked and talked, and probably took up more than my allotted time of five minutes, but no one could stop me. I had pride coursing through my veins. And I remember how I glowed with it when I sat down at my table, until my classmate said, “You’re too white.”
Now let me clarify—this classmate wasn’t being rude. Sure it was unfiltered, but she was merely stating a fact. I was fairer than most of my classmates, though all of us were of mixed descent. Let me also clarify that I am only able to say these thoughts as Seventeen-Year-Old Me. But Sixth-Grade Me turned to this chick. Paused. And said: “What?”
My mind connecting my heart’s emotion to this week’s vocabulary word: confused. “You’re too white to be Mexican,” she continued. As if my ethnicity was just beyond my understanding.
“I’m not Mexican,” I started. “I’m Puerto—”
“Yeah that,” she interrupted. “You’re definitely not that.”
I paused again. “Okay . . .” I smiled tightly, trying to laugh it off.
“I’m just saying,” she continued. “If you’re going to say you’re Port-o-Whatever you should at least look it.”
She proceeded to barrel into a more in-depth explanation before I rushed to explain “I’m Puerto Rican, Portuguese, Hawaiian, Chinese, and Irish.” And suddenly her eyes lit up. Finally, I thought, she gets it.
“Oh! Well, then you just look, like, ‘super Irish.’ ” Shrugging her shoulders, with her two fingers dancing into an air quote. Yet another awkward pause.
“What the heck does ‘super Irish’ look like?” I asked, my eyes narrowed into slits as I aggressively quoted her and her air quotes.
“Well . . . Um. You. I guess.” She had finally stopped herself, looking around, realizing the surrounding tables were now her audience. When my stare was her only response, she made her final remark. “You just . . . don’t look like anything you said you are.”
I didn’t say anything after that. I turned away from the tables of searching eyes and hid my flaming cheeks with my hair, my lips pressed tightly together to keep my eyes from revealing my hurt. My mind spinning a hundred miles an hour trying to think up a retort, something, anything, that would make her eat her words. Something about how I grew up in a Puerto Rican–Portuguese-Hawaiian household, and that I knew how to say “you’re stupid” in all three languages (I didn’t really). How I could stick it to her by knowing dozens of stories of Puerto Rico and that I could eat a whole bowl of poi if it was left in front of me (Well . . . not the whole bowl). And if she wanted to keep arguing with me, I would argue that she was mixed too! She was Hawaiian like me, Portuguese like me, simply darker-skinned in all her glory. But if all she saw was my “whiteness”? If all else failed? We could take it out at recess! And then she’d really see my Latin temper!! (Now that I could do.)
Instead, I stayed silent. My pride ripped from me. Wishing my culture would show itself. Wishing my mama and papa looked a little more like me. Or me a little more like them. My easily tanned skin, not quite as light as my mama’s, but too light when compared to my Hawaiian mother’s side of the family. Soft curly hair that matched my papa’s, but with baby hairs that refuse to grow, so unlike the long flowing locks of my Hawaiian cousins. It took a long time of defending myself to realize I didn’t have to. Not to anybody. I am who I am. I am what I am. I grew up as a loving Hawaiian Portuguese, running around barefoot and climbing trees, eating fried plantains until I fell asleep still chewing. I grew up in the land of my Pacific ancestors and could recite their folklore before I could even think of writing it down. I celebrate Chinese New Year eating noodles for a long life, and Saint Patrick’s Day cooking corned beef and cabbage, leaving our household smelling it for days. I’m mixed. And you can bet damn well I’m proud of it.
And if I could go back (because you know I would if I could) . . . If I could sit where I sat, argue the entire sixth-grade conversation again, I would finally have the perfect retort that would make my family proud, and Me-of-All-Ages proud too. She’d say, “You just . . . don’t look like anything you said you are.” I’d notice she was as embarrassed as I was. I’d take in her own mixed features, so different from mine, and everyone else’s. I’d take a breath, look her right in the eye, smile, and say, “Well, then, I guess I just look like me.” And I’d sit again in pride.
A Palo Alto native, Jeremy Lin is a guard for the Brooklyn Nets and is the NBA’s first American-born player of Chinese or Taiwanese descent. He became an overnight sensation in 2012 for his performance with the Knicks, commonly known as “Linsanity.” Lin has played with the Warriors, Knicks, Rockets, Lakers, and Hornets, and most recently signed with the Nets as a free agent in 2016.
Jeremy Lin
WHERE I GREW UP, in the main part of Palo Alto, California, the population was predominantly white. So before Steven showed up, our basketball team had been a bunch of white kids and me. Thanks to Steven, I was no longer alone.
East Palo Alto didn’t have a YMCA, so Steven always came to our Y to play basketball. When he walked into the gym on that first day, I was in awe of his height. I was nowhere near as tall as he was—and still am not to this day. I spent my entire childhood trying to get taller. I was a little intimidated by Steven, but together, we killed it on that court. It was unfair to all the other third graders in the Palo Alto Y rec league that Steven and I were on the same team. We destroyed everyone else.
Steven was the first black kid I ever played basketball with, which was weird to me since I saw so few white NBA players on TV. In my house, we only paid for cable TV during the few weeks of the NBA playoffs to watch Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. My parents are immigrants from Taiwan. Both of them worked as engineers to make a comfortable life for me and my two brothers, but we didn’t have a lot of extra money for cable after they paid for our basketball gear, all the food I ate trying to get taller, and piano lessons (yeah, you read that right).
Even though my parents made me do things like practice piano and put school before athletics, they always supported my passion for basketball. Not every Asian parent will do this. My mom had high standards for us, but she always encouraged us to do what we loved. She would even sometimes watch NBA games with all her boys. I used to turn on the TV in my living room and watch the games through the window outside while trying to copy Jordan’s moves.
Before I met Steven, most of my friends were white or Asian. Steven and I weren’t exactly friends at first. We were solid teammates for sure, but we went to different schools and lived on different sides of town. Yet the more we played ball together, the tighter we became. And by high school, when we finally attended the same school, we were bros and took our team all the way to the state championship. We became the only two players from our team to go on to play in college.
It took me a long time to get there. I had a chip on my shoulder from day one. And day one was when I was six years old, frozen in the middle of the court during games, standing still and sucking my thumb. I was terrified. Every night before games, I tried to will myself to do better. I would wake my mom up and tell her I was really going to play the next day. Then, come game time, little man froze up again. You can see why my mom thought piano might be my calling.
When I finally did come out of my shell and played ball, I was in it for life. But when people look at an Asian kid, they don’t see “basketball player.” At public pickup games, I always struggled to gain respect from other players, or even get a spot on the floor to play. Coaches assumed I would be a second-string benchwarmer. I would watch guys on opposing teams argue over who got to guard me, because they thought I’d be the easy one.
Th
is killed my game for the longest time. I would get hung up on proving myself. It’s not exactly good for your game to be stuck in your head.
A few years in, as coaches started to see that I could play, they pushed me to build my confidence. By fifth and sixth grade, I was going all out, playing on multiple teams, trying to get as much time on the court as I could. I had gotten pretty comfortable playing on my Palo Alto teams. I was still the only Asian kid, and sometimes Steven was on the team too, but all my friends and coaches saw what I brought and let me do my thing. I worried less about what everyone thought and really started to have fun. It’s amazing how much better you play when you’re not thinking about everyone else.
In sixth grade, I was on two teams in the Amateur Athletic Union, or AAU, the nation’s best youth basketball league. The two teams were different, but they had one thing in common: they both had just one Asian kid. Metro Mirage was mostly white kids and me. Bomb Squad was all black kids and me.
Something amazing happened when I played for both of these teams at the same time. I saw how expectations influence my success. With Metro Mirage, I walked in just knowing I was the guy. I grew up playing with all these kids, so I didn’t question myself. I was relaxed and confident—and became the best player on the team. But on Bomb Squad, I was so nervous all the time. No one on this team knew me, and everyone else on that team seemed to fit the mold of looking like all the good basketball players I looked up to on TV. I put a lot of pressure on myself and started thinking that I would never be as good as the Bomb Squad guys. I was convinced I couldn’t hang with them, and they were probably just laughing at this small Asian guy.
Of course, I was wrong. They were great players and great kids who never made me feel like I didn’t belong on the team. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was the way I sabotaged myself. I convinced myself I didn’t fit in, and it showed.
One weekend, there was a tournament where Metro Mirage and Bomb Squad had games that just so happened to be back-to-back in the same gym. The first game was with Metro Mirage where I played starting shooting guard. I had an amazing game where I ended with twenty points and sunk a buzzer-beater to win the game. I was amped and running around celebrating, feeling great. Meanwhile Bomb Squad was all there watching on the sidelines, warming up for the next game. They had never seen me look so happy—much less play so well. When I changed jerseys and headed over to join them for our next game, they were yelling at me, “Man, why can’t you play like that when you’re with us?!”
It was a good question, and it planted the seed for me. I had to change my way of thinking. I couldn’t let perceptions hold me back anymore.
As high school approached, I got a lot of digs from other teams. People still saw this short Asian kid and expected I wouldn’t give them any competition. I got yelled at by people in the crowd or other kids on the sidelines who would tell me I was an import from China. Even though I had only ever known a life in the United States, these comments reemphasized to me that I was different from everyone else and made me feel like I didn’t belong. It wasn’t until much later in college with the wise advice of my assistant coach Kenny Blakeney that I finally found a way to tune out the racism. I’m not going to lie, it still makes me mad when people make fun of my ethnicity. But I decided I wasn’t going to let it drag down my game. And I wasn’t going to accept the underdog status anymore. I got better and better at tuning out their perceptions and negativity, and just focused on my own goals to shut out the haters.
Just before high school I started focusing on my other major objective. Get taller. I made this a goal—as if it were actually within my control. I knew the odds were stacked against me, but I was determined. I had to play high school ball, and it wasn’t going to happen if I remained this short. So I prayed, and I ate, and then I ate some more. I used to drink more milk than you want to know about, because I thought it would make me taller. I already ate more than anyone else in my family. My mom says when I was really young and we used to eat lunch at church, I would finish eating my food first and then stare at other people’s plates until they felt bad and offered me more. Luckily people were nice to me, but my mom was mortified.
I would always complain to my parents, “Why couldn’t you be taller?” In reality, they are both five foot six, which isn’t short for the average Asian person. You could even say my mom is pretty tall compared to other Asian women. But I was still way shorter than my parents, and I knew I would have to surpass them by several inches. I did all kinds of crazy stuff to achieve this impossible dream. I would hang off the monkey bars at school and stretch my body over the side of the bed to try to lengthen it. Every morning I would wake up and measure myself to see if I’d grown while I was sleeping. I was obsessed. I just had to make it to six feet. Freshman year, I was the smallest guy on the team at five foot three. But somehow, my efforts paid off. By junior year I was six feet tall. By the end of my senior year, I was six foot two. I guess sometimes you really can exceed your highest expectations. But I still don’t recommend anyone drink that much milk.
As I grew both physically and mentally, I started setting my sights on college basketball. At the time I was in high school, only one out of every two hundred Division I college basketball players came from Asian-American households. And no American player of Chinese or Taiwanese descent had ever made it to the NBA. There were only a few Asians to play in the entire history of the league.
No one expected me to get very far, but my parents got behind me because they saw how passionate I was. My dad would get me and my brothers nosebleed seats when the Houston Rockets were in town to play the Golden State Warriors so we could see Yao Ming play in person. Our seats cost, like, $10 and we could barely see the court, but I had to be there to see him in person. Seeing a Chinese athlete play so dominantly in the NBA meant so much to me.
By this time I was doing whatever it took to show my parents I was serious. I kept my grades up and my mom, Shirley, became one of the most involved basketball parents anyone had ever seen. She traveled with my team to all our tournaments and kept an eye on all my teammates. All the guys on my team shared the kind of bond that you share with teammates, but our lives off the court were very different. The white kids mostly lived in insanely huge houses. Meanwhile, most of my black teammates lived in East Palo Alto, which at the time had the highest crime rate per capita in the entire country. When the team was together, we were all pretty tight. But when we weren’t hanging out before or after games and practices, all the white guys hung out with their white friends. All the black guys hung out with their black friends. And I hung out with my Asian friends.
It made for some interesting road trips when we had out-of-town tournaments. Traveling together allowed us to spend a lot of time with each other’s families, chill together, and break bread together. A few of them were so wealthy that they would pay for private jets to fly our team to out-of-state games. One of the dads who paid for the team to take a jet would sometimes take us all out to eat at big restaurants. This was always my favorite because it meant I could order a drink. My parents would never pay for a beverage in a restaurant. I was only allowed to order water. So getting a soda with my meal was a real luxury for me. One time, this dad told us he was taking us to the Old Spaghetti Factory. I was bummed because I don’t really like spaghetti. My teammates teased me: “No, stupid, they have other things on the menu!” But I don’t even remember what I ended up ordering for my entrée because I was so excited to get a strawberry lemonade. I spotted in the fine print that refills were free and drank two glasses before the waitress had even gotten our food orders. She brought me three or four more, and my teammates started to laugh at me. I didn’t care. It seemed too good to be true. I ended up finishing eight glasses.
My mom wasn’t impressed, but I was still glad she got to witness her son enjoying a nonwater beverage at a restaurant. It meant the world to me that she was always there. She was there when I had a great game, and there when I got called names o
n the court for being Asian. She was there when I acted stupid or lost my temper on the court. And she always believed in me. I know a mother’s confidence in you is not the same as a coach’s confidence, especially when you are a teenage boy. Back then, I probably discounted how much it meant to me. Mom, it doesn’t matter that you think I’m great. You have to say that. But looking back, I really appreciate how present she was. My dad was too. They were always right there believing in me. Not every kid is so lucky.
And when you’re young, you believe what people tell you about yourself. Everyone’s expectations become your reality. When people didn’t expect me to be a good player, I froze up on the court. But when people like my parents expected such great things of me, I gained the self-confidence I needed to be strong. When people bless you with high expectations, you rise up to meet them. There’s something pretty powerful about just being told you’re good enough and you belong.
Now, so many years later, I still think about expectations a lot. Even through my college basketball career, no one expected me to become the NBA player that I am. The first time I got to play in Madison Square Garden with the Knicks, the security guards asked me for ID—they thought I was one of the trainers. Now I just laugh it off because I know who I am. Sometimes when I go talk with kids at basketball camps, I tell them what I learned growing up and spending so much time being one of the only Asian kids on the court: It doesn’t matter if no one else looks like you. You still belong as long as you believe you do. You can’t let anyone else’s expectations hold you back. When I first showed up to play with the Golden State Warriors, I rolled up in my old Toyota Camry and parked it next to all the other players’ Mercedes and Porsches. My ride really surprised everyone that day. It’s not the only thing about me that has defied expectations, and I’m pretty cool with that.
American Like Me Page 14