‘Chink In The Stands’: An Asian American Fan’s Notes
By Guest Contributor Jen Wang, cross-posted from Disgrasian
I sat down to write about the fallout that’s ensued since ESPN editor Anthony Federico wrote that “Chink In The Armor” headline a little over a week ago, and I ended up with a bunch of stories about myself. In some ways though, I think these notes better articulate my frustration and anger over many of the conversations that have taken place about Jeremy Lin with regard to race than explicit words to that effect would have. Or maybe I just really like talking about myself.
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For most of my life, I’ve been a sports fan. I was born and raised in Texas, so it was mandatory. More to the point, I was born and raised Chinese American in Texas. I couldn’t look like my peers, I couldn’t be accepted as an equal by many of my peers, but I could root for the same teams as my peers. And somewhere deep down, I probably figured that if I could demonstrate the same devotion to the idols of my peers, they would eventually come around to the idea that I wasn’t all that different from them, and perhaps even accept me as one of their own.
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My father arrived in College Station, Texas from Taiwan in 1965 on a student visa. He was one of several students from Taiwan who went to Texas A&M to pursue graduate degrees in the sciences that year. They all lived together. They all had nothing. Only two years before my dad began his studies at A&M, the school admitted its first African American students. My dad recalls that was right around the time the school shut down its campus chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. He and my mom met a few years later when she came over from Taiwan to attend a nearby women’s college. I have to think the cultural climate of small-town Texas was what put their relationship in fast-forward. They met one Thanksgiving when all of the American students from their schools were home with their families, married a year later, had my brother less than a year after that. My mother has stories from that time of being told to sit at the back of the bus; my father, who only had a bike in those first few years, used to get run off the road by other students in cars who thought it was funny to see a Chinaman in a ditch.
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Me and my brother wearing our Dallas Cowboys jackets during a freak snow in College Station. Yes, it appears he is trying to kill me with that huge block of ice.
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I only started watching sports when I was 8 because I had an older brother I was dying to impress. He decided one day that he liked the Dallas Cowboys. So I decided the next day that I liked the Dallas Cowboys. He started reading the sports pages instead of the funnies and cramming his brain with stats, so I did the same. It bugged him, how I copied his every move when it came to fandom, and it failed to bring us closer. We would watch games together, but it was almost like we were in separate orbits. He liked offensive players like Tony Dorsett and Drew Pearson, I liked defensive players like Ed “Too Tall” Jones and Everson Walls. I remember the year we thought we were going to the Super Bowl. (By “we,” I mean our team. We never had enough money to see a live game.) It was January 1982. We were up 6 points over the 49ers in the NFC championship game with under a minute to play. My brother and I could taste it: what it was like to be a winner.
We lived in a shitty duplex rental on the wrong side of town. All of our furniture was donated by friends or from the Salvation Army. Neither of my parents had their green cards. My dad was just getting around to his postdoc work because of their green card problems, after years of selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door and life insurance. My mom was working a shit job even though she wasn’t supposed to, and getting paid under the table. They had had a lot of doors slammed in their faces–literally and figuratively–often simply for being Asian. They fought a lot about money. There was a lot of talk about “the poor house.”
We needed this win. Just one time.
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