‘Chink In The Stands’: An Asian American Fan’s Notes

But then Joe Montana did his thing. He found his receiver at the back of the end zone, and over the head of one of my favorite players, connected with Dwight Clark’s impossibly long, outstretched fingers. I collapsed after that on the grimy carpet of the home that didn’t belong to us, next to my brother, both of us immobilized with grief, completely unable to comfort one another. We just sat there. In silence. Crying. Silently crying.

You know who else saw The Catch that day? Tom Brady. Only he actually attended the game at Candlestick. And his team won. Which maybe explains why Tom Brady is Tom Brady and often compared to Montana, and I’m here eating a sandwich at my desk, writing about one of the saddest days I’ve ever had as a fan.

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We moved from College Station to a town outside of Houston the summer before 6th grade. I remember the first high school football game I went to that fall. I was 10 going on 11, one of the youngest in my class, one of the smallest in my class, a bag of bones with buckteeth. The football stadium was a huge concrete behemoth, astro-turfed, professionally lit. Even though I’d moved from College Station, home to a Division I college football team, and I’d gone to Aggie games, already committed the story of the 12th man to memory, sat on my dad’s shoulders during The Aggie Bonfire–a world record-worthy totem to A&M’s rivalry with UT–and even struck up a correspondence with then-Aggie Coach Jackie Sherrill, I was dazzled. Texas 5-A football is its own mythical beast. I remember as I walked down the concrete steps of that stadium with my new friends, I understood I was in a hallowed place.

And that’s when I heard someone from the stands, on our side, yell “CHING CHONG CHING CHONG CHING CHONG CHING CHONG.”

I kept walking like it never happened. More than feeling wounded over what I’d heard, I felt mortified that my friends might have heard what I’d heard. If they did, if they’d heard the worst that could be said about me, they’d think of me differently. How could they not? Naturally, I remember nothing else about that game. Who I was with, whose parents drove me home, who won or lost. None of it.

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Jesus and Basketball. I came to both at the same time. The summer after eighth grade, my best friend dragged me to church camp. It would be my first church camp of five. This particular church camp was marked by a careening out-of-control boy-craziness. We made lists in our heads of our crushes, of who suddenly seemed so much cuter out there in the piney woods than they did at school, of who we wanted to make out with in the Prayer Garden (no one, in the end, was able to capitalize). We’d walk extra distances to “happen by the pool” just to see the Baptist boys glistening wet with their shirts off. We did our hair, which kept falling in the humidity, about five times a day. Then at night, after evening service, we’d huddle up around the large TV that was rolled out so we could watch the NBA Finals. We were all usually buzzed by then because evening service was when everyone got saved. So we watched basketball in salvation’s afterglow. The Houston Rockets were playing the Boston Celtics that year. That didn’t mean very much to me then; I just wanted to be where the boys were.

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People always assume that because I love sports I must be athletic. I am not. It wasn’t for lack of trying, especially on my dad’s part, who was always figuring out ways for me to become more “coordinated.” I played softball, rode horses, and did gymnastics, but the biggest trophy I ever received as a kid was for typing 75 words per minute.

Sometimes people assume that because I love sports, I must have been a cheerleader. I was not. It wasn’t for lack of wanting. At the end of eighth grade, I wrote a letter to myself about my goals for high school. One of these goals was to become a cheerleader. (I think one of my other goals was to become “popular.”) I then folded the note up and hid it away inside my microscope case, where I was sure no one would find it. My mom was a snooper who read my diary. My dad had already told me that if I ever became a cheerleader, he would disown me. I hid it away not so much from them though but from myself, from my own shame over wanting something that was so utterly out of my reach. I was practically invisible at school except when I wasn’t, when someone was picking on me and calling me names. I wasn’t “popular” and never would be, no matter how hard I wished on it.

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