A 'Linstant' Star In China
The clearest sign that Jeremy Lin’s appeal has spanned the Pacific to mainland China may lie not in the 1.4 million Chinese microblog messages mentioning him in recent days, but in a rare failure to meet demand here in the heart of one of the world’s largest centers of pirated garment manufacturing.
“His jerseys have sold out, even including the counterfeit ones,” said Zheng Xiaojun, a 24-year-old clerk 2012here in the capital of Zhejiang province, near Shanghai.
Lin’s stunning success with the Knicks over the last week and a half has captured the imagination of the Chinese, from Communist Party bosses to the often-persecuted Christian minority. He has been particularly popular here in northern Zhejiang province, from which his maternal grandmother fled to Taiwan in the last days of China’s civil war in the late 1940s.
Lin is commonly described in the United States as Taiwanese-American because his parents grew up in Taiwan before moving to the United States, where Lin was born. But mainland China is already starting to claim him as its own, part of an incessant rivalry across the Taiwan Strait.
Cai Qi, the organization chief for the Communist Party in Zhejiang, posted a message on his Twitter-like microblog over the weekend claiming that Lin’s ancestral home is Jiaxing, a city on the northeastern outskirts of Hangzhou where Lin’s maternal grandmother grew up.
Since 1991, she and other family members have been giving several thousand dollars a year to Jiaxing High School, according to the school’s Web site. Her nephew Yu Guohua is Lin’s closest relative still living in northern Zhejiang.
Yu, a 56-year-old former plastics factory worker who retired early on disability after sustaining injuries in a car crash, said in a telephone interview Tuesday night that Lin had come to play basketball with the Jiaxing High School team last May and been mobbed by admirers.
Yu said he did not have a chance to meet Lin in the throng, but spoke with his family. “His father was very supportive of Lin’s playing basketball, but his grandmother was not, for fear he would be injured,” Yu said.
Lin may owe his height, 6 feet 3 inches, to his maternal grandmother’s family, Yu said. Chen Weiji, the father of Lin’s grandmother, was well over 6 feet and all of Chen’s children were tall as well, he said.
Chen was a senior municipal civil servant in Jiaxing in the early 1900s. American Protestant missionaries converted him to Christianity, and he imparted his strong spiritual interests to his children, who liked to discuss religious subjects in depth and read books on religion, Yu said.
Lin’s combination of success in the NBA and strong Christian faith — he has spoken in the past of becoming a pastor someday — has fired the imagination of many Asian-American Christians. There are some early signs that he may also be catching the attention of Christians in China, who continue to face varying levels of persecution.
Only 1,500 of the initial 1.4 million microblogging messages on mainland Chinese Web sites that mentioned Lin also mentioned Christianity.
But those messages tended to be fervently enthusiastic.
“Your physical agility has shown me the glory and omnipotence of God,” one Internet user wrote.
“How should young Christians live the life of the Lord?” another blogger wrote. “We have a good example in Lin Shuhao’s miraculous performance and we should cheer him on.”
The NBA has estimated that 300 million people in China play basketball. The retirement last year of Yao Ming, a basketball star from mainland China, deprived the NBA of its main Asian draw. But Lin’s emergence has at least temporarily strengthened the league as a centerpiece of Chinese online chatter.
The highest-level fan may be Vice President Xi Jinping, the heir apparent to become China’s top leader for the next decade. He flew to Washington on Monday to meet President Obama on Tuesday, and told The Washington Post in a written response to questions, “I do watch NBA games on television when I have time.”
mb.com.ph
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