Everything about Jeremy Lin’s basketball career still seems impossible. Ten years ago, no one could have guessed that a second-generation Taiwanese American kid from Palo Alto would make it to the NBA and captivate the country, especially other Asian Americans.
Lin’s parents never even considered a career in basketball. They named him Lin Shu-How or — more accurately — 林書豪. The second character, 書 or Shu, literally translates to book. A clear indication of the hopes they had for their second son in academics.
Even Lin could not imagine such a career for himself: not when he won a CIF Division II state title with Palo Alto High School, not when he successfully walked onto Harvard’s team and not when he earned a unanimous First Team All-Ivy League selection in his senior year.
“It was always this foregone conclusion that basketball was going to end soon for me,” Lin said in a recent interview with The Chronicle.
But it didn’t end. Lin went on to become the first American of Taiwanese descent to play in the NBA and rose from obscurity in February 2012 to fuel a seven-game winning streak for the Knicks in what became known as “Linsanity,” highlighted by 38 points against Kobe Bryant’s Lakers and a game-winning 3-pointer against Toronto.
Not only did he inspire the country, Lin galvanized the Asian American community — fundamentally changing the way they viewed basketball and themselves. He gave Asian American kids someone they could identify with in the NBA. During Linsanity, he could only glimpse his impact.
“I heard from certain people and heard certain comments like, ‘I think this will inspire the next generation to play basketball or, especially among immigrants and immigrant groups, widen the potential avenues for someone’s career,’” Lin said.
Since then, his career in the NBA has slowed to a halt. After winning a championship with the Raptors in 2019, Lin played for the Beijing Ducks of the CBA. A strong showing in China led to a G League deal with the Santa Cruz Warriors during the 2020-21 season. When Lin didn’t receive a call-up, he penned his final goodbye to the NBA and returned to the Ducks.
But Lin is still an icon for Asian Americans of all ages, not only for his longevity in the league but for his activism. His goal is to “create a better world, a more fair world” for the next generation. On Tuesday, HBO will release the latest product of Lin’s activism: a documentary celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Linsanity, “38 at the Garden.”
In October, HBO will release the latest product of Jeremy Lin’s activism for the Asian American community: a documentary celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Linsanity, “38 at the Garden.”
Provided by HBONow, 10 years later, Lin’s legacy is clear to young Asian Americans like Pranav Iyer, who grew up in Cupertino.
He had just started eighth grade when Linsanity took flight. The whole school — not just Taiwanese and Chinese kids but other East Asians, South Asians and Southeast Asians — couldn’t stop talking about Lin. Most of his classmates were children of immigrant parents and they finally saw someone in the NBA they recognized.
“When he spoke about his journey, when he spoke about his upbringing, I was like, ‘Wow, this is literally me,’” Iyer said. “This is like exactly what I had to go through. This is exactly like what my experience was like.”
Yes, there had been Asian basketball players in the NBA. Yes, there was Yao Ming. But Lin was the first American of Taiwanese descent to play in the NBA. Lin was the first player that Asian Americans could relate to.
“That is the biggest impact that could be had is that you can see yourself in these people,” Iyer said. “I think everyone was able to find that inspiration and was able to say, ‘Maybe I should push myself harder. I think I can do these things that I was forever told wasn’t possible.’”
Iyer, partly inspired by Lin, founded his own media company in 2019: AMAZN (short for amazingly Asian) HQ. The site features uplifting stories of Asian American athletes across the country..
Lin now understands his past impact and his potential to influence Asian American youth, whether through his foundation or inviting them to work out when he’s at home in Palo Alto.
Alan Ho, a Bay Area resident, worked out with Lin in high school and played against Lin in exhibition games while he was at MIT. Now he takes his sons, 11-year-old Brandon, 10-year-old Matthew and 7-year-old Nathan, to Lin’s workouts.
“For them, it’s like legend status,” Ho said. “It’s like seeing Michael Jordan for me when I was a kid.”
Ho said Lin is a great mentor to his children. After every work out he talks to Matthew and Nathan, who play on local AAU teams, asking them how their seasons are going and offering to take a look at their shots. Sometimes he’ll drop life lessons, like how to play with purpose and to find a deeper meaning on the court.
“I always try to keep in touch or inspire or just be there for younger players because I felt like growing up — really my whole life — I never really had somebody, an Asian American who’s like remotely understood my experience that could help me through it,” Lin said.
According to TIDES’ 2021 racial and gender report card, when Lin joined the league in 2010, 0.7% of NBA players were ethnically Asian — not including players of mixed descent. From the 2011-12 season to the 2016-17 season Lin was the only ethnically Asian player in the league.
Being the only Asian American on the court was hard, especially when the opposing team called him racial slurs. Finding support on the bench and in the locker room was even harder, where cultural divides separated him from his teammates and coaches.
“Basically, anybody giving me basketball advice cannot understand my upbringing or my culture,” Lin explained. “It would have been helpful primarily around the mindset piece of things. That is where I had to learn by going through a ton of mistakes. I wish I had at least one person who really understood my cultural upbringing that could help me more with that.”
Iyer believes Lin’s continued leadership is crucial for up-and-coming Asian American athletes. In May, AMAZN HQ hosted an All-Star weekend for Asian American high school prospects from California. At the event, the athletes were given a chance to speak openly about the many obstacles they face being Asian American in basketball. Iyer saw that cultural divides and racism were still problems.
Anthony Yu, a Foster City native, agrees there is still a long way to go. Lin rose to the height of his career while Yu was in elementary school and inspired him to play in college. Yu walked on to Loyola Marymount University’s team and spent two years on the roster. Although Yu played a generation later, he faced a lot of the same issues Lin did.
“Say I had a misread or didn’t see something on the court, they’d be like ‘Damn bro, open your eyes,’” Yu said of his high school playing days. “You can tell, they way they said it, they meant it to be toward Asians. If someone else did it they wouldn’t be saying that.”
Anthony Yu is among the generation of Asian American athletes inspired by Jeremy Lin to take up basketball. Yu walked on to Loyola Marymount University's team and spent two seasons on the roster.
Provided by Loyola Marymount University AthleticsYu was also likened to Lin often. Not because he’s a point guard with a high IQ and similar style, simply because they’re both Asian and they both play basketball.
“I think when I was a kid, it probably felt better (to be called Jeremy Lin),” Yu said. “It felt cool because that’s probably genuine. But toward high school, middle school, they’re just saying that because you’re Asian, you look alike.”
Iyer said Asian American discrimination is normalized in basketball because no one talks about it. He thinks if Lin and others like him simply speak on their experiences as Asian American athletes, they can spark change.
“Then we can get to the point where, hopefully, you don’t have to be seen as an Asian American athlete or discriminated against for being an Asian American athlete, you can just be seen as a really good basketball player,” Iyer said. “I know that’s what Jeremy wanted his entire career but, obviously, it wasn’t a reality that he could have had.”
Last year, after the Atlanta spa shootings that left six Asian women dead, Lin wrote an op-ed in Time Magazine where he said his biggest regret was not doing more for his community during Linsanity.
“I think at that time everyone wanted to talk about me being Asian and I didn’t want to talk about it,” Lin said. “I think if I could go back, I would talk a lot about me being Asian, but I would shape the narrative the way that I wanted it to be versus the narrative that everybody else wanted it to be.”
But Lin was just 23 at the time and he still had a lot to learn. Back then, he didn’t know racism could be quiet or systemic. To him racism was loud and singular, like when people called him slurs on the court.
Lin focused on learning more about Asian American history, reading many books — Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” for example — and has formed a better understanding of how to use his voice and his platform to help those like him.
This put him in position to act when, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the racial abuse he had suffered became ubiquitous as President Trump coined slogans like “kung flu” and “china virus”. From March 2020 to December 2021, Stop AAPI Hate collected 10,905 reports of violence and verbal abuse. California led the nation by far with a whopping 38.1% of incidents occurring in the state. New York followed with 15.7% of reports, less than half of California’s share. In San Francisco alone, anti-Asian hate crimes increased 567% from 2020 to 2021.
During the pandemic, Ho took his sons outside to shoot around on a local court. They didn’t have masks on, but they were alone on the court within their family bubble. A woman came up to them, began recording them and said, “This is why we have COVID, because we have these Asians not wearing masks.” Ho took his children and left the court.
During the pandemic, Lin spoke publicly about his experiences with racism and used his social media presence to promote Asian American advocacy groups like Stop AAPI Hate.
“The fact that Jeremy is out there letting people know that he wants to use his platform to speak out against (anti-Asian hate) and to shine a light on it helps the situation and it means a lot,” Ho said. “It just starts the dialog with a lot of people because of who he is. He’s not at the height of his basketball career, but I think he’s still an international icon as far as his status so it still means a lot.”
The next step in Lin’s activism is HBO’s new documentary “38 at the Garden” which focuses how Lin and Linsanity affected the Asian American community. Through interviews with Asian American comedians and journalists like Hasan Minhaj and Pablo Torre, Lin’s impact on the Asian American psyche and Asian American racialization is explored.
“I’m hoping to redefine love for the next generation,” Lin said of his goals for the documentary’s influence. “I think love is a term that is used and thrown around very cheaply. But if we are really to love people and to love the next generation, what would that look like? Can we give them the best opportunity to be their fullest selves? Taking out some of the barriers that racism presents would be one of those ways that we would be doing that.”
The last character of Lin’s name, 豪 or How, means grand or extraordinary. So, in the end, Lin did live up to his name. Just not in the way anyone expected.
Kikue Higuchi (she/her) is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Twitter: @kychiguchi
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