# The Year of the Yao


*Update: I removed the inline-link to the trailer, since it didn’t look
nice in Windows browsers. Quicktime.*

I came across [this documentary on Yao
Ming](http://images.apple.com/movies/fineline/theyearoftheyao/theyearoftheyao_320.mov),
the Chinese NBA player that has made, and found it quite interesting. I
knew that Yao Ming was an important role model to Chinese in the US and
in China who feel that Chinese males are often depicted as emasculated
and not masculine (and short!), but I did not know much more (not being
crazy about any sports probably didn’t help).

The movie tells the tale of Yao Ming’s first arrival in the US, playing
for the Houston Rockets, lacking English skills and having a difficult
time adjusting. The second protagonist is Colin Pine, the white guy who
almost went to law school before he landed the gig of becoming Yao
Ming’s personal interpreter, even moving in with him and his family for
the first half year. The movie focuses a lot on the interaction between
the two of them, and I found it fascinating, as you don’t often see
white guys speaking Chinese on film, and here is one doing it on CNN
live during press conferences and what not. It’s interesting that they
chose to hire him, and not a Chinese-American who spoke both Chinese and
English as their native language - you would think it would be easy to
find one - and I am wondering if it was a conscious choice, that Colin
would be better at the role as a cultural interpreter. But that is an
interesting statement, given that they could have hired an Asian who had
lived all their life in the US…

I also found the different repercussions of Yao Ming’s “Chinese-ness”
interesting - in NBA he represents something rather novel, and so there
were racial slurs by Shaquille O’Neal, lion dancing and Chinese
acrobatics in the stadium before a match… How does this represent the
culture that Yao Ming actually grew up in - I can only imagine if I were
a famous basketball player from Norway, and every time I went to play a
match, they would have tradition Norwegian dancers playing the fiddle
and dancing in the stadium. I would not exactly feel “at home”…

Stian