Thursday, March 8, 2012

Obligatory Jeremy Lin Post

After a very long lay off I've decided that I needed to start writing again not only for the sake of a creative outlet, but also because writing emails at work probably doesn't qualify as journalistic or educational. It's really ironic that growing up in school a lot of kids perceive writing and reading as a chore or a means to an end to get a good grade. I definitely saw it that way and can remember that more often than not I saw it as a necessary evil to get good grades and keep my parents off of my back about school. What I find interesting about that is what were my reasons for even caring about it? Why didn't I just blow off school and play video games constantly like I really wanted to? Was it because of fear of my parents scolding me? A personal expectation to get good grades so I could go to college?

Having a chance to grow up in college and even more so after, I've been able to reflect on a lot of questions like this and begin to gain a better understanding of just why things are the way they are. The answer to my question about why I even cared about school goes back to two interconnected ideas; parenting and culture. I don't think I'm alone as an Asian-American when I say that growing up education was one of if not the most important thing in our lives. I know that Asians are not the only culture that experience this and its very prevalent in some other cultures, but I can only speak from my own experience and I know that its something that was very relevant. Growing up I always felt like I had a certain expectation of myself to get good grades in school, so that I could go to a good college, so I could get a good job and so on. However the good grades were only the product of the larger values I was taught like humility and working hard. While I see it in my own family I've also come to realize it applies in a much broader sense to most other Asian-Americans I grew up with.

When the Jeremy Lin craze first hit the scene it really hit home hard as a big sports fan and growing up Asian-American in the Bay Area. For a while I didn't really know how I felt about it when people asked me and was just taking everything in. I read a lot of articles and posts that came about as a result that all dealt with Asian-Americans' place in society and their perception created by the media. One of the most interesting things about Jeremy Lin that I appreciate most is simply how normal he is.
I remember hearing an interview Jeremy did at one point where he talked about how education always came first with his family and thinking about the similarities in my own upbringing. I don't think Asian-Americans could have asked for a better representation in Jeremy as someone who achieved so much success and doing it the 'right way', meaning through the same values that were stressed in every Asian-American household: humility and hard work. Jeremy's success and instant stardom led to an outpouring of a lot of repressed opinions and feelings in many Asian-Americans simply for the fact that talking about 'Asian-Americanism' in pop-culture was unprecedented. While I didn't completely agree with everything I read, many Asian-Americans expressed some bottled up opinions about the biases that Asian-American's face. His story and the attention it has received gave me and a lot of the Asian-American community a voice and I think it inspired for a lot of people a sense of community to open up dialogue that hadn't existed prior. More than anything I think Jeremy Lin's story has been great because while it has been instrumental in drumming up some refreshing social commentary that questions cultural dispositions, when you take a step back, you can fully appreciate his story and its ability to transcend just the racial and cultural discussions as a story about perseverance overcoming biases.

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