Not Your Ordinary NBA Hero
Running head: MEDIA REPRESENTATION OF JEREMY LIN IN THE US AND TAIWAN
Not Your Ordinary NBA Hero:
A Narrative Analysis of US and Taiwanese News Coverage of Linsanity
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Not Your Ordinary NBA Hero
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Abstract
This paper examines the interconnectedness of the construction of race, ethnicity, and national
identity in US and Taiwanese news coverage of Jeremy Lin. By comparing media coverage of
Linsanity in major US and Taiwanese newspapers, this paper aims to demonstrate how national
ideology sanctions specific constructions of race and ethnicity, and how Jeremy Lin was framed
differently by nationally-preferred archetypal narratives in the US and Taiwan. This paper
proceeds through three steps. First, it reviews scholarship on the intersection of news media,
sport and national identity in the context of globalization. Next, it discusses research methods
and data collection procedures. Finally, it compares US and Taiwanese news coverage of Jeremy
Lin and argues that media in both countries reflect traditional racialized and nationalist
ideologies in their representation of Linsanity, supporting the dominant nationalistic rhetoric in
the US and to increasing social solidarity in Taiwan.
Keywords
National identity, Media sport, Jeremy Lin, Journalism, Linsanity
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Saturday, February 4, 2012 was a frustrating night for the New York Knicks. Over the
previous two nights, they had already lost two games and were struggling in their present game
against the New Jersey Nets. Knicks Coach D'Antoni was frantically searching for a way to
reverse the situation. With three starters unable to play due to injury or family emergency, a
desperate D'Antoni sent Jeremy Lin into the game. No one was expecting much of Lin, who had
only played ten games during the season, scoring just 32 points. He had recently returned from
the development league after being sent there to hone his skills. However, Lin got off the bench
and did not look back. He ran some quick pick-and-rolls, penetrating the defense, racking up 25
points and seven assists, and ultimately leading the Knicks to a 99-92 victory over the Nets. Lin's
dazzling performance had fans at Madison Square Garden on the edge of their seats and made
him a global sensation overnight. The phenomenon was further fueled by the Knicks' victory
over the Utah Jazz in which Lin scored 28 points, and peaked when the Knicks beat the Los
Angeles Lakers in a game in which Lin outscored Lakers team captain Kobe Bryant with a
career-high 38 points. "He charmed an arena, then a city, then the globe," a New York Times
columnist enthused (Flegenheimer, 2012, p. MB4). Fans all over the world verbalized their
excitement by coining terms like Linsanity, Lincredible, and Linpossible (Beck, 2012a, p.A1).
An undrafted player in the National Basketball Association (NBA), Jeremy Lin seemingly came
from nowhere to resuscitate the Knicks following a disappointing season start, yet Linsanity
signifies a more complex phenomenon than sudden fame.
Born in Palo Alto City, California and raised in a devout Christian family, the 6-foot-3
Jeremy Lin is not the average NBA player. His parents, Shirley and Gie-Ming, are engineers who
emigrated from Taiwan to the United States in the 1970s and who still hold dual citizenship.
After high school, Lin went to Harvard University where he was twice named All-Ivy league first
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team captain. These facts make Lin an anomaly on the basketball court. He is the first
American-born NBA player of Taiwanese descent in league history and only the fourth NBA
player from Harvard, after Saul Mariaschin, Edward Smith, and Wyndol Gray (Beck, 2012b,
p.A1). Additionally, the way Lin speaks openly of his faith caused the media to draw an instant
parallel between him and sensational New York Jets quarterback Tim Tebow, who is also a
devout evangelical Christian. The question of how to portray an Asian-American, Christian, Ivy
League-schooled player in the context of a sport played predominantly by blacks and watched
primarily by whites has perplexed the US media. Moreover, since audiences around the globe
can watch Lin play live via satellite, Linsanity also transcended America’s borders to create a stir
in Taiwan. The question of how to frame an American star athlete as the pride and glory of
Taiwan and further employ him as a symbol to increase social solidarity thus became an issue for
the Taiwanese media.
This paper examines the interconnectedness of the construction of race, ethnicity, and
national identity in US and Taiwanese news coverage of Jeremy Lin. By comparing media
coverage of Linsanity in major US and Taiwanese newspapers, this paper aims to demonstrate
how national ideology sanctions specific constructions of race and ethnicity, and how Jeremy Lin
was framed differently by nationally-preferred archetypal narratives in the US and Taiwan. This
paper proceeds through three steps. First, it reviews scholarship on the intersection of news
media, sport and national identity in the context of globalization. Next, it discusses research
methods and data collection procedures. Finally, it compares US and Taiwanese news coverage
of Jeremy Lin and argues that media in both countries reflect traditional racialized and nationalist
ideologies in their representation of Linsanity, supporting the dominant nationalistic rhetoric in
the US and to increasing social solidarity in Taiwan.
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Sport, news media and national identity
National identity is often perceived as a sense of shared belonging that a community feels to
a nation. However, this assumption has been challenged by recent scholarship examining various
sociocultural institutions manipulated by political elites to institutionalize a nationally bound
identity to legitimate the nation-state (Anderson, 1983; Billig, 1995; Hobsbawn and Ranger,
1983; Mercer, 1992). The press plays a major role in constructing and perpetuating national
identity. As Mercer noted, "the role of the newspaper in the historical constitution of the nation is
based on its status as quotidian, ephemeral, everyday, and routine" (cited in Brookes, 2002, p.86).
The daily ritual of newspaper consumption has transformed the nation from an abstraction into a
"thinkable, inhabitable, communicable, and therefore governable" institution (Mercer, 1992,
p.27). By reading newspapers, individual citizens also come to see themselves as members of an
"imagined community" who share a common set of features, including heritage, culture, and
identity (Anderson, 1983).
Billig (1995) coined the term "banal nationalism" to describe that "the routinely familiar
habits of language" in journalism act as constant reminders of nationhood (p.93). Using daily
coverage of sport events as an example, he showed how seemingly prosaic, routine words in
sports news, such as "our victories" and "our heroes", subtly point to the nation, making national
identity unforgettable and inescapable (p.120). The sports pages situate national identification in
the mundane and everyday context, and thus have social and political significance. As Billig
noted, "day after day, millions of men seek their pleasures on these pages, admiring heroism in
the national cause, enjoying prose which intertextually echoes warfare. Such pleasures cannot be
innocent" (1995, p.125). Billig's comments provide a useful starting point in examining how
modern sport and sports journalism contribute to the formation of national identity during the
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current phase of globalization.
Modern sports, a combination of "industrial capitalist production" and "popular leisure
consumption", were first developed in Britain in the 18th century and became prevalent in North
America in the 19th century (Clarke and Critcher, 1985). With advances in new media
technology and increased marketing efforts by professional sports organizations in the West (i.e.,
NBA, MLB, NFL), modern sports have been transformed into media sports that cross national
boundaries (Rowe and Gilmour, 2010). From production and distribution to consumption, media
sports are an engine of globalization that have compressed time and space and caused the
"intensification of worldwide social relations" (Giddens, 1990, p.64). Numerous academic
studies have examined the globalization of sports with a specific focus on how media sports
construct national identity (Brookes, 2002; Gruneau and Whitson, 1993; Rowe, 2003). Despite
some writers claiming that media sports shake the primacy of national identity and replace it
with global fandom and strong consumer identities (Levermore and Millward , 2007), most
scholarship suggests that sport continues to be "an important cultural, political, and commercial
marker of boundaries, identities, and markets" in the seemingly borderless world (Boyle and
Haynes, 2000, p. 164). Brookes (2002) found that international media events, such as the
Olympics and the FIFA World Cup, provide a basis to "reinforce the sense of national identity,
marking regular festive breaks from everyday routine, and linking domestic viewing rituals with
the larger 'imagined community' of the nation" (p.83). McGurie and Armfield (2008) observed
that Univision Telecasts and ESPN employed distinctive nationalist narratives to frame the 2002
Mexico-United States World Cup Match, generating two representations of a single game. In
conclusion, sports remain a key site for expressing national belonging in the context of
globalization.
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Nevertheless, "it is not just that national identity is constructed through media coverage of
sporting events, but that a particular type of national identity is constructed through the
coverage," according to Brookes (2002, p.92, italic added). The structured discourse of sport
news often creates an "us versus them" dichotomy, where "they" are represented as foreign and
different to bolster "our" own identities and perpetuate "our" social values. Accordingly, sports
journalism reveals much about how "we" see ourselves (and how "we" see "others"). Such views
are demonstrated in the sports selected as symbols of national identity (and the sports that are
marginalized and excluded) and in the star athletes chosen to epitomize national character (and
the celebrity players framed as violent and deviant) (Brookes, 2002, p.89). For example, when
Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa both had the chance to break the single-season home run
record of 61 in 1998, the media favored McGwire and mostly mentioned only his quest for
historic record-breaking. As one New York Times reporter confessed, "I think it's because
McGwire is American, and white, and Sosa is a Dominican, and black. Americans want to see
McGwire break the record" (cited in Lule, 2001, p.89). The type of national identity produced
and perpetuated via sport journalism thus is of a hegemonic type, and serves to uphold dominant
class, ethnic and gender interests.
The archetypical national representative in the US is not only male but also white
(Nakayama & Krizek, 1995; Shome, 2001). As many scholars observed, "social constructions of
'color' are subordinate to social constructions of 'white,' the consequence of which is the 'true'
national being equated with middle to upper class white Americans" (Prividera and Howard III,
2006, p.31). Based on this pattern, it is clear that sport journalists often employ discursive
strategies to associate whiteness with US citizenship while conflating ethnic players with
foreignness and being less American. As a result, black players are often framed as heroes (based
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on implied physical prowess) or criminals (based on implied mental inferiority) by the media and
reduced to statistics, such as height, weight, vertical jump, season average, and drug use (Guzzio,
2005, p.229). Furthermore, Asian American athletes have been marked as the racial other, framed
by stereotypical yellow peril or model-minority narratives, and have maintained a
"perpetual-foreigner identity" in media sports (Chung, 2012, p. 246). However, when immigrant
athletes become international sensations and transcend the US context, local news media and
fans actively perceive and decode associated symbolic meanings. Celebrity ethnic players can
simultaneously signify an imperial legacy and an expression of local resistance to global forces
(James, 1963). Thus Asian American athletes are often celebrated as national heroes in Asia,
where their individual achievements are interpreted as symbols of national progress and global
visibility, yet are characterized as eternal foreigners in the US. In this regard, the media portray
of immigrant athletes in the domestic context thus provides an opportunity to examine the
constant negotiation between the global and the local in news production.
Methods
The research materials were collected from two major US newspapers, the New York Times
and New York Post, and two leading Taiwanese newspapers, the Liberty Times and Apple Daily.
Many have argued that the story of Linsanity could only have happened in New York City. The
argument goes that if Jeremy Lin had not been point guard for the New York Knicks, he would
never have become the media sensation he did no matter how well he played. Consequently, the
New York Times and New York Post were included in this research, because they simultaneously
provide national and local interpretations of Linsanity. As Lule noted (2001), "The Times can be
seen as a State Scribe, as our society's privileged and preeminent storyteller" (p.7). This
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observation justifies using the New York Times as a key source for understanding US affairs and
studying nationally sanctioned ideologies and archetypes. The New York Post, on the other hand,
known for its sensationalist headlines and vernacular language, provided this study with a tabloid
perspective on the Lin phenomenon. The Liberty Times and Apple Daily were selected because
they remain the most widely read newspapers in Taiwan. According to ACNielsen data published
during the second quarter (April to June) of 2008, the average daily circulation of the Liberty
Times was 699,450 copies, compared to 509,957 copies for the Apple Daily. The ACNielsen data
further indicated that 45.8 percent of Taiwanese read newspapers on a daily basis, and of those,
15.6 percent read the Liberty Times, 14.9 percent the Apple Daily, 10.5 percent the United Daily,
and 8.8 percent the China Times (ACNielsen, 2008). Additionally, The four media outlets above,
two American and two Taiwanese, thus were chosen because they are both accessible and
extensively consumed by the general public in the US and Taiwan.
This paper further used online databases of the four newspapers to retrieve news articles
about Jeremy Lin from 4 February 2012, the day on which he first led the Knicks to win, to 1
April 2012, the day he announced that he needed knee surgery and would miss the rest of the
regular season and the playoffs. Following brief initial readings, this paper excluded all instant
news transcriptions and news articles that referred to Jeremy Lin only indirectly, but included all
editorials and letters to the editor discussing Linsanity. The final sample comprised over 2,100
news articles. Specifically, the sample included 474 stories published in the New York Times, 556
from the New York Post, 615 from the Liberty Times, and 521 from the Apple Daily. The sampled
articles varied in length. Some were merely one-line summaries of game results or brief photo
captions, while others were extended front-page feature articles. Regardless of length, all were
subjected to narrative analysis to illustrate the symbolic relationships among media language,
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ideological assumptions, and cultural conventions.
Scholars have long used narrative analysis to examine news discourse (Barkin, 1984; Fisher,
1985). As Bird and Dardenne (1997) argued, journalists are storytellers who employ repetitive,
archetypical, and culturally resonant narratives to transform abstract, fragmented, and
inexplicable information into recognizable and digestible stories with clear beginnings, middles,
and endings. Consequently, it is more productive to see news as "stories about reality" than
objective facts (p.334), while "news values...are culturally specific story-telling codes" generated
from existing social and cultural conventions (p.338-339). Seeing news as modern myth, Lule
further noted that "news values will reflect not only professional judgments regarding
newsworthiness and importance, but also the prevailing values and beliefs of the larger society"
(2001, p.152). News not only conveys information about events to the public, but also provides
confirmation of social norms and beliefs to a shared culture.
Employing narrative analysis to examine news texts involves paying special attention to
how new stories unfold and evolve, how language is used to construct plots, how drama is
created and conflict is resolved, what characters are selected and emphasized, what characters are
eliminated or marginalized, and how repetitive archetypical frameworks are employed in
defining individuals and summarizing the meanings of events. Furthermore, "[n]arrative analysis
of journalism is a search for the common thematic and structural choices reporters and editors
made, consistently over time and across media," according to Kitch (2007, p. 40). Such analysis
should identify the "recurring characters and subplots" manifesting in all news stories and relate
them to broad sociocultural conventions to build connections between reader, news discourse,
and social context (p.41). Accordingly, using narrative analysis to examine Linsanity news
coverage in the US and in Taiwan, this paper focuses on the media's language usage and plot
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development (i.e. the beginning/middle/end of the story), the characterization and representation
of Jeremy Lin (i.e. which of his characteristics are emphasized and which are downplayed), and
the construction of related sociocultural meaning.
Modern hero and media spectacle
Cultures around the world have stories about heroes — the Hero Myth. Heroes are
exemplary figures who reflect "qualities that a [specific] society prizes, such as modesty, hard
work, courage, virtue, wisdom, or loyalty" (Lule, 2001, p.82). Barthes suggested that the
ideological function of myth is to validate and maintain "some specific social order, authorizing
its moral codes as beyond criticism or human emendation" (1957, p. 140). The Hero Myth thus
can be viewed as a civics lesson which demonstrates dominant social values and charts the
boundaries of the social order. However, "fame" and "well knownness" have become
prerequisites for contemporary heroes. One needs to be "cast in mass-mediated stories that
inform and instruct society" to become a celebrated hero in the contemporary world (Lule, 2001,
p.101). A modern hero like Jeremy Lin is thus a media construction that combines celebrity
status and exemplary deeds.
Three structural parallels can be found between the timeless Hero Myth and news stories on
Linsanity, including the humble birth, the quest and overcoming of trials, and the (triumphal)
return. Both American and Taiwanese reporters started to narrate and explain Lin's emergence
immediately after his first brilliant performance on February 4. They positioned Lin as an
underdog who was constantly underrated and who had followed a difficult path to pursue his
basketball dream. According to the New York Times,
hundreds of Division I coaches declined to offer Lin a scholarship, all 30 NBA teams passed
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on him in the draft (some of them twice), and two teams cut him, albeit reluctantly, in
December. The Golden State Warriors waived Lin because they were clearing payroll room
to chase DeAndre Jordan, a budding center. The Rockets waived him in favor of Samuel
Dalembert. Both teams liked Lin, for his skills, smarts and work ethic, and both hoped to
re-sign Lin if he cleared waivers, but neither realized what they were giving up. (Beck,
2012c, p.B10)
The key message here was not Lin's failures but his talent (i.e., skills and smarts), attitude (i.e.,
work ethic) and personality (i.e., likability) which qualified him to be an NBA hero — a hero that
could no longer be ignored. Other coverage used captions like "A new chapter in the legend"
(Berman, 2012a, p. L73), "His first NBA start" (Beck, 2012d, p.B2) and "The new Disney-like
paradigm" (Araton, 2012, p.SP3) to mark the first phase of the Lin phenomenon and state that a
hero had been born.
The story of Linsanity continued with as Lin pursued his quest and achieved excellent
performances in NBA games. The first trial Lin faced was to prove himself a truly great player,
rather than a "one-hit wonder" (Lewis, 2012, p. SL67). Many described Lin cynically as merely a
passing sensation, or a "Linderella" fairy tale in which a guy "found a pair of magical sneakers"
(Araton, 2012, p.SP3). However, after Lin was instrumental in his team’s back-to-back wins
against the Utah Jazz and Los Angeles Lakers, journalists announced that "the uncertainty is over.
Lin has cemented himself as a credible NBA player, not a novelty act" (Beck, 2012b, p. A1).
Even Kobe Bryant, a five-time NBA champion and the league's fifth all-time leading scorer,
praised Lin in a postgame interview:
When a player is playing that well, he doesn't come out of nowhere. It seems like he comes
out of nowhere. Go back and take a look, and the skill level was probably there from the
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beginning, it's just that we didn't notice it. (Araton, 2012, p. SP3)
Being recognized by one of the most respectable players in the league legitimized Lin's status in
the NBA. The second challenge for Lin was Knicks Coach D'Antoni's resignation on March 14.
D'Antoni and Lin had been very close ever since the beginning of Lin’s career. While many said
that "Lin may have saved Knicks coach Mike D'Antoni's job for now and the future," others
argued that Lin owed his success to D'Antoni's "speed ball offense system" (Beck, 2012f, p. B11).
When D’Antoni left the Knicks the media thus declared the end of Linsanity. The New York Post
published a photograph of a gravestone on its front page with text reading "R.I.P. LINSANITY.
Briefly Beloved Broadway Smash Hit. February 4, 2012 to March 14, 2012" (New York Post,
2012). Other coverage suggested that the new coach Woodson was "ready to bury Lin" and
would bring back "the Melo and Amare show" (Berman, 2012c, p.113). However, Lin outdid
himself again in the Knick-Pacers game on March 18. His dazzling performances persuaded the
media that "Linsanity is rising from the grave" (Berman, 2012d, p. LC98) and will be "a
never-ending journey" (Vaccaro, 2012a, March 19).
The archaic Hero Myth generally ends with a triumphal return and celebration. In reality,
the story of Linsanity reached a hiatus when Lin announced that he needed knee surgery and
would miss the rest of the regular season and the playoffs. Lin's departure was as unexpected as
his rise. In a lengthy story, the New York Times lamented:
Jeremy Lin's rise was swift and magical, an NBA fairy tale played out on a global stage, one
enchanting chapter at a time, its conclusion a captivating mystery. That epilogue came
Saturday night, much sooner than anticipated, with a shocking cruel twist.
Linsanity is sidelined. D'Antoni is gone. For the next four weeks, this is indisputably
Anthony's team. The Knicks can only hope he justifies their faith. (Beck, 2012g, p. SP1)
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Despite leaving the season early, Lin's legacy was clearly defined and documented by news
media. Linsanity is "the kind of sports story that transcends the sport itself," said President
Obama (Jackson, 2012). Lin's story thus acts as a civics lesson which reflects social values and
beliefs and maintains social order. Both the US and Taiwanese media identified similar values as
being represented by Jeremy Lin, including persistence, hard work and humility. As Forbes
reported, "Lin couldn’t have seized his opportunity if he hadn’t worked like crazy for years
perfecting his skills" (Jackson, 2012). The reason Lin could overcome early difficulties was
because "he's the hardest worker we have," as his assistant coach said, "he's defying all the
coaches who said no, all the teams that have dropped him" (Berman, 2012b, p. A63). Finally,
Bryant concluded that Lin's success is a "testament to perseverance and hard work" and "a good
example for kids everywhere" (Beck, 2012e, p. D1).
Lin was also portrayed as always humble and grateful. Notably, US and Taiwanese media
interpreted Lin's humility from different perspectives. While American newspapers attributed
Lin's humble manner to his devout religious beliefs, the Taiwanese media framed it from the
perspective of Lin being a team player. The New York Times hailed Lin as not just the "Harvard
hero" but the "humble Harvard hero" when he said "God works in mysterious and miraculous
ways" to reporters after his team’s third consecutive win. The Times continued to note that the
"humble Lin" refused to take credit himself and quoted the Bible to encourage fans by saying
that "suffering produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint"
(Luo, 2012, p. SP11). Guttmann argued that the modern sports hero is "a secular replacement"
for "a once-sacred figure" who embodies a new form of immortality by continuously breaking
historic records (cited in Lule, 2001, p.85). Yet the tension and rupture between the sacred (i.e.,
religion) and secular (i.e., sports) seems to be reconciled and mended by faith-driven athletes like
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Jeremy Lin, who sees "basketball as an area he can use as a platform to promote the gospel"
(Lehman, 2012, p.90). On the other hand, the Taiwanese media tended to depict Lin as a humble
team player who refused to define the game in personal terms, even after leading his team to a
win over the Los Angeles Lakers. As Lin said in the postgame interview, "the only thing we
established tonight was getting four in a row. I'm not really too worried right now about proving
anything to anybody. I think as a team we're just growing and we're trying to build on this
momentum" (Chen, 2012). Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou later pointed to this example, and
asked his cabinet to show the same team spirit (Doufu, 2012, p8).
Starting from humble beginnings, overcoming various trials, and finally establishing
himself as an exemplary model for both US and Taiwanese societies, the media crowned Jeremy
Lin as a modern hero. News stories about Jeremy Lin in both the United States and Taiwan were
characterized by traditional heroic patterns and current celebratory narratives. However, when
read more closely, coverage of Linsanity also exhibits other modern issues which were not so
readily celebrated. The following section demonstrates how Jeremy Lin was framed differently
by nationally-favored narratives in the US and Taiwan during two successive periods. The first
period was when the Knicks won seven games straight with Lin running the offense (February
4-15), and the second period was when the Knicks were struggling in their games and with
personnel matters (February 16 to April 1).
Linsanity in the US: from underdog to "Chink in armor"
The American news media started to closely follow Jeremy Lin after his first victory. This
23-year-old, undrafted, twice-cut, Asian American player stunned US sports journalism by
leading the Knicks to seven straight wins from February 4 to 15. During this period, reporters
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often positioned Lin as a quintessential underdog who represented all Americans and embodied
the "American Dream." Such narratives focused on Lin’s humble beginnings, how he had
overcome barriers and rejections, how he worked diligently to achieve, and how he finally
reaped personal and professional rewards. Additionally, the couch on which Lin used to sleep in
his teammates' apartments circulated in the news as a visual and rhetorical metaphor to affirm the
values of the American dream, including hard work, persistence, self reliance, individual prowess,
"rags-to-riches" opportunism and social mobility (Zingg, 1986). As the New York Post described
it:
Here's the couch that catapulted a career. This ordinary sofa could become the most famous
piece of furniture in sports — as the impromptu sleeping place that Knick phenomenon
Jeremy Lin crashed on in his teammate's Manhattan pad the night before his breakout
game. (Abrahams, Berman &Fredericks, 2012, p. L4)
The contrast between the nomadic couch potato and the celebrated global sensation not only
encapsulated beliefs in the American dream, but also transformed Linsanity into an inspiring
"true Hollywood story" that speaks to everyone (Armstrong, 2012, p. A1). Nevertheless, by
focusing merely on personal autonomy and individual effort, this underdog narrative of Jeremy
Lin produces a colorblind ideology in a sense that an "Asian American's 'success' is used to deny
the existence of institutional racism and to 'prove' that US society is reasonably fair and open for
racial minority groups to move up the social ladder" (Kawai, 2005, p.114). This narrative further
encourages the public to ignore the finer racial issues existing in the sports world, such as "racial
stacking, disparities in opportunities, or white dominance of ownership, coaching, and the very
means of representation" (Ebanda de Bberi and Hogarth, 2009, p.91). Consequently, the
underdog narrative functions as a deceptive media discourse that distracts audiences from
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scrutinizing the racialized reporting on Jeremy Lin.
Journalists portray Lin using the framework of the of immigration and stereotypes. As
Chuang observed, news stories on Asian American men "tended either to focus on those that
directly related to [their] foreignness or to present non-foreign characteristics. . . in a way that
emphasized the immigrant experience or reinforced Asian-male stereotypes" (2012, p.254).
Similarly, Zhang argued that "Asian Americans are typically stereotyped as exotic,
non-American, foreign, inassimilable, and acting FOB (fresh off the boat), and are routinely
treated as if they do not belong in the US to the same degree as other racial-ethnic groups" (2010,
p.26). This "perpetual foreigner" reporting pattern is clearly evident in coverage of Lin that
emphasized his ethnicity and immigrant family background. Both the New York Times and New
York Post published lengthy stories on Lin's tight-knit family. Lin's father Gie-Ming, an
electronics engineer who received doctoral degree from Purdue University, was described as a
"brilliant mind behind a silent face" who "struggled with his English" when he first arrived in the
US. Lin's mother Shirley, also an engineering specialist, was portrayed as a typical Asian "Tiger
Mom" who was "strict with Jeremy about academic matters, calling his coaches to warn them
that a poor grade meant Jeremy would not be going to practice until his grades improved"
(Borden & Bradsher, 2012, p. SP1). Despite Lin being American-born and therefore an American
citizen by all legal definitions, his identity was constantly confused in media coverage that
mentioned the contest between Taiwan and China to claim Lin as their own. Furthermore, even
characteristics of Lin with no connection to his ethnicity were represented through the lens of
ethnic culture. In an article analyzing Lin's weak performances, the New York Post said
Jeremy Lin was born in 1988, which was the Year of the Dragon...According to Chinese
Zodiac dot com, children born under this fifth position in the Chinese zodiac are "driven,
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unafraid of challenges, and willing to take risks." They're passionate in all they do and they
do things in grand fashion. Unfortunately, this passion and enthusiasm can leave Dragons
feeling exhausted. That's why you've seen Lin on the verge of collapse in the third and
fourth quarters of games. (Vaccaro, 2012b, p. M102)
Narrating the Lin phenomenon using the framework of "perpetual foreigner" thus defines and
reinforces Lin’s identity as an ostracized outsider both in the NBA and in American society as a
whole, and is typical of the experiences of most Asian Americans (Wu, 2002). A parallel example
of the perpetual foreigner stereotype can be found in the 1998 Winter Olympics women's figure
skating competition where MSNBC used the caption "American beats out Kwan" to report Tara
Lipinski’s win over Michelle Kwan, despite both of them being American born (Kawai, 2005;
Zhang, 2010).
The racialized coverage of Lin became overt when the Knicks ended their seven
game-winning streak with a loss to the New Orleans Hornets on February 17. Media outlets
expressed their disappointment by asking "what do we make of Jeremy Lin and Linsanity now"
and suggesting "it's time for sanity to return" (Willsis, 2012, p.60). Moreover, ESPN used the
blatantly racist headline "Chink in Armor" to comment on Lin's struggle in the game. "Chink" is
an American racial slur referring to persons of Chinese descent. Although "chink in the armor" is
also a somewhat clichéd term used in sports journalism to describe a weakness in a player or
team, the double entendre inherent in its use to reference Jeremy Lin made it offensive. The
Asian American Journalist Association (AAJA) issued a media advisory that asked their
colleagues to avoid racially insensitive and context irrelevant terms, such as “chink”, as well as
references to eye shape, food, martial arts, and the yellow mamba, in their portrayals of Lin
(AAJA, 2012). Their advisory further stated,
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Jeremy Lin is Asian American, not Asian. . . It's an important distinction and one that should
be considered before any references to former NBA players such as Yao Ming and Wang
Zhizhi, who were Chinese. Lin's experiences were fundamentally different than people who
immigrated to play in the NBA. Lin progressed through the ranks of American basketball
from high school to college to the NBA, and to characterize him as a foreigner is both
inaccurate and insulting. (AAJA, 2012).
The distinction between Yao Ming (i.e., Asian) and Jeremy Lin (i.e., Asian American) needs to be
further examined to explain the resentment towards Lin in the US context.
As Crawford (2004) observed, the booming East Asian market and its huge populations
have become a prime target for NBA marketing efforts since the 1980s, including sales of match
coverage and branded merchandise. One strategy the NBA has used to attract East Asian viewers
has been to recruit players from East Asia. In this context, Chinese basketball player Yao Ming
joining the Houston Rockets was not threatening, but was simply seen as a savvy business
maneuver by the NBA to increase basketball consumption in Asia (Rowe and Gilmour, 2010). In
contrast, given that American basketball is a sport predominately played by blacks and
watched/managed by whites, the intrusion of Jeremy Lin into the NBA empire challenged racial
boundaries in US sports and implied the arrival of a "new yellow peril." The new yellow peril is
a pervasive media discourse which combines the old yellow peril and new model minority
stereotypes. This discourse represents Asian Americans as a "super minority" who not only outdo
other minority groups but also White Americans, and therefore challenge the superiority of the
White race and trigger fear (Kawai, 2004, p.116). Seeing Lin through the lens of the “new yellow
peril” explains the racist media disgust surrounding him. Lin signifies the model minority
stereotype in the sense that he is willing to assimilate and play according to the dominant rules,
Not Your Ordinary NBA Hero
20
yet he also signifies the yellow peril through his attempts to achieve (Kawai, 2004, p.120).
Media representations of ethnic athletes are guided by nationally-favored archetypes. As
Prividera and Howard III noted: "for a story to be engaging and ideologically coherent, the
involved actors must fit sanctioned roles" (p2006, p.36). Accordingly, the initial coverage that
positioned Lin as an epitome of the American dream was soon replaced by more racialized
reporting. The US media thus created ambivalent and contrasting narratives of Linsanity in
which Jeremy Lin was simultaneously a modern hero and humble underdog with whom all
Americans could identify, as well as a perpetual foreigner and even a rising threat to be
ostracized.
Linsanity in Taiwan: From national hero to "Our hero can do no wrong"
In today's globalized media environment, a key challenge for journalists is to present global
affairs to the local audience. Journalists must link international events with national interests to
ensure the local relevance of their news stories. Domestication thus becomes essential for news
makers to: "[cast] faraway events in frameworks that render these events comprehensible,
appealing and relevant to domestic audiences. . . and to construct the meanings of these events in
ways that are compatible with the culture and the dominant ideology they serve" (Gurevitch et al.,
1991, p. 206). The process of news domestication not only reflects the geopolitical relationship
between the international and the local, but also reveals how national ideology dictates the
representation of foreign affairs (Pantti et al., 2012, p.49). In this regard, the Taiwanese coverage
of Linsanity provides an opportunity to examine the constant negotiation between the global and
the local in news production.
Jeremy Lin attracted the full attention of the Taiwanese media after his breakout game. This
Not Your Ordinary NBA Hero
21
happened to occur immediately after the Presidential election in Taiwan (January 14, 2012) when
society was highly divided. The emergence of Jeremy Lin became an outlet through which
Taiwanese could escape the fractious world of domestic politics with its false role models.
Furthermore, Linsanity in Taiwan reflected a yearning among Taiwanese for an end to their
nation’s extended diplomatic isolation and marginalization. Accordingly, Lin's individual success
was interpreted as a symbol of Taiwan's progress, and Lin himself became a national hero who
elevated Taiwan’s global visibility. On February 5, Lin's image was displayed on the front pages
of all the Taiwanese newspapers with captions reading "Impossible! Lin leads the Knicks to win
over Nets" (Chen, 2012). During the first two days of Linsanity (February 5-6), Taiwanese media
simply followed US coverage of Lin, adopting exactly the same story angles (i.e. Lin as Asian
American) and terminology (i.e., Linsanity). However, from February 7 they started to highlight
Lin's Taiwanese heritage and frame him as the pride and glory of Taiwan. The following
describes three narrative strategies identifiable in Taiwanese coverage of Linsanity that served to
"de-Americanize" Jeremy Lin and claim him as one of "our" own (i.e., Taiwanese).
The first narrative strategy was to coin new words such as "Haoge" (Brother Lin),
"Haoxiaozi" (Good Son Lin) and even "Haoshen" (Lin the Divine) to replace Linsanity. All these
nicknames were derived from Lin's full Chinese name — Lin Shu-hao. While "Haoge" and
"Haoxiaozi" were used primarily to describe Lin's brilliant performances, "Haoshen" appeared in
editorials that discussed the symbolic parallel between Lin and mythical or religious figures from
Taiwanese culture. This seemingly banal transformation in name was critical in that it redrew the
boundary separating the Self and the Other. By referring to Lin using his Chinese name and
labeling him as a brother/son to all Taiwanese, Lin's Taiwanese identity was implied and his
American identity muted. When the Apple Daily used the caption "Haoge! Son of Taiwan beats
Not Your Ordinary NBA Hero
22
out NBA No.1 Kobe Bryant" to celebrate the Knicks' fourth consecutive victory (Cai, 2012), the
Taiwanese media were clearly positioning Lin as their own.
The second narrative strategy involved the way the Taiwanese media continuously
highlighted Lin's Taiwanese heritage. As one editorial article described, "[Taiwanese] sport
journalists have gone into overdrive to unveil new tidbits of Lin-ology, interviewing relatives in
central Taiwan and excavating long-forgotten examples of academic work that got him into
Harvard" (Yeh, 2012, p.19). This narrative explained Lin's perseverance and hard work as a
"reaffirmation of the undefeatable spirit that characterizes Taiwanese culture" (Liao, 2012) and
cast him as the "national hero who impresses international society" (Hsu, 2012). The narrative
drew parallels between Lin and other talented Taiwanese in the US, such as Oscar-winning film
director Ann Lee and fashion designer Jason Wu, and thus justified Lin’s status as the "glory of
Taiwan" (Liberty Times, 2012). The narrative claimed that Lin spoke perfect Chinese and
"saluted the Taiwan's national flag when he saw it on the court" (Liao, 2012). Lin's Taiwanese
identity was a focal point of discussion in this narrative. In the news story entitled "Lin Shu-hao
is Taiwanese, family insists”, Lin's uncle told the reporter: "For sure Lin is Taiwanese. I spoke to
Lin's father, my younger brother, and he said: 'make sure you point this out'" (Shih, 2012, p.1).
Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou later referenced this statement during a meeting with a US
congressional delegation, and hailed Lin as "the pride of Taiwan." In response, the US
representative countered President Ma’s assertion by describing Lin as "a true-blood born
American who happens to be of Taiwanese ancestry" (Mo, 2012).
The third narrative strategy was the "face-saving" strategy used after the Knicks’ remarkable
run of consecutive wins led by Lin ended. As Yu and Wen indicated, in Chinese culture
"face-saving is not only a personal issue but a group issue as well. . . group members are
Not Your Ordinary NBA Hero
23
expected to do everything they can to prevent their group from losing face" (2003, p.53).
Embracing Lin as its own, Taiwanese media often defended the national hero's failure through
avoidance of responsibility. This narrative argued that the losses resulted from poor
performances by Lin’s teammates rather than any failure by Lin himself. For example, The
Liberty Times used the headline "Where are Lin's Teammates?" to report the Knicks’ loss to the
Miami Heat and question Carmelo Anthony's weak defense (Yeh, 2012). On the other hand, The
Apple Daily attributed Lin's loss to Heat to the strategy of opponents, and quoted Lin as saying:
"I can't remember another game where it was hard to just take dribble. They did a great job of
making me uncomfortable" (Chen, 2012). Furthermore, when the Knicks lost to the Boston
Celtics and Lin was severely criticized by New York Post on March 6, the Liberty Times argued
that "US media's comments on Lin's performance were too critical" (Liuo, 2012). These
examples all suggest that Taiwanese media consider Lin an "insider" who needs to be protected
and defended.
The Taiwanese coverage of Linsanity demonstrates the practice of news domestication. By
emphasizing Lin's Taiwanese heritage, the Taiwanese media render US news stories culturally
meaningful and politically significant to their domestic audience. Equally, Jeremy Lin represents
a national hero whose individual achievements are interpreted as symbols of Taiwan’s national
progress and global visibility. Lin’s struggles against racism and his Christian faith are
downplayed in Taiwanese coverage because they are remote from the life experience of the
audience.
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24
Conclusion
Star Asian American NBA player Jeremy Lin has become a global cultural icon and his
international popularity articulates the complex relationships among race, ethnicity, nationalism
and news production in the modern world. The Lin phenomenon in both the US and Taiwanese
contexts provides an opportunity to examine the interconnectedness of the construction of race,
ethnicity, and national identity. By comparing media coverage of Linsanity in major US and
Taiwanese newspapers and by using narrative analysis, this paper finds three structural parallels
between the timeless Hero Myth and news stories on Linsanity, including the humble birth, the
quest and overcoming of trials, and the (triumphal) return. Lin's story thus acts as a civics lesson
which reflects social values and beliefs and maintains social order in the US and Taiwanese
context. However, read more closely, this paper further reveals how national ideology sanctions
specific constructions of race and ethnicity, and how Jeremy Lin has been framed differently by
nationally-favored archetypes. The findings of this paper suggest that the image of Jeremy Lin in
the US media was ambivalent, with Lin cast as a modern hero and humble underdog with whom
all Americans can identify, but also as a perpetual foreigner and even a rising threat. On the other
hand, coverage of Linsanity was highly consistent in the Taiwanese context, and Lin was
portrayed and defended as a national hero who elevated the global visibility of the nation.
Consequently, this paper suggests that media in both countries reflect traditional racialized and
nationalist ideologies in their representation of Linsanity, supporting the dominant nationalistic
rhetoric in the US and promoting social solidarity in Taiwan.
Not Your Ordinary NBA Hero
25
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