I was upset after reading this article about the importance of basketball in the Chinese community. I’m not mad at the author for writing it. It was great that Alex was representing Asians (and Chinese people in particular) in the basketball community and advocating for more representation even outside of Asian Heritage Month.
Why was I upset? Because I couldn’t see myself in it.
If you ask any of my students, they would tell you that I’m Asian (ha!), and they would probably tell you that I love basketball. I’m that teacher who wears Jordans to teach. I would argue with students about who the GOAT is for a whole lunch period (I prefer MJ but I’m glad this generation has LBJ, but too many people sleep on Kareem, it’s not his fault he didn’t have the ball in his hands). I can name every Raptors player in this video. I watched the very first tip off between Yinka Dare and “Easy” Ed Pickney at the SkyDome. In 1996, I paid money to watch the Bulls play the Raptors from the other side of the SkyDome, where we sat so far away, we fought over the binoculars one sensible friend actually brought to the game. I co-own season tickets to the Raptors 905 since their inaugural season. I own the full series of the Slam Dunk manga that was translated to Chinese. I have never played organized basketball (more on that later) but I worked for many years as a basketball referee and even attended a refereeing camp one summer. I have coached boys and girls teams of all levels during my 17 years teaching career, and even won a championship when I was a student teacher. So yeah, I’m Chinese, and I love basketball.
Let me tell you how I felt invisible after reading about the basketball loving Chinese community.
My family, and most of my basketball loving friends, immigrated to Canada from Hong Kong in the 80s and 90s. We all lived in the east end of Toronto, in the now gentrified area called “Riverdale”. But back when we lived there, it wasn’t full of families with million dollar homes. We didn’t have driveways for a basketball hoop. In fact, my first “basketball hoop” was a milk crate with the bottom cut out of it. We played basketball because it was cheap, because all you needed was a $10 rubber ball from Zellers (shoutout to Voit). I was so happy when I finally got a Rawlings fake leather NCAA basketball (You’re dreaming if you think I could afford the NBA Spalding one). When the milk crate failed, the best my dad could do was to replace the it with an actual rim and drill it into a piece of plywood for me. It was heaven.
In the article, there were many examples of parents sharing the love of basketball with their children. Sadly, my parents had back breaking labour jobs that often required them to work on weekends. They didn’t have any extra time to devote to any hobbies, as my father would use his spare time to fix up our broken house (it literally had holes in the wall when we first moved in). An organized youth basketball league wasn’t even a known entity amongst my friend group. Even if we did know, the cost of entry made it a non starter. So we would just meet at the park and waited until the bigger, better players went home. I remember one time my mom reminded me as I was leaving the house to go to the park: “Don’t get kicked (recruited) into a gang!”. We eventually found a nice indoor court where we played, every Friday evening, for a $2 entry fee. When some of us couldn’t afford it, we’d let them in the back door, but we didn’t want to “kill the golden goose” so we always tried to help each other out when we were short the two dollars needed.
The highlight from our high school memories of Raptors basketball was being part of an outreach program for underprivileged kids, we got amazing seats behind the backboard at SkyDome and even got to meet Donald Whiteside after the game! I guess Mighty Mouse was busy. I would post pictures but my camera was stolen the next week before I had a chance to develop them. Alas.
It was interesting to see the Raptors embrace AAPI heritage month by featuring one of the writers that happened to be Asian. I’ve also seen panels in which Alex hosted a discussion with Asians of many different backgrounds to have a discussion of rising of anti-Asian racism during the pandemic. The issue is the notion of a month devoted to the people from an area that spans half of the planet is steeped in White supremacy. Even in the “PI”, which is supposed to represent all of the people from the Pacific Islands is problematic, as there are a multitude of differences between the people there. Treating “Asians” as a monolith reinforces the term “racialized”, i.e.; “Not White”.
Which brings me back to being invisible in an article about the Chinese community’s connection to basketball. There are different challenges that are faced within our own culture. Hong Kongers are different from Mainlanders, who are different from Taiwanese. Even within each community, there’re challenges of navigating the experiences of “FOBs” and “CBCs”. All of us are 100% guilty of pushing the LGBTQ community waaaay back into the crevices of our community that we almost never talk about. Intersectionality is so important when discussing discrimination and inequities. Both Alex and I emigrated from Hong Kong, but our experiences growing up in Toronto were very different. He grew up in the suburbs of Markham, and I grew up a stone’s throw from Blake-Boultbee in eastern Toronto. We both experienced being “the other”, but I just wanted to show you a subset of the Chinese community that wasn’t published.
So yes, let’s celebrate Asians when it’s not Asian Heritage Month, but be wary of lumping all of us together. We don’t all look the same, just as our experiences are not the same.
Teachers are People too 