Ming dynasty in the Year of the Yao

I turn double-six 60 days before Yao Ming turns 31 in September, but he is retiring as a professional basketball player for the Houston Rockets, with thickly lined dollar-denominated pockets while I teach Oral English to rocket ship designers and engineers at Shenyang Aerospace University on Renminbi stipend appropriate for the mendicant monks of Caesaria! But as the tallest player in the American league, we dare not compare our diminutive 5’4” shrinking stature to the titan of the hoops. An apple does not compare next to a lemon.

Something does not sit well, though. We are 10 quarters short on our SS so we will not receive any retirement benefits from the shrunk and threatened SS of the American economy. Had the CNMI retirement system been in better health, we might have fared better; it sucked what would have been my SS contribution on the promise that the government would add a more generous counterpart. Not. GovCNMI defaulted on contributions before the RF taga pillars even started to get shaky. Having to deal with a cervical bone disorder, we withdrew our contribution sans a penny from the government counterpart so the whammy was doubly painful.

But this is not about us. It is about basketball. And Yao Ming.

Soccer is the international spectator sport as basketball is the global participation sport. One of my Chinese students called himself “Kobe” for NBA’s Bryant, and being a sports paraphernalia endorser, Kobe this week hung out in old Manila town where basketball has taken the glitter of the old pintakasi.

Basketball is a national Filipino pastime even if a majority of the population is vertically challenged. And like old cockfight aficionados, some love it more than their spouses, and the intensity of the games and audiences invariably reduce machos to tears and fistfights. If there is anything Pinoys might contribute to Chamolinia, and reduce health debilitation from diabetes-prone taotao tano/taotao tasi, the showy oval dribble and fancy footwork might just do the trick.

Yao Ming did wonders to basketball in China. OK. The NBA saw a market and moved into it with deliberate speed. Sale of sports paraphernalia initially ordered for the global market from China’s factories has since flooded the domestic market; beer consumption (Bud, the Pacific regional beverage, and NBA endorser, now outsells Harbin’s Snow in Dong Bei) has risen considerably. Racially conscious Chinese dislike dark skin (being tanned means one manually labors in the field, a China-Japan-Korea dislike), and are afraid of Africans, but that has been somewhat overcome with the prominence of African-American star players in China’s media ads.

The tall rebounder for the Houston Rockets had a shaky introduction to the NBA, following Shaquille O’Neal’s attempt at humor before they met when he was quoted as saying, “Tell Yao Ming, ching-chong-yang-wah-ah-soh” (“ching-chong” is a pejorative term applied to Sino faces, along with the Japanese “ah soh”), a meaningless phrase that the media immediately pounced on as racially inappropriate. Yao Ming comported himself throughout all the taunts in statesman-like composure, endearing himself to his fans and co-players. He leaves the Rockets well respected, if not loved.

I remember Texas ’71 working in a summer camp for inner city kids under the auspices of the Highland Park UMC next to Southern Methodist U, which at the time had a rather unlikely progressive youth pastor. The Caucasian director did not hesitate to remind staff of our unified effort in dealing with the diversity of clientele and that all would be radically honest in dealing with the advantages of our skins. “Vergara,” she would holler on the grounds, “I need your color,” when she needed to deal with Mex-Tex participants from the juvenile home.

Yao Ming operated out of a more liberal social context (Houston is to the left of Dallas-Fort Worth, though left in Texas is a relative term) where the pecking order began with the Aryan well-to-do, northern Europeans, southerners and country westerns, then the hillbillies, before the various layers of African-Americans, followed by the Latinos before any Asians. Anyone who dealt with the practices of racism in that period would concede that the actuations of those on the top layer, either in condescension or outright abuse, would be the same treatment afforded layers down the line by subsequent groups. Hitting bottom at the time were the Chinese, bested by Filipinos only because the latter spoke some semblance of English.

Yao Ming, along with the times, would change that pecking order; also, China’s relationship to basketball. At each of the dormitory clusters at Shenyang Aerospace University, true also in the other universities, are 20 hoop boards per outdoor court where male and female students daily bounce the rubber. That’s a lot of basketball players, and with the improvement on nutrition, native height is hitting the NBA line!

We will continue instructing some of them to speak English. But Yao Ming had already gotten them affixed to the language of the court. We’ve started them on English songs; now we have to teach them how to properly cuss in English under the hoops, NBA-style! Not.