The Ask A Korean blog posted this extremely eloquent and powerful essay by a guy named Jay Caspian Kang that posits the sport of baseball as one of the means by which Asians can (at least for a while) experience what it might mean to be an American.
Here are a couple of excerpts.......
"The irony of our multicultural education is that it provides us with only the vocabulary of the thoroughly entitled and the thoroughly disenfranchised. Asian immigrants stand somewhere in between, but lack the context and the words to express our place..............
..........This season, I will watch the game for the stats, the umpire-specific strike zones, the infield shifts, the pitching changes, and the numbers on the scoreboard. But, when I hear the occasional racist comment in the stands that I might reflexively place upon myself, my intellect will begin to pull apart baseball's patriotic metaphor. But thankfully, the process is cyclic, because whenever an Asian player is met with applause, or when I see a young white or Hispanic or African-American kid in a Choo or Kuroda or Matsui t-shirt, the flood of inclusive, metaphoric language will seal the gaps shut and I will once again be awash in halfway hopeful reverence."
How refreshing that an Asian-American can write about his experience without demonizing or blaming his own culture, community, or parents.
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