What does Yao think about race relations in the league, or in America in general?
Yao has, clearly, gotten along well with all of his teammates, regardless of race. I think that for all of them it was completely new—and it wasn’t highly charged in the way that black-white relations sometimes are on an American sports team. And I don’t think that Yao has a strong opinion about race relations in America. You have to realize that he grew up in China and spent many of his formative years in sports schools. It’s foreign territory for him—it’s like asking Steve Francis about the Opium War. There was an incident early on in which Shaquille O’Neal made what was taken by many to be a racist remark about Yao in an interview—he said, “Tell Yao Ming, ‘Ching chong yang wah ah so.’ ” Yao handled the Shaq comments beautifully, and some of the credit has to go to the Rockets. They have Mandarin-speaking staff who saw this issue building on Chinese Web sites, and they warned Yao. But the bottom line is that Yao handled it gracefully, in part because he had no idea how thin the ice w
