8 Asians

Last February, I had blogged about the premiere of the fourteenth season of The Amazing Race with Tammy & Victor being an Asian American older brother & young sister team. Well, Tammy & Victor are the victors, winning one million dollars and the various travel prizes they won coming in first in various legs of the race. Congratulations to them both!

In a come from behind move with Victor beating out Luke (who got first to the final road block task), Victor quickly and correctly identified and ordered eleven surf boards with symbols from each leg of the race, allowing team Tammy & Victor to get to a cab and to the finish line first. The only real team meltdown that Tammy & Victor had was when they were arguing with each other when Tammy thought Victor was leading them the wrong way in Romania, and was being stubborn and finally relented to Tammy’s suggestion of backtracking.

The next-to-the last leg of the race had Tammy & Victor at a slight advantage when they were in Beijing — they had both been to Beijing before and spoke Mandarin Chinese. But there is also a lot of luck involved in The Amazing Race, mostly whether or not a team gets a taxi driver who knows where they are actually going or possibly being on a delayed flight, which happened to Tammy & Victor early on, causing them to be the leading team to a trailing team.

Tammy & Victor were the strongest team overall, as they had come in first in four of the previous legs of the race; the mother and deaf-son team of Margie & Luke had won three of the previous legs of the race, and the former cheerleader team of Jaime & Cara had won none, yet came in second in the final leg to Tammy & Victor.

What cracked me up with Tammy & Victor throughout the race was that both of them would make comments every so often they would make self-deprecating comments about themselves:  Victor saying “that’s Asian engineering” when they completed building a tall wall of logs, or when they were in China and saying that they had to win that leg or they would bring shame to their parents, or in the final episode, when Tammy said she could be more than a “geeky math nerd.”

Tammy & Victor now join an illustrative group of Asian American reality television winners such as Survivor’s Yul Kwon, Last Comic Standing’s Dat Phan, and I am sure others. I hope to see more Asian Americans on reality TV, whether or not they win the show. And I really do hope to be able to meet Tammy & Victor – I’m sure I know someone in the San Francisco Bay Area that is connected to either of them within one degree or two of Facebook.  Hint, hint.