The Wife, Brother-in-law, and I watched the Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony last night, and what struck me as cameras panned over the Team USA boat was that there were a fair number of Asian faces. We have talked about gymnasts Sunisa Lee, Asher Hong, and Leanne Wong as being part of the USA Olympic team, but there are other AAPI to watch like breaker Sunny Choi. Interestingly enough, there are other Asian Americans are not on the US team.
I enjoyed the above video, and I find Sunny Choi’s story fascinating. At 35, she is an older athlete who gave up what had to have been a lucrative career as Director of Global Creative Operations at Estee Lauder to pursue her breakdancing dreams. Another Asian American, Logan Edra, joins Choi on the Team USA breaking team.
The Bay Area, with its large Asian American population, has a number of Asian Americans in Olympic sports that tend to be dominated by Asians. Twins Annie and Kerry Xu from San Jose are joined by Vinson Chiu of Milpitas, Jennie Gai of Fremont, and Joshua Yuan of San Mateo on the badminton team. Along with Beiwen Zhang, they make the entire Team USA Badminton Team Asian American. Lily Zhang of Palo Alto and Rachel Sung of Mountain View are on the Table Tennis team and train at 888 Table Tennis in the Bay Area. What an incredibly Asian American name for a training center! Zhang and Sung are joined by Amy Wang and Kanak Jha, making Team USA Table Tennis also entirely Asian American.
There are other Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders that are in other sports. Team USA Mens Volleyball has three athletes from Hawaii: Eric Shoji, Micah Christenson, and Micah Ma’a. Other volleyball athletes Garrett Muagututia and Justine Wong-Orantes are from California. Jack Yonezuka, from a long line of judoka, competes for the Team USA Judo.
As the Olympics already started when I posted this, there are already some Asian American athletes who have had their moment. In particular, Torri Huske won the gold in the 100 meter butterfly a day after she won a silver in the 4×100-meter freestyle relay. I have hope that this kind of AAPI representation and success for Team USA will help chip away at the perpetual foreigner stereotype. A distant hope admittedly, but a hope nonetheless.
I am sure that I missed many other Asian Americans in the Olympics. If you know of some other notable ones that I did not include, please let me know in the comments.
(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license..)
