‘The Sense of Wonder’ puts a fictional spin on Jeremy Lin’s ascendance
Matthew Salesses’s novel follows an Asian American basketball player whose toughest contests are off the court
Review by Ron Charles
January 11, 2023 at 8:00 a.m. EST
In early 2012, Jeremy Lin, the first Taiwanese American in the NBA, led the New York Knicks out of a miserable slump to win seven games in a row. The cover of Sports Illustrated trumpeted Lin’s “sudden and spectacular ascent,” and fans around the world went crazy with Linsanity!
Beyond his opponents on the court, though, Lin also had to contend with racist taunts from the media. A [black] Fox Sports columnist mocked Lin’s genitals. And when the Knicks’ winning streak broke, an editor at ESPN posted a photo of Lin with the headline: “Chink in the Armor.”
For Matthew Salesses, a Korean American writer and avid basketball fan, those responses to Lin epitomized the peculiar species of racism that Asian Americans face in the United States. Soon after the ESPN incident, Salesses published a deeply personal essay in which he wrote: “When the disparagements came — as we feared and maybe suspected they would but hoped they wouldn’t — it was like that first time looking in the mirror. We realized that for all of Jeremy Lin’s accomplishments, we as Asians are still different, are still seen differently than other races by the vast majority of Americans.”
Now, Salesses has transformed his thoughts on Lin into an insightful novel called “The Sense of Wonder.” That long decade of reflection included the death of Salesses’s young wife, the rise of Korean television in the United States and the mass shooting of Asian American spa workers in Atlanta. Ideally, we’re willing to think about the intersection of tragedy, pop culture and anti-Asian prejudice in a way we weren’t a decade ago.
Salesses’s protagonist is Won Lee, a 6-foot-2 point guard on a one-year contract with the Knicks. … He scores 25 points and earns the Knicks their first win in 11 games. …
All over the world, the media dubs this amazing winning streak the Wonder. “People compared the Wonder to a fairy tale,” Won says, “and like a fairy tale, the trouble was the ever after.” Because, you see, Won is never just playing basketball; he’s simultaneously playing an exhausting game designed by White people to idealize him, dismiss him and exoticize him while he dutifully pretends he doesn’t see color.