Ecstatic Taiwanese claim Knicks' Lin as their own

With only a handful of foreign embassies, and a political leadership forced into international invisibility, it's not surprising that the 23 million people of Taiwan feel their island home doesn't always get the respect it deserves. Perhaps that's why they're now embracing emerging New York Knicks star Jeremy Lin as one of their own, reveling in his basketball exploits with a passion rare for a place better known for its flat screen TVs and computer chips. Lin was born and raised in the United States, and his maternal grandmother comes from China, but his parents spent their formative years in Taiwan, and that's enough for people here to see him as a true-blue son of the island. The Harvard graduate's remarkably rapid rise from NBA obscurity to stardom appeals to the Taiwanese as embodying the virtues they say propelled their island from agricultural backwater to high-tech powerhouse: hard work, devotion to family and modesty. "Jeremy Lin may not consider himself a Taiwanese, and his success has had nothing to do with Taiwan, but Taiwanese regard him as one of their own," said political scientist Liu Bi-rong of Taipei's Soochow University. "Now he has taken the world by storm, and they are proud and enthralled by what he has done." Across the 100-mile Taiwan Strait, China too is claiming Lin as a native son, pointing to his grandmother's roots in the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang as proof of his Chinese-ness. He is being touted as the next big Chinese sports star after Houston Rockets center Yao Ming, whose retirement last year has tested the NBA's deep-seated popularity on the mainland. China's pride of ownership is all too familiar to most Taiwanese, who are constantly bombarded by Beijing's assertions that they live in a political never-never land, lacking all the elementary accouterments of statehood. The two sides split amid civil war in 1949, and China claims the democratic island as its own, to be brought back into the fold by persuasion if possible, by force if necessary. Watching Lin's latest performance against the Sacramento Kings at a Taipei sports bar Thursday morning, 22-year-old saleswoman Tsai Shu-fan dismissed China's Lin identification with a barely disguised sneer. "He is a native of Changhua, where his parents came from," she said. "He is not a Chinese."