Yao's mother stabilizing force during rookie season
He's an international sensation, and he's quickly becoming one of the best players in the NBA. When it's all said and done, though, Yao Ming is still a 22-year-old kid who is halfway around the world away from home. How many of us could make the adjustment- new country, new language, high expectations, different food, sudden fame- that Yao is having to make? Like any of us, having Mom around is bound to make a difference.
"I want to give him support," she said. "I want to be able to provide a place where he can feel at home, so that when he has worries outside, when he comes back, he has something to rely on.
"I think a good mother and a good father can do that. I worry about him. I see the pressure. I worry."
But she protects him. Eventually, as with all mothers and sons, he will leave the security of that embrace. But he is in many ways entering a new life with the Rockets, experiencing its possibilities for the first time. And as with children testing themselves, he ends each day back in the world's safest place, his mother's home.
Yao, 22, does not deny the pressure on him. He has often said there is more attention on him than on any other rookie. But he is Chinese, which he said requires that he must be understated. He knows the attention he faces cannot even be compared with another NBA rookie.
The pressure on Yao, the scrutiny and judgment, the demands and responsibilities, go so far beyond all precedent that to measure it in sports terms is laughably inadequate.
He cannot insulate himself with blissful ignorance and knows he has become such an enormous source of pride in China, where he is watched even more closely than he is in the United States and where so much of his heart remains. He knows about the harsh rush to judgment of his awkward first NBA steps, that NBA players are increasingly anxious to test and measure him and that the Rockets have pinned so many of their hopes on him.
Yao may be having to shoulder the expectations of an entire nation, but when the game is over he knows that there is at least one person who wants nothing but the best for him.
"There are so many people watching him, I am proud of him, but I also worry," Fang [Feng Di] said. "People can see it how they want to see it. Whatever somebody sees is their truth."
He was sent in many ways to become an ambassador of those ideas and to build momentum and talent for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing. And he is too aware of all those demands to protect himself by naively pretending he is just a basketball player, even if as the first foreign professional ever taken first in the NBA draft, that would be pressure enough.
"I feel a lot of pressure on me," he said through his interpreter and companion Colin Pine. "But I feel it every day. I am used to it.
"It is a bit of a burden on me, but I have to realize it's a responsibility I have to shoulder."
Yao has faced the burden with a blend of his mother's gentle affability and his father's quick wit. He has disarmed and charmed the media that surround him and won over those who doubted him. (They should not feel bad about their predictions. Even his mother, once an accomplished player for the Chinese national team, said she did not expect Yao to succeed to this degree so quickly.)
He has so successfully seemed to handle the demands and scrutiny that there have been few signs that it has bothered him. Even Pine, who lives with Yao and his mother and acts as Yao's tour guide through America, said he has never seen an indication the pressure has gotten to him.
But Fang knows better. Even if no one else sees the pressure show itself on her son's face, she does. Yao does not argue.
"I do see the pressure on him," Fang said. "And I hope that I can help, help him to relax. I worry. If he worries, I worry. If he's happy, I'm happy. We often talk about it at home.
"A mother knows her son."
Indeed.
