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| BEIJING — Tiffany Chin scanned the arena at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships last month and marveled at how things had changed. |
| Chin won the national title in 1985. She was a happy-go-lucky teenager back then, but savvy enough to realize that the winners who had come before her had not looked like her, that few people in the rinks where she skated ever did. |
| The scene last month was different. Asian American skaters populated the singles and pairs and ice dancing competitions. They appeared up and down the standings in the senior and junior contests. And by the end of the week, they filled the roster of the Olympic team. |
| For the second consecutive Winter Games, four of the six figure skaters who arrived to represent the United States in the singles events were Asian American: Karen Chen, Nathan Chen, Alysa Liu and Vincent Zhou. A fifth Asian American skater, Madison Chock, is competing in the ice dancing event. |
| “There are so many,” Chin said. “And that is so exciting.” |
| In the United States, a country where Asians and sports are not often intertwined in the popular imagination, figure skating is now plainly an Asian American sport. Asians make up around 7 percent of the American population but have become vividly overrepresented in ice rinks and competitions at every level, from coast to coast. |
| Gradually, they have transformed a sport that, until the 1990s, was almost uniformly white. They have infused competitions with music that draws from their Asian heritage, bolstered a pipeline that could solidify their hold on the sport and, in a climate of anxiety about anti-Asian violence, navigated the perils of hate on social media while insisting on expressing their roots. |
| “I think representation is really important,” said Nathan Chen, a Chinese American who was also a member of the Olympic team in 2018, when seven of the 14 skaters were Asian American. “So to continue seeing faces that kind of look like yours on TV doing really cool things, I think, is still useful to a young kid.” |
| Amid the various factors behind this phenomenon, almost every Asian American skater mentions being inspired by a chain of early pioneers. |
| Chin provided such a spark for Kristi Yamaguchi, four years her junior, who recalled watching Chin whenever she came to the Bay Area, where Yamaguchi grew up, marveling at her technique and even asking once for her autograph. |
| “I always looked up to her,” said Yamaguchi, a two-time world champion, who became a household name after winning a gold medal at the 1992 Games. “There was definitely that kinship, that inherent connection, because she is Asian American.” |
| Liu, 16, a two-time U.S. champion, began skating, in part, because her father, Arthur Liu, had become such a big fan of Michelle Kwan — a two-time Olympic medalist (1998, 2002), five-time world champion and nine-time national champion — after immigrating to the United States from China three decades ago. |
| “I watched figure skating all the time,” he said. “When I had Alysa, my office was two blocks away from the Oakland Ice Center, and I figured, let’s see if she likes it.” |
| In some ways, it has seemed like a matter of being in the right place at the right time. |
| The success of Yamaguchi and Kwan came at a time when figure skating was near the peak of its popularity in the United States (it has faded considerably since then) and on the heels of a surge in new rinks around the country. |
| Chin, Yamaguchi and Kwan all grew up in California, and the state, with its considerable Asian population, remains a center of gravity for the sport today. Karen Chen, Chock, Liu and Zhou, for instance, were all born in California. |
| When Kwan opened an ice rink in Artesia, Calif., in 2005, it quickly became a magnet for Asian families from the area. Chin, who coaches now in Southern California, said around 40 percent of her pupils were Asian. And Californians are not only representing America: Zhu Yi (also known as Beverly Zhu), who is from Los Angeles, is competing for China this year after winning the U.S. novice title in 2018. |
| Other explanations — that Asians excel because they tend to have smaller bodies or because their parents are demanding, so-called tiger parents — are often floated, including by some Asian Americans, but experts tend to dismiss such theories outright. |
| “Every race has body types that would be successful in figure skating,” said Christina Chin, who teaches a sports sociology course at Cal State Fullerton. “It’s the cultural acceptance, the societal pressures or opportunities, the structural forces and institutions that make it possible.” |
| People do tend to agree on one factor in explaining why Asian Americans have broken through in figure skating, while other minority groups in the United States have not: Figure skating is expensive, and East Asians, as an immigrant group, have the highest average household income in the country. |
| Asians have long struggled with a lack of representation in American popular culture. For these skaters, then, seeing elements of themselves mirrored in top athletes could be a soul-stirring experience. |
| Mirai Nagasu, a former national champion and two-time Olympian (2010, 2018), grew up working at her parents’ Japanese restaurant, where they eked out enough money to pay for her lessons. Nagasu laughed remembering how much it meant to her, as a young skater, to learn that Kwan’s parents had owned a restaurant, too. (Chin’s parents also owned a Chinese restaurant, and Liu’s father worked in one before she was born.) |
| Naomi Nari Nam, who won a silver medal at the 1999 national championships, noted that the rise of Asian American participation had also coincided with the success of skaters from East Asia, like Yuna Kim of South Korea. |
| “When I started skating, I was the one out of two Asian skaters in my rink, in Costa Mesa, Calif.,” said Nam, whose success led to an appearance on “The Tonight Show” at age 13 and a run of television appearances and commercials in Korea. “I coach now in Lakewood, Calif., and around 90 percent of my clientele is Asian or half Asian.” |
| Still, the sport was not always accommodating to them. |
| When Chin skated, she was often called “China Doll” by commentators and journalists. Articles from the time refer to her “porcelain complexion” and “Oriental roots.” She was called a “siamese cat” and “unemotional” and an “exotic beauty.” |
| Nam was placed in an etiquette class by her coach so she could learn how to interact with the predominantly white officials and judges who could decide her fate in skating. |
| “He knew that it was a different culture,” Nam said. |
| Skaters said that while explicit racism inside figure skating felt rare, many acknowledged that they received racist comments on social media. Alysa Liu learned over time to tune out harassing messages. But some incidents, in a time when violence and hate against Asian Americans have increased, have been harder to ignore. Liu, who has spoken about her growing awareness of social issues, called her father one recent night, struggling to sleep after reading about the shooting of a 71-year-old Chinese man in Chicago. |
| “She was crying,” Arthur Liu said. “Crying hard.” |
| At the 2018 Games, Nagasu’s excitement over becoming the first American woman to land a triple axel in Olympic competition was muted by a viral tweet from a columnist for the opinion section at The New York Times who wrote, “Immigrants: They get the job done,” based on a line from “Hamilton.” Nagasu, who was born in Montebello, Calif., had declined to comment on it then. But in an interview last month she said, “It was not appropriate.” |
| Over time, Asian American skaters have become more comfortable publicly asserting their identities. |
| At the 2018 Games, Nathan Chen wore an outfit from the Chinese American designer Vera Wang and skated to the music of “Mao’s Last Dancer,” a 2009 film about the Chinese ballet dancer Li Cunxin. |
| Karen Chen, who took Chinese dance classes as a child, has incorporated traditional fans and other Chinese objects into show numbers. She has been skating this season to “The Butterfly Lovers’ Violin Concerto,” which she called “a Chinese classic.” |
| “I think my ethnicity and cultural background has a huge impact on me as a person, even in skating,” she said. “It’s stuff that inspires me, and it does make me proud of who I am and who I’ve become.” |
| Zhou, who had to withdraw from the Games on Monday after testing positive for the coronavirus, has skated exhibition performances to the music of Joji, a pop singer from Japan, and last week skated in the team event to the theme from the 2000 Ang Lee film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” |
| “Everybody is celebrating Chinese New Year right now,” Zhou said. “It’s the Year of the Tiger, and I was born in the Year of the Dragon, so it’s kind of perfect.” |
| As a group, these skaters have enjoyed a kind of hidden comfort zone on the team, a calmness afforded by not being the Only One. |
| Zhou’s mother has become known for inviting the skaters over to her place for home cooking. |
| Karen Chen said she had meaningful conversations with Nathan Chen about managing the pressure and expectations of immigrant parents, about addressing mental health in a community in which it is not often prioritized. (Studies regularly show Asian Americans, as a racial group, are among the least likely in this country to seek mental health services.) |
| More lightheartedly, Karen Chen pointed out that all four Asian American singles skaters on the team spoke Mandarin, at varying levels of proficiency. She had been brushing up before arriving here. |
| “I think Nathan’s Chinese is the worst,” she said, laughing. “I can say confidently that’s one thing I am better than Nathan at.” |
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