I'm very humbled and honored. I'm very thankful to the Asian-American Community for all their support!
My first dunk ever was in middle school. We were playing, me and my church friends, and I dunked it, and I swear I could not sleep that night.
My audience is God.
It seems like everybody's perception of me is very bipolar. To one group, it's overpaid, overrated; to another group, it's underpaid, underrated, underdog. It's funny to me because there's no real balance.
I just really, really, really hate to lose. Really.
With all the media attention, all the love from the fans, I felt I needed to prove myself. Prove that I'm not a marketing tool, I'm not a ploy to improve attendance. Prove I can play in this league. But I've surrendered that to God. I'm not in a battle with what everybody else thinks anymore.
Not sure if that will benefit me or hurt me, but I know I have the skills and am ready to play in the NBA regardless of my ethnicity.
When you think about your relationship with Christ, it really just affects every aspect of your life. I think a lot of people try to segment off, like, 'This is church, so this is God, this is my daily life, this is my job,' but I think true faith is when it manifests itself in every single aspect of your life.
And people are always saying he deceptively quick, deceptively athletic, and I don't know if that's just because I'm Asian or what it is, but obviously there's going to be stereotypes that you have to fight.
I would be a pastor. It is something I think about doing when my playing days are over.
I want to be a representative and be a role model for the Asian American community.
I agreed to film after my rookie year in Golden State. I was more used to cameras and felt that my journey to the NBA was a story worth sharing. Little did we know how much bigger the platform and documentary would become after Linsanity.
I get scared of a lot of attention. I get scared of the spotlight. And I'm not talking about on the basketball court.
There is so much temptation to hold on to my career even more now. To try to micromanage and dictate every little aspect. But that's not how I want to do things anymore. I'm thinking about how can I trust God more. How can I surrender more? How can I bring him more glory? It's a fight. But it's one I'm going to keep fighting.
I won't let any of my friends become a fan. To me, you're either a friend or you're a fan. That doesn't mean my friends can't support me, because they all do, but they can't treat me differently than they would treat someone else. None of my friends are in awe of me.
I think right now the way society's going, I think role models are important, and kids need direction. If I didn't have that direction growing up, who knows what I could be doing, because I've been lost many times in my life, and I've had to have someone guide me back on the right path.
If I had a day to myself I would just play video games with my brothers.
Faith, family, academics and then sports was the order of priorities in my family. My parents really stuck to these principles when raising me and my two brothers. As long as we took care of everything, they let us play as much basketball as we wanted.
Coming out of college into the draft, being Asian-American and being from Harvard, that's not going to be an advantage because of stereotypes.
In many ways, the longer I live, I understand that there are so many things outside my control. That's why I believe faith is such a big part of the story. There are so many things that were orchestrated by God, that were put into place to make this perfect storm, that created Linsanity.
