The first time I saw her she wasn’t even skating. I was flipping through the handful of channels our TV could pick up with its rabbit-ear antenna when I glimpsed her waving from the tallest podium at the 1991 World Figure Skating Championships, dazzling in rhinestone-studded hot magenta, with her high hair-sprayed bangs and million-watt smile. She’s Asian, I thought. There’s an Asian girl on television, and everyone is cheering for her.
I’m far from the only kid who fell hard for Kristi Yamaguchi, world and olympic champion, in the early 1990s. But if you’re an Asian-American woman of a certain age, chances are Yamaguchi might also have been one of the first Asian-American women you saw being publicly celebrated. What many Asian-American kids felt when we watched her and, later, Michelle Kwan in the limelight was more than appreciation, more than fandom. It was recognition — all the more powerful because that feeling was often in such short supply.
Kristi Yamaguchi came along right when I needed her, filling a need I had long felt but didn’t understand. I was an adopted Korean girl growing up in one of the many towns in Oregon that is not Portland, which meant that everyone who cared about me, everyone I saw around the neighborhood, everyone I met in my day-to-day life was white. In my school, where even white girls with brown hair seemed to envy the blondes, I didn’t just feel invisible; I felt like a mistake.
To see a young Japanese-American woman singing our national anthem with a gold medal around her neck was to feel the entire world I knew shift. I couldn’t conceive of Yamaguchi’s victory the way she probably did — as another crucial step on the road to the 1992 Olympics, the fulfillment of long years of training, effort and sacrifice. To my rapt 9-year-old gaze, her triumph felt like a sudden, unexpected gift. Flanked by two white women — Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, who completed the American sweep of the medals — the person who looked most like me was the star, the golden girl. It had never occurred to me that a girl could be nationally adored without being white. It had never occurred to me that Asian-American heroes might exist.
Throughout my childhood, well-meaning adults told me that my race and my heritage weren’t supposed to matter. Yet claims of “colorblindness” and melting-pot platitudes did not stop people from complimenting my English or asking where my parents had gotten me, nor did they prevent my classmates from pulling back their eyes and teaching me slurs I was usually too humiliated to report to anyone. In those years there was no one I could turn to in my confusion, no one who could answer my questions: Where, exactly, did I fit in? Did my adoption mean I was supposed to try to aspire to a whiteness beyond my reach? When other people looked at me, what did they see — an Asian girl, or an American?
When I saw Kristi Yamaguchi beaming from the cover of Newsweek’s 1992 Olympics preview issue, I took it as an encouraging sign. Maybe I hadn’t yet figured out how to be both Asian and American, but Yamaguchi, America’s Olympic sweetheart, seemed to have found her place. That magazine cover occupied a place of honor on my bedroom wall for years. The article hasn’t aged well. Frank Deford describes the rivalry between Yamaguchi and Midori Ito of Japan:
[T]he battle for the gold and all the lucre it earns sets up a duel between two young women named Yamaguchi and Ito, whose bloodlines both stretch back, pure and simple, to the same soft, cherry-blossom days on the one bold little island of Honshu. The twist is, though, that if the powerful Ito is Midori, of Nagoya, the delicate Yamaguchi is Kristi, from the Bay Area, fourth-generation American. It’s the chrysanthemum and the sword — on the ice together, worlds apart.
Comparing the two rivals’ looks, body types and styles on the ice, Deford calls it a “kicker” that Yamaguchi, while “totally of Japanese descent,” exemplified “the stylish Western ideal that the stout little Midori is so envious of.” He mentions the Yamaguchi siblings’ “hopelessly American” interests and seems almost surprised that their parents chose not to open up about the time their families spent in World War II internment camps (“None of them want to dwell on it anymore. Or, if they do, they won’t let us know”). Unsure what Yamaguchi herself thought about her potentially historic role, he concludes that her heritage might just turn out to be her secret weapon: “Certainly, deep within her, she is still Japanese — some of her must be — and if she should win it’s because, while the others have the triple axel, only she has the best of both worlds.”
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