Ga Rab Yoon
Sports is a large part of the popular culture, and it is also a powerful form of popular culture in many ways. It is rare to find someone who does not participate in, read, see, or hear about sports. We often go crazy about a sport star, and often identify ourselves with the star. Sometimes people even look like they’re going to a war, when they are cheering their favorite teams. Like this, sports is closely related to our everyday lives, and its power to spread ideas in popular culture is immeasurable. There is one individual who used the power of sports to prove to the people of the United States that stereotypes of Asian athletes are false—Sammy Lee.
Sammy Lee, or Dr. Samuel Lee was a Korean American, born on August 1, 1920 in Fresno, California. As a kid, he had an idea that he wanted to compete in the Olympics, but didn’t know in what category. When he found out that he wanted to do diving, he gained full support of his parents, but only under the condition that he will study and become a doctor. He was able to accomplish both. He became a doctor of medicine, earning his degree from USC in 1947 and back in 1942, he was already the first non-white diver to win the National Diving Championships held in the US. However, it wasn’t enough; he still wanted to compete and win in the Olympic games.
However, he had many troubles along the way to compete in the Olympics, because 1940 and 1944 Olympics were canceled due to World War II. Overall, it took him 16 years to compete in the Olympics, but he finally did it. In 1948, Lee won his gold medal in the 1948 Olympic game in London. He was the first Asian American to win a gold medal for the United States. Later in 1952 Olympics, he won again, making him the first diver to win two gold medals in a row.
Lee’s achievement was ground-breaking and also stereotype-breaking. The typical stereotype of an Asian was that they cannot do good in sports—that they’re simply incompetent athletes by nature. Lee also talks about this issue in one of his interviews, as he says that “Sixty years ago, they said you had to be Caucasian, slender and tall to be a diver…" However, Lee’s gold medals, proved this stereotype to be a false idea, twice in a row. The best part was that it was an Olympic game, which must have been broadcasted to the whole nation. It must have helped to debunk the stereotypes of Asian American athletes in many American minds.
Another significance of Lee’s achievement is that he also helped Americans to acknowledge Asian Americans as genuine, or authentic Americans, too—that they are not forever-foreign, or alien. Logically, Lee had to be an American who won the gold medal for America, not an foreign/alien Asian. If Americans suggested the otherwise, the gold medal would have been someone else’s. Plus, I am sure that many Americans felt very happy at the time, and I think Lee was able to also emotionally unite Asian Americans and the rest of the Americans under the same roof, under happiness.
Lastly, he also educated the ignorant public about the difference in the Asian countries. He says that “other people didn't know what a Korean was (…) they said, ‘You were [either] Japanese, [or] Chinese.’” He “wanted to show my fellow Americans that we, Koreans, had a place in American society.” In fact, many Korean Americans were proud, and they certainly felt like they were more acknowledged when he won the gold medals. He was a source of hope and encouragement for not only Korean Americans but other Asian Americans as well. As I am a Korean myself, I too, feel the same way.
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