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The 3.8-million strong community boasts a number of bona fide celebrities.

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By Sujeet Rajan

In one of the most high-profile sports signings of the year, NBA's Houston Rockets recently signed Chinese American basketball star Jeremy Lin for $25 million over four years. Part of the reason the Rockets signed Lin, who has starred in only a handful of NBA games until now, was his marketing potential, especially among the Chinese Americans in the Houston area.

Since his departure, the Forbes magazine reported that the share value of Madison Square Garden, the home games venue of Lin's former team New York Knicks, plummeted by more than $93 million.

Lin's meteoric rise earlier this year as the first big league star athlete from the Chinese American community — the largest Asian American group — had become a global media story. Yet, the Harvard graduate is not the first bona fide celebrity from the community.

The 3.8-million strong Chinese American community has a host of international modern icons like film star Bruce Lee, director Ang Lee, cellist Yo Yo Ma, the co-founder of Yahoo!, Jerry Yang, and fashion designer Vera Wang, among many super achievers in different walks of life, to idolise as their own here, but Chinese Americans still revere Yung Wing, the first Chinese student to graduate from a US university, from Yale College in 1854.

Continue reading this story at The Economic Times...