Basketball is amazingly popular in China. It’s so popular that Houston Rockets’ games are shown on the local buses here in Qingdao. And when asked what they do when they’re not in class, my male students invariably give one of two answers. They either play World of Warcraft, or they play basketball.

When I ask students how long they’ve been interested in basketball, most of them tell me since Yao Ming joined the NBA. Yao Ming, of course, is the super-engineered, robotic killing machine created by an evil wizard to destroy America. Wait…no…that’s the Brothers Haier. But according to this TIME magazine article from a couple of years ago, Yao Ming was engineered – by the CPC.

Personally, the article leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It hints at something that it’s unable to deliver. And suggesting that Yao’s mom and dad were strong-armed into breeding some kind of wunderballer…well, that kind of accusation demands proof. Maybe it exists in the 350-page book written by former Newsweek Shanghai bureau chief, Brook Larmer, but I doubt it.

The only reason I mention the article is this bit about Yao’s mom, Da Fang, a former player in China’s national women’s league.

On the night of Yao’s highly anticipated home debut, a pre-season game against the Philadelphia 76ers, his parents were nowhere to be found in the stands. Instead, they were at Windsor Park Lakes, waiting for the cable company to come to install their TV service. When somebody suggested they reschedule the cable guy so they could see their son’s game, Da Fang demurred, “No, the serviceman told us to wait for him.” It was a perfectly Chinese response, rooted in a culture of pliancy and long suffering.

Now, if I could just get that kind of response from those “pliant, long suffering” women when queuing for the bus. I bet I know where Yao learned to throw elbows.