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.