You’re nobody anymore until you’ve been made the subject of Taiwanese animation.
We can’t say we entirely get the phenomenon, but the Rockets’ Yao Ming joins Al Gore, Charlie Sheen and other celebrities as the star of one of these things on the occasion of his retirement.
It seems to include his mother giving birth to a basketball, and Yao riding a shark over a lake full of money, but we could be wrong.
This article appears in Jul 21-27, 2011.