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Still, Da Fang kept close watch over her son. After one of Yao's early practices, she arrived at the Rockets' facility with his lunch — a few bags of McDonald's hamburgers and french fries. As Yao gobbled down the food, his teammate Cuttino Mobley emerged from the locker room in a tailored lavender suit. "That s---'s gonna kill ya," he said to Yao, before turning to Da Fang. "Hi, Mrs. Yao." Flashing a seductive smile, Mobley leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. Da Fang recoiled.
Yao appreciated his mother's devotion, but sometimes even a giant can feel suffocated. Back in China, Yao had sometimes avoided going home on his day off simply to escape Da Fang's nagging. "My mother is like a mosquito constantly buzzing around my ears," he once complained to a friend.
Now the buzzing became louder. Yao may have been an adult with an $18 million contract, but he lived under his mother's thumb; early on he even had to ask her for an allowance. After one preseason practice he brought home one of his only Chinese friends in America, Yang Yi, a Shanghainese journalist on assignment in Houston. Da Fang threw a fit when she saw Yang walk through the door. "How did you get here?" she demanded. Yao tried to calm his mother down. But later, when the journalist mentioned the name of Yao's gated community in an article, Da Fang forbade Yao to speak to him again. That evening, during a pregame warmup, Yao went up to Yang and told him gravely, "You're finished. Listen, it's my mother's fault. She's way too sensitive. But meiyou banfa — nothing can be done." Yang later patched things up with Da Fang, but at the time he felt so discomfited that he left Houston two weeks early.
In public Yao never failed to sing his mother's praises. Her chicken soup was his favorite food in the world. Her knowledge of basketball was so great that she should be made a Rockets assistant. Her judgment was so sound that he left all major decisions to her. In private, however, Yao told a friend that he had finally mustered the courage to give her a warning. "You just put up walls around me," Yao told her, "but one day you may notice that you put yourself outside the wall. What will you say then?"
Over the last few years the walls around Yao have gradually come down, giving him more room to breathe. Now 25, he still lives most of the NBA season with his parents in Windsor Park Lakes, where, despite his suggestion that his mother hire a housekeeper, she insists on doing the laundry and cooking all the meals. But Yao has also rented an apartment in downtown Houston for game days and nights, enabling him to avoid the nightmarish Texas traffic — and his mother's cloying affection.
By all accounts, Da Fang is learning to rein in her natural protectiveness. According to her close friends, the matriarch now more readily accepts her son's decision to occasionally live on his own, to take unchaperoned trips with his first and only girlfriend, 1.9 m Chinese national team player Ye Li, and to spend as he pleases his growing pile of cash. Da Fang and her husband have also busied themselves with projects of their own, including the opening of a sports café — Yao Restaurant & Bar — in a Houston strip mall. How fitting that a restaurant, that cliché of the Chinese immigrant community, should also be Da Fang's version of the American Dream.
Born to a poor laborer's family, the former Red Guard came of age in the Cultural Revolution and then, like the rest of China, gradually traded her communist ideals for capitalist goals, all the while keeping one constant — her love for her only son. Yao Ming has come a long way, but it is Da Fang, surely, who has made the greatest leap of all.
Adapted from Operation Yao Ming by Brook Larmer. 2005 by Penguin Group (USA).
Reprinted with permission of Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA), and Brook Larmer.
This excerpt originally appeared in Sports Illustrated.