Name: 【TEDx】How Laughing at Yourself Can Change the World | Brad Jenkins | TEDxCapeMay
Uploaded: 2018-02-12T12:18:17.000Z
Duration: 17 min 12 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Translator: Theresa Ranft Reviewer: Peter van de Ven

and I have a quick confession before I start.

And that is, at the tender age of nine years old,

I thought of myself as a very strong black man.

And I heard a little bit of nervous laughter.

It was like a combination of "Shaft" and LeVar Burton from "Reading Rainbow."

this is my dad here and this is my beautiful mother.

This is when they met in Seoul, South Korea.

He was shot a couple of times in Vietnam.

And my parents met, and they fell in love,

This is me, Brad, this is the guy in the middle,

This is my brother, Sean, to the left, who's in the audience.

and this is the reason why I thought of myself as a strong black man.

who was a great person, a great American.

he decided that I needed to go to basketball camp.

I didn't know if there were tents in the court,

because my father enrolled me in a basketball camp in downtown Trenton.

We lived in Trenton as well, but we live in Hamilton,

which is very different, demographically speaking.

And this camp, none of my friends were going to, it was just me.

And so, as we're driving up to this camp,

I had that, you know, that kind of nervous pit in your stomach,

you're just like, "Uh! Man! I'm not going to know anyone.

And as I walked into the gym, I looked out,

and I saw a sea of black kids and their parents and their families.

And I thought to myself, "Oh, thank God, my people!

to my brothers and sisters earlier in my life?"

And so, my dad got in the car and I was fired up.

we had defensive drills and we had dribbling drills.

And in the afternoon, we had our first scrimmage game.

And as I mentioned, I was extremely fired up.

I had fake Air Jordans because my parents were cheap.

And as I was dribbling the ball up the court for the first time,

they were looking at me, I was looking at them.

and I remember the sound of it to this day.

It was like - it was like a symphony orchestra really.

and there was a bass, and there was an alto.

"Chinese boy! Chinese boy! Pass me the ball, Chinese boy!"

"Hey, yo! Chinese boy! Move it, man, pass it, pass it!"

And I'm dribbling up the court and I'm saying,

"Who is the Chinese boy that they are referring to?"

And then I realized, "Oh, they're talking to me."

I literally thought to myself, "I'm Chinese!"

And so, I passed the ball, and the rest of the game I was distraught.

Every time the ball was passed to me, I'd just pass the ball away

because I really was embarrassed, to be honest.

At the end of the day, my father picked me up from camp,

And I said, "Well, dad, apparently, I'm Chinese!"

And so, I tell my father the story and, you know,

I've heard my father laugh over the years, over the course of my life,

but he had never laughed so hard as when I told him this story.

And I didn't think it was funny, I didn't think it was funny at all.

In fact, you know, this was my identity -

granted, it was a nine-year-old identity, but it was shattered.

"You know what, I'm not going back to this camp."

Subtitles ListPlay Video

【TEDx】How Laughing at Yourself Can Change the World | Brad Jenkins | TEDxCapeMay

incredible

genuine

crisis

negative