Jeremy Lin and pro basketball's glass slipper

My friend is a 26-year-old educated, attractive Chinese-Canadian with a great job, a new condo and a steady boyfriend. But the man she's talking about is not her boyfriend.

"I'd marry him, I really would."

But you've never met him, I remind her. Until this week you didn't even know he existed.

"What's not to like? He's Asian, he's Christian. He went to Harvard. He's successful. He's cute, he's tall."

Aren't you already engaged?

"If Jeremy Lin wants to marry me, I'd marry him, tomorrow, this week, I don't care. He's perfect. I'd take him like that!"

It's disconcerting because I'm not sure that she's not serious.

If she's joking, it's because Lin, the phenomenal new point guard for the New York Knicks, ticks so many boxes that he is almost too perfect, a paragon of achievement, skill and virtue.

As an athlete, his performance in leading the moribund Knicks to seven straight victories made him a hero to New Yorkers within a fortnight and seems to have the entire NBA, maybe even the entire sport-watching world, looking on in delight.

Bill Simmons who wrote the bestseller The Book of Basketball says he's never seen anything like it. "People don't come out of nowhere in the NBA."

When Lin destroyed the Toronto Raptors earlier this week with a game-winning three pointer with 0.5 seconds left to play, even the hometown crowd cheered.

They are cheering in other parts of the world, too. In Taiwan, where Lin's parents come from, the Knicks games are carried live on morning television and then replayed two more times during the day.

Taiwan appears to have moved beyond Lin-sanity into a state of perpetual Lin-chantment.

But what about that other China, the home to some 300 million-plus basketball fans? How far around the world does a Cinderella story with religious overtones really travel?

Beijing's cabbies

"The first couple of years I was in Beijing if the Rockets were playing it would be on a loop on Channel CCTV 5," Adrienne Mong, a reporter with NBC who lives in Beijing told me on CBC Radio's Day 6.

Adrienne is American, in fact she's from New York, and the reason for the interest in the Houston Rockets of course was because of their former centre, Yao Ming, China's most famous NBA star, who retired last summer because of injuries.

Mong says Jeremy Lin is getting considerable attention in China but not as much as you might expect. She was surprised, for instance, that Lin had no profile with Beijing's taxi drivers.

"I was curious, particularly because Beijing cabbies have the radio on all the time," Mong said. "One of the drivers had the 24-hour news station on. All of these stations are state run. And I didn't hear any mention of Jeremy Lin or the NBA or the Knicks.

"So I asked the driver if he knows this guy Lin Shou-Hao (Lin's Chinese name) and he said 'no, the only basketball player I know is Yao Ming.'"

The Taiwan thing

Mong says there are probably two reasons why Linsanity is not sweeping through the Chinese mainland.

One is that his parents are from Taiwan, the island state of 23 million that China would like to bring under its control. The other is that he's a self-avowed Christian.

"This is something that would sit uneasily with officialdom in mainland China," Mong says. "Ordinary Chinese don't even know what to make of his references to God. It's not something that figures very largely in their daily lives."

That Knicks games are not being broadcast that much in China right now may have something to do with NBA rights issues. But the fact that there are almost always Taiwanese flags in every stadium Lin plays in, including when he was in Toronto, may factor into this as well.

Lin's account on Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, has half a million followers, which seems like a lot until you look at the overall numbers.

"One of the things you try to give context to when you're reporting from China is scale," Mong points out. "China has 1.3 billion people and it's easy to be dazzled by numbers."

By comparison, Yi Jianlian, the only other Chinese player in the NBA, and a bit of a journeyman, has six and a half million followers.

Línfēngkuáng

Undoubtedly, Lin's profile in China will increase over time.

In keeping with the rest of the world, the Chinese already have a word for Linsanity — Línfēngkuáng.

When it comes to Asian-Canadians and Asian-Americans, it's hard to imagine him being any more popular than he is right now.

His winning narrative — the overlooked bench player from an Ivy League school who became a superstar — and the role he's played in raising a New York team from mediocrity to contender make him one the best things to ever happen to the NBA, particularly in this lockout-shortened season.

Still, in the self-absorbed world that is the NBA, this failure to spot Lin's potential seems inexplicable and has prompted no end of media talk about whether race was a factor.

Bill Simmons, for one, doesn't think it is.

"I'd argue that his Harvard pedigree caused people to overlook him just as much as his ethnicity," he wrote in his sports blog.

"The real problem was threefold: He didn't blow anyone away during his Golden State stint last year; he played a position that was pretty filled throughout the league; and because of the lockout, he didn't have a chance to blow anyone away during training camp."

Now that Lin is getting that chance, nothing about him is overlooked, from his race to his religion. When he was asked in Toronto how he accounted for his singular success he said simply, "I think it's a miracle from God is the way I would describe it."

Another small miracle, he left Toronto without proposing marriage to my friend who watched the game on Tuesday night on TV with her boyfriend. It was, after all, Valentine's Day.