Apparently a woman named Holland Christensen from Tennessee wanted a tattoo on her ankle. Like many other unoriginal white people she wanted her ink to be some Chinese characters. I’ve written about this before but I think it’s absolutely stupid for people to get Chinese character tattoos especially when they have no idea how to read Chinese. For the most part, these type of people think it just looks “cool” without having any idea about the language or the history of the Chinese people. There’s a certain irony behind white people who have Chinese character tattoos that then go and order “chop suey“.
Despite her claim of being “smart”, Christensen said she used the Internet to provide her the characters she wanted plastered on her ankle and didn’t bother to authenticate the results. Someone who gave her the translation deserves a lot of credit for trolling this lady in the best way. As you might have guessed, instead of giving the correct translation, they gave her the characters for Jeremy Lin’s name. For those who don’t follow basketball, Jeremy Lin is an NBA player for the Charlotte Hornets.
Christensen went ahead and got the tattoo and only afterwards did she check the translation. She states that when someone told her it was actually Jeremy Lin’s name, she had never heard of him before. The whole story is described to the world in her video above.
Weirdly, instead of scheduling an immediate tattoo removal procedure, she decided to research Lin’s career. She wound up deciding to attend one of Lin’s games. Christensen went onto Reddit to find someone who would accompany her to the game. She did wind up going to one of his games though she was not able to meet Lin as she had hoped. To everyone’s surprise, Lin himself made another post on Reddit where he addressed the wayward tattoo.
While all of this sorta worked out in the end, it does nothing to change my mind about these type of tattoos. Like do you think there’s some Chinese woman in Shanghai right now who has Curt Shilling’s name inked on her shoulder?