During a talk at the New Yorker festival this month, Lin recalled that as a little-known high school basketball player he dreaded the moments before games when he knew he’d hear those familiar taunts from people in the stands: “Yao Ming, Yao Ming.”

Nicknames on a court, of course, can be wielded with affection or respect, and rhetorical sparring can be one of basketball’s auxiliary pleasures.

But as Ren Hsieh, the Taiwanese-American commissioner of the Dynasty League, a recreational basketball organization in Chinatown, pointed out, the intent of words is usually pretty clear. “I’m a 5-foot-9 point guard,” Hsieh said, laughing. “If you call me Yao Ming, I know what you’re saying.”

Lin may be too famous today for those proper-noun taunts. But he remains a magnet for abuse.

“Even now, to this day, you go to N.B.A. arenas, guys will say racist things, ‘chicken lo mein’ or whatever, which is a really good dish, by the way, but I don’t like being called that,” Lin said at the New Yorker event.

Likewise: Jeremy Lin is a good player, but we don’t like being called that.

Eddie Huang, the Taiwanese-American chef, writer, and television host, recalled an interaction three years ago, on St. Patrick’s Day, in which a group of men emerged from a bar near his restaurant on 14th Street and shouted to him, “Yo, Jeremy Lin.” Huang felt tempted to throw a punch before checking himself.

“I don’t want nobody calling me Jeremy because it reminds me of being called Long Duk Dong or reminds me of being called things like Jackie when I was a kid,” Huang said. “I don’t like that. I’m Eddie Huang, you know what I mean?”

This was the landscape of Linsanity. Along with whatever euphoria Lin’s unexpected success engendered among Asians, we remember, too, all the residual messiness as people around us betrayed an inability, or a lack of desire, to treat him with basic decency.