Jeremy Lin is a Harvard-educated, undrafted point guard for the New York Knicks who seemingly emerged from nowhere to become an international phenomenon. He became a fan favorite in early 2012 after scoring at least 20 points in five straight games, all of them Knicks victories.

Lin is the N.B.A.’s first American-born player of Taiwanese or Chinese descent and only the fourth Asian-American in league history. He is also the first N.B.A. player to have at least 20 points and 7 assists in each of his first four starts.

The Knicks claimed Lin off waivers after he was cut by the Golden State Warriors and the Houston Rockets in December 2011.

Lin, who is from Palo Alto, Calif., played high school basketball in a gymnasium across the street from the Stanford campus. But the coaches there did not seriously recruit him. Neither did the coaches from the University of California at Los Angeles. The same for the coaches from many Ivy League universities.

Lin’s lackluster college recruitment illustrates how talent evaluators overlooked his ability even when he was young. It is something that was repeated in the professional ranks as he moved from Golden State to Houston to New York, where he has infected Knicks fans with Linsanity, becoming a sensation very quickly.

Lin’s stunning success with the Knicks has also captured the imagination of the Chinese. He has been particularly popular in the northern Zhejiang province, from which his maternal grandmother fled to Taiwan in the last days of China’s civil war in the late 1940s.

Lin is commonly described in the United States as Taiwanese-American because his parents grew up in Taiwan before moving to the United States, where Lin was born. But mainland China has started to claim him as its own.

Lin’s combination of success in the N.B.A. and strong Christian faith — he has spoken in the past of becoming a pastor someday — has fired the imagination of many Asian-American Christians. There are some early signs that he may also be catching the attention of Christians in China, who continue to face varying levels of persecution.