It’s not every day you fly halfway across the world, play a basketball game on foreign soil, and then meet your mirror image on the other side. Doppelgänger might be a stretch, sure, but Devin Booker’s encounter with Alou Loulin, better known across social media as “China Book,” comes close enough to make you question reality.
For years, we’ve emulated greatness on the hardwood ourselves. The footwork of Hakeem, the fadeaway of MJ, the killer crossover of Iverson. It’s basketball’s version of cultural inheritance. But Loulin takes that lineage and runs with it, full stride. He doesn’t just mimic Booker’s movements and shooting form. He’s embodied the man entirely. The jump shot, the posture, the quiet confidence, even the signature faded haircut and razor-lined chinstrap beard.
Scroll through his viral clips and it’s almost disorienting. The desert icon reborn in a misty forest? Booker’s pull-up three, framed by fog and ferns instead of arena lights? It’s as if somewhere between time zones and TikTok algorithms, reality glitched and Devin Booker found himself looking back through the mirror of basketball’s global reach.
But alas, no. That wasn’t Devin Booker. It was Loulin. The myth, the mimic, the mirror image himself.
After the Suns wrapped up [their win over the Brooklyn Nets](/suns-scores-results/90393/suns-nets-132-127-overtime-recap-china-jordan-goodwin-khaman-maluach-rasheer-fleming-highlights) on Friday morning, the worlds of fiction and flesh briefly collided. Loulin made the pilgrimage to Macao, stepping out of the internet and into real life, where he finally met the man whose game he’d spent years studying, dissecting, and recreating frame by frame.
There they stood. Book and “China Book”. The original and the reflection, separated by oceans but bound by the same jumper. It was one of those rare moments where basketball’s reach feels surreal, where fandom and artistry blur until you can’t tell where imitation ends and inspiration begins.
“It was nice meeting ‘China Book.’ Thought it’d be a long shot that we’d cross paths, but you know what, a perfect place to do it,” Booker said. “I ended up giving him my game jersey today.”
Just goes to show you that the world never runs out of weird, wonderful surprises. One minute you’re playing ball halfway across the planet, the next you’re shaking hands with your own reflection. Basketball may be the common thread, but it’s moments like these that remind us how small, and how endlessly fascinating, the world really is.