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from www.traveltowork.net

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Break out the cigars and/or Serbian professional basketball players! Rockets star Yao Ming and his wife Ye Li are expecting their first child in July, a Chinese newspaper reported Tuesday.

Source: Freebase

The news was accidentally revealed by Ye’s close friend Miao Lijie, who is her former teammate on China’s women’s basketball team, when attending a show at Shanghai World Expo on Monday. When asked why Ye did not come to the show with her, Miao said a “pregnant woman deserves less public activities.”

Yao, 29, marked his marriage to longtime girlfriend Ye, 28, with a lavish August 2007 ceremony.

The couple hasn’t decided yet where the baby will be born, but whether boy or girl, “lil’ Yao” is sure to be one thing: creepy tall. Yao stands at 7-foot-6-inches, while Ye towers over most women at 6-foot-2.

In a recent Sina.com online poll, 76 percent of more than 29,000 people voting said that Yao’s child was likely to grow taller than 6-foot-8, while 33 percent said the baby would grow taller than 7-foot-2. However, according to the calculations of medical experts, cited by China Daily, if the child is male, he probably will reach a height of between 6-foot-6 to 7-foot-3. Translation: the kid is going to be huge.

Not that it matters. The lil’ tyke is probably already the leading vote-getter in the Western Conference, after the fourth returns of the NBA All-Star balloting are released. China, man. China. So powerful.