Chinatown Sports

For Chinese American communities across the country, participation in sports has been a way to bond with other Chinese Americans and cross cultural boundaries. In New York City’s Chinatown, basketball courts were scarce but, from the 1940s to the mid-1960s, 22 different basketball teams cropped up across the metropolitan area. Starting in the mid-1930s, a group of young men called the Chinese Athletic Club (CAC) would meet for an hour every week at the Church of All Nations on Houston Street and Second Avenue, where they played basketball and swam together. During World War II, the draft and Japanese internment took many players away from their teams citywide. One of the CAC's founding members, Coach Lung Chin, consolidated the Chinese Basketball Club and the Dragons with the CAC, and gave his personal time to help shape his new players into true athletes. Representing the local 5th Precinct of the NY Police Department, the newly formed Chinatown Midgets, pictured here, won 25 straight games and eventually the Police Athletic League NYC Midget Championship in 1945. In that same year, the Chinatown Midgets even played an exhibition game in front of a sold-out crowd at Madison Square Garden for college basketball’s annual National Invitation Tournament (NIT). The team's success helped generate enough support and resources to form the Chinese Community Club (CCC). In 2012, Jeremy Lin and the “Linsanity” phenomenon put a global spotlight on perceptions of Asian American masculinity, sparked debate about the myth of a pure athletic meritocracy when evaluating player potential, and highlighted the degree to which Asian American basketball networks are able to produce elite players.