Outside the Paint: When Basketball Ruled at the Chinese Playground (review)
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Long before the summer of 2010, when Jeremy Lin became the first Chinese American of full East Asian ancestry to sign a contract with the National Basketball Association (NBA), Chinese played professional basketball in the United States, barnstorming across the country as members of the Hong Wah Kues, playing with the likes of the famed Harlem Globetrotters. This is just one of several little-known stories Kathleen S. Yep has excavated in her eminently readable and tidy book, Outside the Paint: When Basketball Ruled at the Chinese Playground. The book argues that during the interwar years working class Chinese American boys and girls in San Francisco's segregated Chinatown found freedom and space for creative expression on the basketball court, especially Chinatown's famed "Chinese Playground." Despite—or perhaps because of—their lack of access to resources (like uniforms) and their often smaller physical build (especially relative to their white opponents), these Chinese youths developed innovative ways of playing basketball that were not only ahead of their time but led them to multiple local and regional championships. For William Woo Wong (the subject of chapter 4), it even paved the way for play in New York's famed Madison Square Garden. Yep's larger argument is that in the face of racial oppression and enforced segregation, many of San Francisco's Chinese American youth were able to use sports to forge solidarities with their neighbors and find racial, gender, and class empowerment through excellence in the game of basketball. She subscribes to a theoretical approach to the sociology of sport that is cognizant of sports' dynamic social influence but eschews the more rigidly ideological approach to the field that casts sports as wholly reproductive of social inequality. Yep is centrally concerned with "highlight[ing] how sports are used to strengthen and, at the same time, challenge inequalities" (9). [End Page 233]
Although Yep is a sociologist, her work "document[s] a hidden cultural history" through the use of a five chapter historical narrative that focuses on the various ways in which working class Chinese American boys and girls in San Francisco's Chinatown used basketball to "carve out space for themselves within the context of poverty, patriarchy, and racial segregation" (2, 3). Yep has chosen to focus on basketball both out of a personal love for the game, and because she believes "it reveals—more than any other sport—analytical nuances about socioeconomic class" (11). While I applaud the possibilities that might inhere in such a claim, I believe they are not thoroughly fleshed out in the book. The arguments Yep makes about resistance and social mobility afforded by success in basketball within a segregated racial and patriarchal community appear as though they would apply just as well to boxing and baseball, among other sports. I would like to have been persuaded by her argument about basketball's exceptionalism, but such a claim requires a more comparative approach, which the book does not offer.
Yep's work straddles several disciplines, particularly sociology, ethnic studies, and history, and consequently she has put together an impressive methodology and unique set of primary sources to make her argument. In addition to conducting thirty-four interviews with people who participated in the vibrant basketball culture of San Francisco's Chinatown in the interwar years, Yep relies on publications in both the mainstream and ethnic press, government documents, personal papers, and various basketball ephemera dating to the time of her study—including many vivid broadsides reproduced in the book. Yep is clearly an assiduous researcher, and the book's footnotes thorough, but some historians may find the amount of evidence used to make larger claims a little thin. For instance, chapter 3, "The Mei Wahs Knew How to Use Their Elbows and Push," is unconvincing in its suggestion that there existed a causal relation between the Mei Wahs' working class background and their scrappy style of play. It is...
