38 At The Garden

The success of Taiwanese-American basketball player Jeremy Lin is framed by a consideration of its significance to the wider Asian-American community in Franch Chi’s debut short documentary in the face of ingrained institutional racism. The 38 At The Garden refers to the number of points scored by Lin during a head-to-head for the New York Knicks against Kobe Bryant’s LA Lakers at NYC’s Madison Square Garden in 2012.

Although this is a largely straightforward mixture of talking heads and archive footage showing Lin’s rise to fame, the use of animation adds welcome variation and it is powered by contagious enthusiasm, not just from famous Asian-American contributors including comics Hasan Minhaj and Jenny Yang, Lin’s teammates and some Knicks fans.

Lin also had a deep well of enthusiasm for the game, which is just as well given the anti-Asian bias he faced when he was starting out. The stereotypical way Asian-Americans are depicted on television and film is noted by the various contributors in the same way that The Problem With Apu articulated similar issues. Contributors note that Asian-Americans have become associated with words like “passive” and “diminutive”, and the film illustrates how pernicious these sorts of stereotypes can be as we see Lin’s teammate Tyson Chandler honestly recalling all the assumptions he made about Lin before he saw him play, with coaches making similar knee-jerk assessments.

Lin had been couch-surfing when he got his opportunity to shine on the court - and took it with both hands. The idea of being ‘represented’ is a perennial favourite subject of many filmmakers - the importance of people, and particularly, children, being able to see someone like themselves achieving things in order that they can more easily imagine doing it themselves. It comes across strongly , and it wasn’t just his athletic success but his self-belief that people found inspiring. Inevitably, there’s a lot crammed in and a bit less of the male interviewees talking about Lin’s “big dick energy” and more from the man himself - and some of the female talking heads - would be welcome.

This Oscar-nominated short has been made with an American audience in mind - both in terms of its sporting theme and the specificity of the cultural issues it is discussing. However, the rise in hate crime against those with Asian heritage which Chi documents in the US, also saw an uptick across the globe in the wake of the Covid pandemic, offering food for thought beyond the basketball court and America’s borders.