See & Do: 9-Man Panel and Preview at MOCA
NEWS, News Right, SEE & DO, SLIDER Wednesday, March 6th, 2013
What is 9-man? Eighteen men play ball on an unvarnished urban landscape, shredding elbows and knees on the asphalt, smacking balls into puddles of broken glass. 9-Man’s faster than any volleyball you’ve ever played. Filmmaker Ursula Liang says, it’s “like Rutgers park street ball basketball to Duke basketball as 9-man is to indoor Olympic volleyball.” In a word, chaotic.
After raising over $40,000 through Kickstarter, Liang made a documentary focusing on this incredible sport, whose rules require two-thirds of each team to be “100% Chinese” and has remained largely unknown to those outside the nine-man community. The sport grew out of the isolation of the early Chinese American community, nearly entirely male because of immigration restrictions. “There was this small percentage of people who were ghettoized to the Chinatown,” Liang says, “but they wanted to connect to the other Chinatowns.” A part of contemporary Chinese America can be seen in 9-man–an element of Chinatown that’s both a cultural inheritance and sport dripping in swagger.
On Wednesday, March 27 at 6:30pm, Liang will be screening a preview of her documentary and speaking at the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) along with two nine-man athletes, Frank Gee and Wayne Chow. Devin Gordon from GQ will be moderating.
RSVP required at programs@mocanyc.org. Admission is $7 for MOCA members, $12 for non-members.
Check out the Q&A Liang did with us in December!
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Kyla Cheung is a contributing writer at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Continue the conversation by posting a comment here, on OurChinatown’s Facebook page, or on Twitter at @ourchinatown.
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Posted by Kyla Cheung
on Mar 6 2013. Filed under NEWS, News Right, SEE & DO, SLIDER.
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