Not just for sports fans

Few people have lives that lend themselves to fable as easily as Yao Ming’s. Here is a Chinese man over seven feet tall, playing basketball in Shanghai who, at 21, becomes an international star and sports idol. In the eyes of the Chinese, he’s a symbol of athletic pride and ambssador of goodwill. For the National Basketball Association, he represents another big step in its attempt to globalize its market.

Since Year of the Yao is based on a true inspiring story, one can expect it to be a feel-good, emphasize-the-positive kind of movie. And it is. But there are several other fascinating angles to be found. The film mines its riches from a variety of sources.

For one, it shows the clash of East-West culture in a modern state. Decades ago, much would have been made about the fact that the Chinese and Americans have entirely different sets of values. The differences themselves would have been a point of study. Here, however, we see a world where differences have long been acknowledged, and how members of each culture willingly feel their way through to a better understanding.

When players from the Houston Rockets, the NBA team that drafted Yao, talk about the contrasts in the way American and Chinese players treat their opponents, it’s encouraging and amusing to see how far we’ve come and how far we seem to be willing to go.

This culture clash is also emphasized in the curious relationship between Yao and his translator, Colin Pine. Pine is a young American who has learned the Chinese language (he’s young enough to earn the comment, "I thought you’d be much older," from Yao when they meet) and he effectively narrates the movie. It’s interesting to see the valuable strategy in assigning a translator whose first language/culture is not that of the athlete’s. Pine ends up spending much of his time gently acclimatizing Yao to the American way of life. In the process, each of them gain an unlikely but most welcome friendship.

Meanwhile, Yao’s year isn’t an easy one. The movie goes to lengths to show that, in sports, your background doesn’t matter. Proving yourself in the game is the ultimate equalizer. It gets a bit of humorous mileage from challenges issued by ex-NBA star Charles Barkley before presenting us with Yao’s ultimate obstacle — Shaquille O’Neal and the Los Angeles Lakers ( as a die-hard Lakers fan, I took this all in good humor as well).

Shaq is the closest thing we get to a villain. His shadow is ever-present, his oafishness played up, his ill-advised attempt at comedically declaring a showdown with Yao is the nearest we can get to acknowledging any underlying cultural ignorance. Through it all though, the film emphasizes the good that comes from sports and organized competition in general — that in such situations, the playing field is leveled as people of different origins forge a camaraderie that might not have happened.

In this time when misunderstanding — cultural, religious, sexual, you name it — still cuts a deep wound throughout the world, it’s easy to be cynical and dismiss The Year of the Yao as a positive-energy puff piece. But hope has to come from somewhere, even from small places like a movie about a basketball player. Stern and Del Deo have given us a movie which makes us believe that, in our modern world, a better understanding continues to grow. I don’t think we should feel foolish in accepting this belief.