During the past year, poet Giles Lee set out to tell a

During the past year, poet Giles Lee set out to tell a fictionalized account of recently retired Chinese-born basketball star Yao Ming.

Acting in the persona of Yao, Lee recites a fictitious retirement speech to show how the American media always seemed to focus on Yao’s ethnicity as a Chinese basketball player during his nine years with the Houston Rockets rather than his skills on the court.

Today, Lee is one of the growing number of amateur filmmakers in Boston’s Chinatown neighborhood working to show how stereotyping has limited and miscast the Asian-American community in the United States.

“People have a preconception of who we are based on what we look like,” Lee says. “They have trouble imagining we have our own distinct personalities.”

His film, “The First Draft of Yao Ming’s Retirement Speech,” recently premiered at the third annual Boston Asian American Film Festival. It was joined by others, such as “Wear I Fit,” a story about self-image and clothing, which explored issues of ethnicity and understanding in American society.

For Lee, it’s a theme central to his work year-round as director of programs at the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center. He and others at BCNC work with Asian-American youth to produce films that not only help with their technological skill sets, but also help them forge a clearer identity as Asian-Americans in the United States.

“It’s important we take matters into our own hands using digital storytelling,” says BCNC Director of Youth Programs Sophia Kim. “We are telling who we are from our own perspective.”

Kim finds it annoying, for example, that American pop culture regularly characterizes Asian-Americans as Kung-Fu fighters and restaurateurs. At the BCNC Youth Center, Kim is helping to teach students to combat film with film, alongside teaching editing software like iMovie.

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