Around FLOATER: On Making a Book and a Basketball Community with Chinatown Basketball Club
Writing: Jiani Wang
FLOATER is a book written, edited, and co-published by Chinatown Basketball Club (CBC) and linlin Plum. CBC is a community best known for its weekly pick-up basketball gatherings at Columbus Park in New York’s Chinatown, where it first took shape in 2019 and has remained its home base ever since. Over the past six years, CBC has expanded beyond the weekend game, organizing tournaments and Sunday School for basketball fundamental lessons, and hosting a series of events and hangouts shaped around alternative basketball culture and Asian diasporic expression across multiple artistic forms, from film and photography to graphic design and crafts. Its footsteps move through public parks, indie cinemas, and city streets across Manhattan, and extend beyond New York City through members of the community.
2025 CBC Autumn Classic 3x3 Tournament Sunday School final. Photo by Dustin Lin
While the book emerges from the life of CBC, it stands on its own as an intricate visual archive and a collective memoir of contemporary Asian American experiences of basketball as both a sport and a culture. Weekly DIY posters and photographs capturing vignettes from each CBC gathering on the court, along with seven essays by CBC members tracing their personal memories and encounters with basketball, are assembled into six chapters—four regular chapters with Pregame and Overtime chapter—echoing the structure of a basketball game. Together, they trace an organically formed subjectivity, a shared rhythm of time, and a sense of belonging that takes shape along the way.
Beyond this, the team behind the book engages a set of broader ontological questions through the process of making it: Is there an alternative, distinctly Asian diasporic way of experiencing basketball? And could a basketball aesthetic rooted in Asian diasporic experience exist outside mainstream basketball culture?
On a January Sunday evening, still close to the fading festivities of Christmas and New Year, Lu Zhang, Herb Tam, Xinyuan Qu, and Lin Wang—the editors, writers, designers, and co-publishers behind FLOATER—sat down with :iidrr mag to talk about the making of the book.
Sunday School taught by Cindy Si. Photo by Dustin Lin, 2024
Why is the book titled FLOATER?
I have this habit of getting deeply attached to a word and holding on to it for a long time, and Floater was one of those words for me. To be a floater is to exist in a suspended state. It felt closely connected to the immigrant experience—the feeling of not being fully settled or at home, of being in-between. It can be a frightening state to be in. But if you turn it around, it can also be a very beautiful one. You don’t have to be fixed or settled. There’s a kind of openness in that condition.
I later learnt that floater is also a specific term in basketball. It refers to a shot used as an alternative to a layup, one that allows a smaller player to finish over a taller defender with an early release and high arch shot. It is a way of navigating space, of moving around power rather than confronting it directly.
Then I looked more deeply into the word and learned that, in ophthalmology,
a floater refers to tiny particles or pigments in the eye that drift across your vision and make it appear blurry. That meaning felt especially fitting for the book, as it looks at basketball aesthetics through an alternative perspective; in that sense, it’s like being a small floater in the eye—slightly disturbing what is usually seen as the mainstream visual language of basketball.
FLOAT’s brick-red cover
Jiani:
How did you approach the visual design of the book, particularly the cover and title layout?
2023 CBC Autumn Classic 3x3 Tournament final. Photo by Benji Zijian Hsu.
What’s one element or part of the book that you enjoy the most personally?
Lu:
I have two favorite things. The first one, which is a little funny to say, is simply that it’s a book. The process of organizing and transforming all the posters, photographs, and archival materials from so many individual events and moments into a book gave me a new understanding of what CBC has done and experienced over the past five years.
The collective posters were originally made chronologically, each one emerging in its own moment as an individual conversation between the artist and CBC. When the project took the form of a book, the chapters were organized by artists instead. The discussions we had during the making of the book—whether it should follow a chronological structure, how each image should relate, Xinyuan took a great lead folded into the final format. Reading the book creates a new, parallel experience among the artists themselves, and that is what I appreciate the most.
My second favorite thing is the title - FLOATER.
Lin:
For me, it’s the paper choice and the cover cut-out. For the paper, we experimented with more samples than a book project normally would, and it was a constant back-and-forth process. Because the fabrication was done in China, although we had paper samples for the first and second samples, for the final one we decided to use the paper that was not included in the sample set. This meant we had to make decisions without being able to physically touch the papers.
At one point, a colleague at Printed Matter reminded me that, except for the designer and whoever was involved in the process, most readers probably won’t pay much attention to the exact paper that’s used. But I’m still really happy when someone tells me, “I love the paper.” Xinyuan and I also spent a long time thinking about the cover cut-out. It was a negotiation between having a more playful design and making sure the cover wouldn’t be too fragile. And the entire process was the most interesting for me.
Herb:
I enjoyed working on the writing and editing. Usually, ideas that aren’t directly about basketball stay off the court. But for us, they didn’t. I liked that people felt free to write about growing up, struggling with the game, and not just the act of playing, but also the social and cultural aspects around it. Those early basketball experiences are still with everyone today, and you can feel it in the text.
Xinyuan:
I also enjoyed the content itself. It channels everyone’s basketball experiences into more personal, private parts of their lives. Herb’s writing, for example, delves into the history of Chinatown basketball, while Lu’s piece is rooted in her experiences growing up in China, playing basketball in middle school, and her memories of her grandfather. All of these stories reveal how the past and the present continue to shape who we are and where we find ourselves now.
Incidental Contact, a photography exhibition curated by CBC members Sha Luo and Benji Hsu in May 2025, at Columbus Park, photo by Yiwei Lu
The book was launched last December at Printed Matter, and some time has now passed since that moment of release. What kinds of responses, conversations, or unexpected feedback have reached you since then? Have there been any impressions from readers that stayed with you?
Herb:
To be honest, when we first started working on this book, I didn’t really expect a lot of people to read it, mostly just those who are close to us and already part of the community. And of course, those responses were warm and meaningful in their own way.
What surprised me was seeing the book get out there beyond the world of CBC, especially into spaces within the design community. People have really responded to the way the book itself has come together as an object, including the craft, the tactile nature, and the graphics and design.
Lu:
Like Herb said, when we first started this project, it was more about looking back at what had been done in the past, celebrating the community, and bringing those histories together in a printed format, partly for archiving purposes, and partly to reflect on the fact that, when it came to basketball, there weren’t many Asian or Asian diaspora voices or images already out there.
But we were surprised by how well the book was received more broadly. Every time we brought it to bookstores, people there were really excited about it, and in particular about the basketball perspective of the project, since there isn’t much like it out there yet. Through this process, we’re also learning more about who we’re connecting with.
Lin:
As a publisher who has been working in this field for the past two years, I’ve spent a lot of time at art book fairs and in art bookstores, and I’ve developed a fairly clear sense of the kinds of books these spaces tend to carry. There’s a certain expectation—even a kind of stereotype—around what an “art book” looks like. What felt fresh about our book was that it suggests a different possibility: that basketball can be aesthetic, and that it can build a community very different from what people might expect.
Selected book scans by courtesy of CBC
I guess that’s also part of why CBC feels so special. There are so many artistic talents in the community, and when you want to make something, like a book or a photo exhibition like the one last summer, you can really draw from that.
Lin: It wasn’t like, “Let’s make a book and then go play basketball.” Whoever contributed to this book had already been playing basketball at CBC before we decided to make it, and even after the book was finished, we kept playing. So for us—for me—basketball is part of our daily life, and the book is like another tunnel through which something creative could emerge from that life.
Lu: I also wanted to mention that a lot of the content in this book was made by non-artists. Take Smiley for example. He used to work in a restaurant, and now he is the guardian of the park and the main thing he does is play. There are also posters that were made for very personal reasons. Isaac wanted to make a poster to share a photo of a friend and wish him a happy birthday. I really like how art becomes blended into all of these different intentions. It blurs the boundaries of what aesthetics can be.
Xinyuan: The idea of amateurism is something I thought about a lot while working on this book, because to me it really reflects the spirit of CBC as an open but competitive space: Anyone is welcome to play basketball with us and compete with each other. We’re there simply to have fun, get better at hooping, and build connections along the way. I wanted the book to carry that same chill but steady energy.
This was the first time any of us worked on a book of this scale. Just like the book’s title, Blurring Basketball Lines, the boundaries of our roles were often blurred. We naturally stepped into each other’s roles, stumbled through mistakes, and didn’t always see eye to eye. But through it all, we learned so much from one another, found joy in creating as amateurs, and built something that feels close to our hearts and everyday lives.
For me, it was a truly special collaboration and a precious learning experience, far from the usual designer-client dynamic.
Sunday School. Photo by Sha Luo, 2024
Are there any new publishing plans currently brewing within CBC? Do you see this book as the beginning of a potential series?
At the very beginning of brainstorming FLOATER, we were already thinking about continuity. If this were to become a sequence, how could the design signal that? How could people recognize it as part of an ongoing series? Looking ahead, I don’t really know yet. But maybe one day, in a few years, whether that’s two years or five years, it could be the right moment to come back together and make another sequence of FLOATER. We don’t need to define it as a catalogue, or a magazine, or whatever now—things will happen. For now, let it just keep floating.
2024 AC tournament merch campaign. Photo by Echo Zixuan Zhao.