Louis J. Sheehan.  When Patty Law was growing up in Chinatown after immigrating from Hong Kong, sports were not even remotely part of her family’s vocabulary. She was a natural athlete, but the only extracurricular activity she knew as a child in Manhattan was manual labor. Every day after school, and all day on weekends, she joined her mother at a sweatshop, hunched over a sewing machine hemming trousers until well past nightfall.

“My parents didn’t believe in letting us play sports,” she said. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com

At the same time in another Chinese-American home in New York, Ms. Law’s future husband experienced a different relationship with sports. The son of a first-generation Chinese immigrant father, who was a well-known shop owner in Chinatown, and a second-generation Chinese-American mother from California, Tom Law was allowed to pursue his passion for basketball and joined any playground pickup game he could find.

“I grew up running around New York City,” said Mr. Law, 46, who was a starter on his high school varsity basketball team.

Together, the Laws now run basketball organizations that serve Chinese-American girls and boys in Manhattan, an activity that consumes much of their free time.

The Laws’ childhood experiences reflect two prevailing and divergent views among Chinese-Americans regarding the role of sports in a child’s upbringing. Sports, of course, has become a daily topic of conversation in the Chinese-American community as the Summer Olympics showcase China and its extraordinarily deep athletic talent, which has the nation leading in the race for gold medals.

One view, particularly common among first-generation, working-class Chinese-Americans, maintains that sports are an unnecessary impediment to academic and professional achievement, according to interviews with Chinese-American athletes, students, educators and community leaders in New York.

An opposite view, typically held by more educated parents or those who have become more assimilated into American culture because they have been in the United States at least one generation, promotes sports as an integral part of a child’s maturation.

On a recent evening on the fourth floor of Public School 130 in Chinatown, about a dozen Chinese-American boys were running ball-handling and shooting drills under the energetic direction of Mr. Law.

Ms. Law, 45, who was seated on a stack of gym mats, said that for many second-generation and well-educated parents, immersing their children in activities can become “like a competition.”

“They send their kids to swimming, martial arts, piano,” she said, amid the squeak of sneakers on the floor and the clunk of balls caroming off backboards. “But new immigrants send their kids to tutoring, and sports are secondary.”

Mr. Law said that the primary goal of many recent immigrants “is to get out of this seamstress-restaurant prison,” and they attach their aspirations to their children.

“If your child comes home and says, ‘I want to play basketball,’ what’s your response?” he added. “No way! You have to stay in school and become a doctor! I don’t want anything that will derail you from that goal.”

Pressure to excel academically can be particularly intense for those, like Ms. Law’s family, who arrived in the United States toward the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. While some members of other ethnic groups have embraced sports as a way out of poverty, Asian-Americans, for the most part, have not, said Peter Kwong, a professor of Asian-American studies and urban affairs and planning at Hunter College.

“Using physical strength to make a living is not respected; it’s a Confucian ideal,” he said. “You’re wasting your mind. Using your hands is just not a career.”

According to National Collegiate Athletic Association data from 2002, the most recent available, fewer than 1 percent of all Asian/Pacific Islander students participated in their college’s sports programs, compared with about 9 percent of all black students, 3.4 percent of whites and 1.9 percent of Hispanics. There are no comparable national data for sports participation below the college level, sports experts say.

There are relatively few Chinese-Americans on American professional sports teams, even though there is a growing number of athletes from Taiwan and China playing professional baseball and basketball here. And in China itself, thanks in part to Yao Ming’s success with the Houston Rockets, basketball has become a huge phenomenon, both on the amateur and professional levels.

Ms. Law said she loved to play sports in school — on the playground and in gym class. But there was never any opportunity after school. She was required to work to help support her family and, later, to help pay her way through Albany State University and Pace University. She was the first person in her family to get a college degree.

“My parents weren’t educated, and they didn’t want us growing up to work the hours they worked,” she said. “I missed my childhood and all that, but I was able to contribute to the family, and I developed good work habits.”

Now Ms. Law devotes a significant amount of time to her and Mr. Law’s basketball program, the NYC Sabres, giving young Chinese-Americans something she never had.

Mr. Law started the program in 1986, adding to a vibrant basketball scene in Chinatown, where the courts at Columbus and Sara D. Roosevelt Parks were nearly always busy with pickup games and nighttime and summer basketball leagues. In the late 1990s, he added a girls’ squad.

The teams, most of whose expenses are covered by the Laws, practice wherever they can get court time in court-deprived Chinatown, at locations including P.S. 130 and the basement gym of the Chinatown Y.M.C.A. They compete throughout the city and, at least once a year, in national tournaments.

The Laws met in 2000 — both were divorced and each had a young child — and Ms. Law fit seamlessly into Mr. Law’s basketball organization, working as its administrator and at times as an informal guidance counselor to the players and their parents.

She has found herself having to counsel skeptical parents who see no value in their children’s joining a community basketball team. (The Laws’ 14-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter are members of the teams.)

“Many times we have to convince the parents,” Ms. Law said. She talks to them about not only the importance of fitness but also the educational and social value of sports, how basketball can teach teamwork, focus and commitment and give a child a sense of belonging. “I say, ‘I’m a parent of two children. We’ve been doing this for many years.’ ”

Indeed, according to educators, coaches, students and athletes in Chinatown and elsewhere, this is a common conversation in the Chinese-American community.

“For many Chinese, they don’t see sports as part of youth development,” said Howard K. Chin, president of Chinese American Student Exposure, a nonprofit group that provides sports programs, volunteering opportunities and career counseling to young people in Chinatown. He spoke on a recent evening at Columbus Park amid a crowd of about 100 people who had gathered to watch a Chinese-American basketball tournament.

Mr. Chin, 42, immigrated from Hong Kong when he was 3 and settled in Chinatown. His parents placed no value on sports and did not let him participate, in part because they feared he would get hurt.

“Second-generation parents are going to be much more accepting, much more trusting, and more accustomed to the fact that sports is much more a part of the educational process,” Mr. Chin said.

Fermin Liang, 18, graduated this year from Stuyvesant High School, where he was a linebacker on the varsity football team. He said that his parents, first-generation immigrants, were more open-minded than some of their peers because of their education — his father had been a doctor in China and his mother a nurse. In addition, he said, his mother had played sports as a child. She was a talented swimmer and had been invited to attend a state-run swimming academy in China. (She declined, choosing instead to pursue her nursing career.)

“I could see how a lot of kids who are really athletically talented couldn’t join the teams because their parents really stressed that they wanted them to get a really good education,” he said. One student was widely known as a fast runner, Mr. Liang said, but he never tried out for the track team. Louis J. Sheehan.

“We would be, like, ‘Why don’t you join the track team? You have all this energy,’ ” Mr. Liang recalled. “His mom wouldn’t let him join because it would take away too much time from his homework.”

The Laws are heartened by their program’s growth but are frustrated that too often, they say, parents are curtailing sports in their children’s schedules to make room for more studying.

In recent days, they said, one of the best shooters on the boys’ team said he wouldn’t be able to continue playing regularly because his parents — concerned that some of his grades had dropped below 95 — had enrolled him in an SAT preparation course. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com

“It’s horrible!” Mr. Law said. “We haven’t seen him this whole summer!”

The boy is entering ninth grade at Brooklyn Technical High School in September, Mr. Law said, and won’t be taking his SATs for two years.