That's not so clear in Better Luck Tomorrow. Lin is highly conscious of having made the first Asian-American film to be picked up for distribution, and he talks about the four boys and their criminal life as if he were documenting a social phenomenon, for instance in this 27 December 2001 interview with AsianAmericanFilm.com:

"Better Luck Tomorrow" is really exploring the whole youth culture of today, specifically Asian American, but also just the general mentality of teenagers today. I mean, I work with teenagers, I grew up in the 80s, and already it's very different, the mentality. You go to suburbia, you look at upper middle class kids, and through the media they've literally adopted urban gangsta mentality…. Specifically it's very interesting when you put it within the context of Asian American males. I mean, what's more empowering than being a gangsta with a gun? I don't think I'm doing justice to it, but that was the theme that I really wanted to explore, about the fact that [teens] don't have the patience to search for things and so [they] start adopting things and then potentially this identity could swallow [them]....

What we see, however, doesn't feel real. It's highly detailed, and in that sense technically realistic, as are the performances (by an accomplished set of actors, including Karin Anna Cheung as the girl Ben likes, and John Cho, who has a wonderful face for the movies, full of fascinating, inchoate cross-currents, as Ben's rival), but I still felt that Lin was working something out in his head rather than in any California town.

Where, for instance, are the parents? In one scene Virgil gets upset thinking about what his dad will do when he hears about his son's behavior, but we never see the father or hear what happened. Likewise, the academic decathlon team never meets with a faculty member and attends the championship meet in Las Vegas without a chaperone. Lin may talk about the pressures on teens in the real world, but Better Luck Tomorrow is a romance that, I'm guessing, isn't fully separable from his feelings about himself. (In this 2 April 2003 interview with Asia Source he says of himself in high school: "I was the rebellious kid. I hated being labeled. I was this short Asian guy on the varsity team and eagle scouts. It's funny because it was good I did all these activities but I did them for the wrong reasons. I just wanted to prove people wrong.") It may sound like I'm knocking the movie, but this half-emerged quality is actually what makes it interesting and coherent, and enables it to avoid the squishiness of an autobiographical coming-of-age film.

I would further guess that Lin's concern with the images of Asian men in American movies led him as an artist more than his concern for Asian-American teens in the world. Asian male characters have been sages (detectives, such as Mr. Moto and Charlie Chan, and kung fu masters, such as Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid (1984) in the positive mode; and mysterious, sly, manipulators, such as Dr. Fu Manchu and the Chinese brainwasher in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), in the negative); stuttering comic relief (Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) and Gedde Watanabe in Sixteen Candles (1984)); peasants; house servants; and, of course, during World War II, sneaky, cruel "yellow monkeys."