And Then Came Shang-Chi

Original “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”

And Then Came Shang-Chi

by Chiiaseeds

In September 1991, a woman, who spoke no English, brought her young daughter from Hunan, China to Carbondale, Illinois to reunite with her husband, who had left three years prior to study in America. At five-and-a-half, I was in complete awe of the new experience and “meeting” my father for the first time, and equally oblivious to what this change would mean for my future. Exactly thirty years ago to the month, the dichotomy of what was to be the rest of my life began.

Momma and me, circa 1991, post international adventure

From age five till college, it was as if I lived in two worlds: the outside world of school and a semi-traditional Chinese home. I was told to be American when I left the house but Chinese when I returned. I am the product of two cultures and yet not completely integrated into either. My parents were “older” parents due to years of delay to attend university during the Cultural Revolution, I am their only source of long-term care because of One-Child Policy, and my father’s application to study in the States was accelerated in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square Incident. Growing up in America meant that I benefited from free and reduced lunches, educational grants, and all the library books I could carry. I grew up listening to my parents’ sympathies towards Chinese interests in global events but developed the American attitude just the same. Filial piety and patriotist were equals and, at times, rivals during my formative years. For most of the first decade, we watched all global sporting events (the Olympics) as “Chinese spectators.” The 1999 Women’s World Cup was the first time I felt genuine confusion as to where I stood. Since then, the Olympics became an exercise in heartburn – “Go USA! Go China! Shit, US is playing China…um…go Brazil!?”

During my school years, I stuck around people who looked like me but spoke mostly English. At home, it was Chinese only or “someone was going to get a hurt real bad”. Chinese was my first language, but it was only in spoken language. I knew how to read and write the numbers, my own name, and the characters for big and small, but that was about it. All of my formal education was through the American public school system, and my mom taught me elementary math and basic Chinese characters at home. I grew up writing book reports for homework then copying ten new Chinese characters a week for mom-work; I memorized the preamble to the Constitution and I know all the states thanks to that “nifty” song, but to this day, I still have to recite the multiplication table in Chinese.

I learned to read Chinese by following along with the subtitles to Chiung Yao’s dramas and martial arts films. I loved them – people flying and shooting energy out of their palms, beautiful costumes and elaborate hairstyles, evil back-stabbers getting their comeuppance, kick-ass fight sequences – what’s not to love? Not to mention, the characters all had “yellow” complexion and dark hair. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to watch American tv due to the “lack or Asian representation,” it was just that my dad’s “Chinese only” rule applied to the TV too. I loved me some Nickelodeon, Fresh Prince, the Terminator and ABC’s TGIF line up, but I just had to sneak it in when I could. It never really bothered me that the heroes and main characters on mainstream TV or in movies rarely looked like me; pre-Hollywood Jacky Chan and Jet Li were my heroes. If my twenties were a movie, it would be called The Drunken Fist.

Another photo of momma and me, circa 1991, post international adventure

To my parents’ great dismay, my love for TV and movies would forever overshadow my willingness to study. Fantasy, sci-fi, and animations are my go-to’s, but once in a while, I like a good comedy or drama, and if I’m feeling really adventurous, rom-com. Throughout my self-proclaimed movie critic career, I think I can count on one hand the number of non-indie films with Asian American leads: The Joy Luck Club, Harold and Kumar, Crazy Rich Asians, and now Shang-Chi. Each of these films holds a special place in my development that would define my worldview for years to come.

My parents moved us from middle-of-nowhere, Illinois to Montgomery County, Maryland in 1993. This was the first time I met real “first-generation” Chinese-Americans – kids born in the States to immigrant parents. I could just as easily speak with my peers in unaccented English, then turn around and impress their parents with perfect Chinese. These first-gen parents spoke mostly Chinese to their children – with English terms sprinkled in – and the kids responded in varying degrees of Chinglish. My own parents stayed true to their “Chinese only” rule. I was a CBA, Chinese-born American when my cousins and friends were ABCs (American-Born Chinese). I was different but too young to understand why that was actually a good thing. 1993 was a confusing time for eight-year-old me and it was also the year The Joy Luck Club was released.

My parents picked up a copy at Blockbusters sometime in 1994 and I recall being both in awe and confused when I watched it for the first time. This was a story about two generations of Chinese-Americans – the mothers who left their homelands to make a better life and the daughters who grew up in homes surrounded by Chinese culture and yet not speaking a lick of the language. “Wait,” I thought, “why DON’T” they speak Chinese? All my ABC friends spoke some Chinese, albeit with an American accent and English sentence structures. However, these characters look like me, but they’re in an American movie and speaking English! This concept was so foreign and intriguing to me that I rewound and re-watched that rental over and over again the three days it was in our possession. In hindsight, there were definitely some scenes inappropriate for an eight-year-old, but my parents were pretty liberal when it came to film ratings – as in, what film ratings?

I was too young to really analyze The Joy Luck Club, but over the years, I figured out what bothered me about it. It seemed to me that in the eyes of Hollywood, all us Asians are interchangeable. There was no difference between Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese – they cast for the look, but not the language or culture; Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) being a glaring example. Hence, we ended up with June’s mom, a Chinese woman trying to feed her twin babies during the famine in the 1950s-60s, who was crying and wailing in a completely different East Asian language. I guess the “American” audience wouldn’t know the difference, but I did.

At this point in my story, it’s probably important to note that I’m sensitive to sound – language, intonation, accents. At age three, I straight up refused to learn the local dialect of my hometown because it didn’t sound auditorily pleasing. Growing up with a lot of Taiwanese Americans, I learned to switch between the “Mainland Chinese” accent and the “Taiwanese Chinese” accent. I wanted to fit into whichever group I was with. By college, I watched so much anime that I didn’t need to wait for the subtitled version of new Naruto episodes to be available on Wednesdays. This language (listening) skill came in mighty handy during my three-year stint in Seoul and was probably why I ended up being an English as a second language teacher for most of my twenties. This sensitivity is also why I cringed every time a Chinese/Japanese/Korean character on TV or in a movie spoke their respective language and didn’t sound right.

Fast forward to 2004, the year I graduated high school
That summer, “Harold and Kumar” was released and it was fantastic. It was so relatable in the sense that I grew up with the Harolds and Kumars of Montgomery County. Kids going into or purposefully rebelling from their parents’ expectations. Loving it or hating it but having some fun along the way. To me, it was a pretty typical first-gen Asian American story. Along with Mean Girls, which came out the same year, this was the perfect coming-of-age film – go forth, do what you want to do, get good at it, don’t be a dick but stand up for yourself….and drive to New Jersey for your nearest White Castle burger.

Many years and many movies later, I started working for the federal government in 2016. I won’t go into the details of what will always be called “my sad times.” Let’s just say, I worked for/with some characters and had to endure such commentary gems as “you know you were a diversity hire, right?” and “you’re Asian, you’re smart, you can handle it”. Crazy Rich Asians hit the theaters in 2018 during my “sad times” recovery period. I could barely contain the pride I felt for this “Chinese-American” story to be the center of entertainment attention! People were watching it, people were talking about it, and people of all races were (finally) finding Asian men attractive! This movie was giving me the emotional support I didn’t know I needed to move on from that work experience.

A few months later, a colleague invited me to her “family fun cruise wedding.” After I declined the RSVP, she asked me directly why I wouldn’t go. I tried to say that I didn’t want to intrude on a party that was mostly for family, and after further insistence from her, I told her I couldn’t swing the cost of a cruise for myself +1 at the moment. “Whatever,” she said, “you’re rich.” Crickets. Wait, what? “I saw that movie,” she goes on, “I know y ’all are rich!” Oh no… oh Darwin, is THIS what people think? I’m Asian so I must be rich?! I couldn’t stop myself; I probably should have come up with a more tactful response, but “if I were rich, you think I’d be here working with you!?” just spurted right out. We stopped talking after that.

This got me thinking, is the Asian-American story heard and seen so little, that an obviously fictional story, is viewed as truth? Did people think it was a documentary?! I didn’t notice before, because I was always surrounded by other Asian-Americans or in the classroom, but since having to work with other adult (questionable) humans, I was just then seeing how others saw me: hardworking, submissive, smart, could probably fix your computer, can calculate the check, not the right color, not the wrong color, and now… rich? Over the years, I’ve seen people of other colors portrayed in a multitude of ways on the silver and big screens (I’m not saying it’s always done right), that I know whatever the story, it’s a fantasy, it’s not real. The next black person I meet was not going to be whatever trope the most recent movie depicts. “But Asian stereotypes are positive,” you say? Well, it’s the proliferation of these stereotypes that allowed for me to get dumped with eight people’s worth of work during “the sad times” and to be confronted for a negative RSVP response.

2020-21 was, and still is, a crazy time. I wish I had a better adjective than “crazy,” but I really don’t. Emotionally, socially, politically, economically, all they -allys, the world is facing problems never experienced in modern times and/or are coming to the surface after decades of being swept under the rug. I don’t recall exactly when it started, but around January/February of 2020, I started noticing that the seat next to me in a crowded metro car tended to be empty. At first, I thought, “great, more room for my lunch bag,” but as empty seats turned to glares every time I coughed, sneezed, or sniffled, I started feeling nervous. Videos of violence against Asians started to pop up all over my newsfeed, and to me, the office sending everyone home to work since March 13, 2020, was a blessing. For the first time since 1991, I felt unsafe on a daily basis because of my skin color. I cannot begin to understand what it feels like to be afraid of people who are supposed to protect you. But due to the “China virus,” I was living in a world where if I saw 100 humans out on the street, and two of them were police, any of the remaining 98 could feel entitled to glare, insult, or perpetrate violence. At first, I thought, “no, I live in the DC area, people are educated here.” But fear is fear and ignorance is ignorance, anywhere. I didn’t want to leave my home because of the consistent stream of blatant glares thrown my way. One time on the streets of Georgetown, a tall gentleman walking past leaned into my face to tell me “this isn’t China, you know.” Another time, my partner was angrily asked if he was Asian or Chinese by a fellow veteran. I would laugh at the absurdity of this question, but the insidious message underneath the ignorance is that “you don’t belong.” Never had I felt so little confidence and power, doing normal, day-to-day things.

Then came Shang-Chi. This was the movie I had been waiting for my whole life. I have not been able to stop thinking about it since my first viewing on opening night. First, there was the language – perfect, unaccented Chinese and English; a 0.5 generation, like me! The effortless switch between Chinese and English has never been portrayed on screen but is such a big part of who we are. Then, the cultural reference: from the squee-worthy line up of qilin, nine-tailed fox, phoenix, dragon, lion, and dijiang (Morris), to the question of marriage and what you are doing with your life, to the love of karaoke, the screenwriters did their homework. Finally, the internal battle of past and present, origins and learned behavior – the dichotomy of what makes up Shang-Chi – spoke to me on a deep, personal level. This is a movie that gives voice to what I’ve been feeling my entire life in a truly fantastical world that cannot possibly be misconstrued as fact…right?

I cried the morning after watching it. I now truly understand why “Wakanda forever” was chanted for months after Black Panther. Superheroes are not real, not in the sense that they have vibranium suits or magical bracelets. Superheroes are an idea as tangible as patriotism or filial piety: they give us hope for the better and internal strength to keep going in uncertain times. As an Asian-American woman who tip-toed my way through 2020 and now, over half of 2021, I finally feel like I have some of my power and voice back.

And if you’ve made it all the way to the end of my little story, thank you for reading it.