Star Wars is For Everybody, or How I Found My [Shang] Chi

Star Wars is for everybody.  Okay who are we kidding, lately it feels like Star Wars isn’t for anybody.  But not too long ago, (and also a long time ago) Star Wars was for everybody.  …wasn’t it?

You’re five years old.  Star Wars comes out in theaters and your immigrant parents who can’t afford childcare take you to see it, probably to the chagrin of whomever it is you’re sitting next to.  But boy are you glad they did.  It busts your mind wide open.  You can’t wait to tell everyone at school.  Before long, everyone is talking about it and playing it at recess. You and Katie Mitchell, and Marc and Chucky gather on the playground with visions of laser swords and blasters and droids in your collective imaginations.  The adventures you’ll have.

“I’ll play Princess Leia.” Says Katie.

“Great, I’ll play Han.”  You say. 

“You can’t play Han.”  Says Marc.  “Han has brown hair.  Like me.  I’ll play Han.” 

…Okay.  “I’ll play Luke then.” You say.

“You can’t play Luke.”  Says Chucky.  “Luke has blonde hair.  Like me.” 

…Hm.  Okay.  “Then who should I play?” 

“You can play Chewie.”  They say. 

Chewie.  Who has brown hair.

You don’t know it yet, but years down the way you’ll have a word for this: microaggression. Till then you’ll simply recognize it as an exclusion of convenience.  You’ll recognize it later in life too when out of the blue your shoulders tense up or your breathing gets labored, or your heart rate increases when someone tells you somebody else should do something you’re qualified to do too. Meanwhile everyone else goes on with their day. This will be a theme. Eventually you’ll also come to recognize that no one is born thinking something isn’t for them. They are told that repeatedly until they decide it is easiest not to disagree. You wonder how if something is for you, it is any less for you when it is also for someone else.

But that’s not true, they’ll tell you in high school when you study Joseph Campbell.  It is the classic hero’s journey.  Universal in its theme and immediately recognizable to all. Also, it’s science fiction.  It’s absolutely for you.  (They won’t know that it’s really a Western- neither will you till much later.) Years after they insist Star Wars is for you, you’ll be given a word for why they see something one way and you see it another.  (Unconscious bias) Or more to the point, why they have no context to see what you’re seeing.  And you’ll lose nights of sleep wondering how to get them to open their eyes.  Because fucking Chewbacca had brown hair too.

Before any of that though, you’ll discover comic books and video games.  You’ll see all of your friends go gaga over the same transforming robots your grandparents and cousins used to show you whenever you visited them overseas.  And you’ll think maybe it’s okay to like this?  Spider-Man wore a mask.  It could have been anyone under there.  Maybe it’s okay to like that? But then in Secret Wars 8, when Reed Richards repairs Iron Man’s armor, they have a three bubble conversation about Rhodey’s black skin, and if it was surprising to see a Black man under the armor.  Reed Richards, one of the smartest men in the Marvel Universe will of course not see color.  It’ll make you feel a little better, but yellow skin isn’t even part of the conversation so just to be safe you’ll decide to stick to Spider-Man. 

You finally get to high school and they’ll call you oversensitive and laugh you off.  They’ll also call you Chink when you inadvertently over-step into their realm of privilege.  And sometimes, they’ll be afraid of you.  But that won’t be satisfying either, because they won’t be afraid of you for your very real, very palpable rage.  They’ll be afraid of you because they think you know karate.  Which itself is rage inducing because a) you don’t, b) you aren’t Japanese, and c) they could give a fuck either way.  So your quiet rage gets quietly amplified.  Lost in the cacophony of Short Rounds, Long Duck Dongs, Mr. Miyagis…Not all of them will be that insensitive though.  Your quadruple-bypass, so-old-he-has-Jesus’-beeper-number, Social Studies teacher who looks like Santa Claus and is actually named Mr. White will see your tennis racket and say “Are you gonna be as good as Michael Chang one day?”  He’ll mean it as an encouragement, but all you’ll notice is he didn’t think you’d ever want to be as good as Agassi or Sampras.  You will have no idea how to unpack that for a long, long time.  Fucking Chewbacca. 

In college you’ll have finally learned to downplay questions like “where are you really from” only to realize that when people in New York City ask you that, it’s because they’re actually curious about your second culture.  They want to celebrate how you are not the same as them, and want you to celebrate how they are not the same as you. To you it’s the silent, biological death-sentence you spent the last eighteen years trying to distance yourself from.  To them it will be something great. You’ll start to wonder if maybe it is. You’ll go to a screening of Jackie Chan’s First Strike.  Dubbed in English, with Jackie doing his own lines.  Your overseas family will have been talking about him for a decade by then, but you won’t have given a shit about it until his breakthrough here in the states after Rumble in the Bronx and Supercop become cult favorites.  In one scene of the film that does not involve martial arts stunts of any kind, just a beautiful woman talking to a handsome man, you’ll start to cry uncontrollably.  In the theater. Because you’ll realize this is the first time you’ve ever seen people who looked like you on a big screen talk about anything in English that wasn’t martial arts or being from somewhere else.  You’ll deeply love it for what it is but feel an ache about it too.  Because you’ll understand on some level that this wasn’t made for you either.  It was made for the people who laugh at you when they hear your busted Mandarin. 

By now you’ll have starred in your first independent feature- the first of two that will go nowhere and do nothing for your fledgling acting career.  (Though many of your costars from both and even one First AD will go on to be in big, badass things- I’m looking at you Nelson Lee.) And you'll start to piece together something that, years down the line people will call Institutional Racism.  And even though it troubles you that your enemy doesn’t have a face, or even yet a name, you’ll kind of gloss over it.  Because by then you’ll have found your tribe and Star Wars will be cool again.  At least to everyone you play with. Anyway, fuck Chewbacca.

You’ll decide that even if nothing is really ever for you, and the reasons behind why are myriad and Machiavellian, there’s something you actually can do: make things that are.  One of your directors will say “Ask yourself what you want to see that no one else is making.  Make that.” You’ll let that be your compass for the next twenty years.  You’ll write for people who look like you before it was cool.  You’ll insist on working with female directors before it was cool.  In that twenty years a lot of things change.  Politics change, demographics change, your own worldview changes.  You’ll recognize how much of a racist you yourself have always been.  You’ll see that you got it from your parents, your family, your church and literally every white student you went to school with.  You’ll wonder how anyone ever decolonizes their thinking at all when there’s literally no one around to reflect truth to them.  Then you’ll realize you yourself did it and you’ll wonder how anyone couldn’t.  You’ll see colleagues workshopping their shows at universities.  You’ll be sad you’ll never get to do that because what conservatory has six to ten Asian performers who would be featured in anything you wrote?  (Though eventually you too will get to do that!).  Somewhere in there Fox will launch the X-Men film franchise and you’ll be reunited with old friends.  Only instead of communing with them in a dark basement, you’ll commune with them in a dark theater with Dolby surround sound.  Hugh Jackman will say “bub” and everyone will talk about it like they know.  You won’t call anyone out on their fair-weather fandom because in one sense you yourself were a fair weather fan. 

Eventually they’ll make movies for Transformers, and GI Joe and even though they won’t be good, they’ll be cool because they exist.  You feel comfortable claiming them because no one else wants to. (They’ll make new Star Wars films too, but maybe the less said about those the better.)  Before you know it the Marvel Cinematic Universe spends ten years redefining popular culture and you (and your wife and daughter) are there for it.  You buy a ticket opening weekend of Shang-Chi knowing full well that with an unvaccinated child at home you won’t be seeing the film.  You just want your dollar to be counted.  You’ll give away your ticket on the Buy-Nothing Facebook community.  You’ll have no regrets.  Your wife, god love her, will insist that you be a part of this conversation though.  And lets you go see it at 9:30pm on a Wednesday.  There are six people in the theater.  It doesn’t get much safer.

You immediately post: “I thought about writing an essay on the significance of Shang Chi. And I may still. But at the end of the day all that really matters is literally every frame of this film was made for me and that's never happened before in my life and fuck anyone who says representation doesn't matter.” 

It gets around two hundred likes when you decide “Maybe I should write that essay after all.” 

You can’t stop thinking about this film.  Is it Winter-Soldier-levels of perfect?  Nah.  Is it Black-Panther-levels of world-changing?  Nope.  But it’s yours.  It’s all yours.  It’s yours because your mother has gifted you jade and you held on to it in its tiny cotton pouch for as long as you remember.  It’s yours because when she passes down jewelry she also passes down ghost stories. Family members who are visited upon by dragons and spirits. Your legacy to claim. It’s yours because you too have gone years without speaking to your sibling and if you found yourself in an actual cage match with him as you often wished in your youth, you’d probably do something unnecessarily dramatic.  (We’re cool now, chill.)  It’s yours because only a few people know your Chinese name and recognize how deeply fitting it is for you. They’ll know it as your secret identity.  They’ll know there’s no telling if the name conjured you or if you conjured the name. It’s yours because when you told dad you won the Richard Rodgers that one year his response was “…neat.” And that was progress.  And when you told mom you were invited to speak at your high school graduation in 2019 her response was “Your father did that too.”  It’s yours because the rest of that night was spent talking about their past instead of your future. Because to them there’s no difference. It’s yours because you were never Long Duck Dong, you were never Short Round, you were never Mr. Miyagi even when people said you were.  It’s yours because you were never fucking Chewbacca, even when people said you were.  You were Indiana Jones.  You were Han Solo and Luke Skywalker.  You were Peter Parker. You were Daniel-san. You were Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras. And yes, you were Michael Chang too when you wanted to be. And now nobody’s saying nothing.