By Justine Trinh
Simu Liu is best known for his roles as Shang-Chi in Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Ten Rings and Ken in Barbie. In these roles, Lui transforms into larger-than-life characters: In Shang-Chi and the Ten Rings, he portrays the first Asian American superhero lead in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and in Barbie, his inclusion as Ken shows that the Asian American body can be a part of the idealized beauty standard. However, there is so much focus on his acting career and celebrity persona that it is easy to forget the person and the journey it took to get to where he is now.
In his memoir, We Were Dreamers, Liu goes back in time to tell his family’s stories in addition to his own. To understand Liu’s personal narrative, it is necessary to understand his parents’. His parents survived the Great Chinese Famine and labor camps that were a result of the Great Leap Forward, and these traumatic events affected their parenting style. Liu shows how harmful this kind of parenting and these expectations can be. As a child, Liu excelled in language arts, but this was never nurtured or encouraged. Rather, his parents expected him to be “an engineer like [them]. Or a doctor. Definitely a scientist of some sort,” regardless of Liu’s own career aspirations. This led to an unsatisfying career in business that resulted in a depression wherein Liu would “lie awake in bed every morning praying to be sick so [he] could take the day off.” This unhappiness led Liu to consider other options, including acting, which brought him joy. Liu was not an immediate success; his memoir captures both the good and the bad of his acting journey.
Liu’s work shows that we are all dreamers, even our parents, but their dreams don’t have to be ours. Liu’s parents had a dream to go to Canada for a better life, and this dream included Liu. However, Liu’s own dream is at odds with what his parents envision for him. There is an unrealistic expectation for the second generation to succeed as a way to pay back the first generation for their sacrifices, and that this success would come easily since the second generation does not have to face the same kind of traumas as the first generation did. This ignores the emotional and physical pain the second generation endures; Liu must navigate and negotiate these expectations. Initially, he attempts to achieve the traditional form of success by attaining a business degree. However, this career path causes him so much distress that he has to pivot to something that he enjoys in order to survive. Although he does not attain the traditional version of success (lawyer, doctor, engineer, scientist, etc.), he still became a successful actor. At first, his parents cannot understand this as success as “they are simply happy [he] has a job,” but over time, they come to accept this as success.
His memoir also gives him the opportunity to humanize himself away from his celebrity persona by showing he too experienced the expectation of success and parental harm. Liu does not shy away from describing the violence his parents inflict. He details the moments his mother violently hits him over and over again as he is curled up in a ball or when his father verbally insults him. As a child, Liu is powerless to talk about the harm he faced because of his parents’ authoritative power and the community’s silence around such actions. Liu recounts a time when his mother locked him out of the house as a young child, and a neighbor found him outside crying. When his neighbor discovers that this temporary exile is a form of punishment, she is unsympathetic to his plight. While his parents are the ones who enact this punishment, the community is aware and reinforces such harmful treatment by not intervening, thus illustrating the power of the collective. Liu later learns that his mother got the idea to lock him out from the same neighbor that found him crying. While these moments of harm are horrifying, they are continually reenacted by community members onto their children as neither the neighbor nor Liu’s mother are chastised. The visibility of such punishment, while originally meant to humiliate the child for their misdeeds, inspires other parents within the community to do the same.
In We Were Dreamers, Liu peels back the layers of his celebrity status and shows he too is a person beyond his fame. I appreciated his willingness to be vulnerable and tell these stories that hurt. It never occurred to me that Liu ran away from home for a week to escape such pressure and violence, and looking at him and his success in Hollywood, I would have never thought of the violence he went through to get to where he is now. We Were Dreamers is necessary because there is so much focus on success (in this case, Liu’s big movie roles) that we do not generally think about the pain, hurt, and failures that accompanied such success.
Justine Trinh is an English literature Ph.D. student at Washington State University. She graduated from the University of California, Irvine with B.A.s in Asian American studies and classical civilizations and a B.S. in mathematics. She then went on to earn her M.A. in Asian American studies, making her the first student to graduate from UCI Asian American Studies’ 4+1 B.A./M.A. program. Her research interests include Asian American literature, critical refugee studies, family and trauma, and forced departure and disownment.