Guest Post! Vivian Kao takes her sons to the movies
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Parenting
Hi everyone,
I’m SO excited this week to have our very first guest post from my friend Vivian Kao. Vivian is part of the reason I still write this newsletter, because she sends me messages commiserating over how tough this parenting gig is. She wrote an amazing Facebook post a few weeks back about how exciting it was to take her sons to see the Marvel movie Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and so I asked her if she would write a guest post for our little newsletter. And here it is! I’ll be back next week - I have a few thoughts about Halloween costumes and appropriation I wanted to run by y’all.
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Vivian Kao has a Ph.D. in English from Rutgers and teaches literature and composition. She has two little humans that, like Kelly, she’s trying desperately to raise to not suck, but it’s been hard. She lives with her family in Flint, Michigan, a community that she has come to know and love.
(Spoiler alert: what follows makes certain parts of the plot of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings explicit.)
A few weeks ago, my husband and I took our two sons, Julian (9) and Flynn (3), to see the newest Marvel movie, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. I’m not a fan of superhero movies, but this one felt special to me. My parents immigrated from Taiwan to Canada in the early 1970s, and about 10 years later to Houston, Texas to start a family restaurant business. In Houston, I grew up in a supportive, close-knit diasporic Chinese community, and even when my family moved to rural Washington State and I became the only Asian person in my town, people were curious about me but very rarely showed any animosity. I just sort of “was” Chinese-American, and I was fortunate enough to make it through my formative years not needing to think too hard about my racial identity. That’s why I didn’t know how much it would mean to me to watch my boys watching a Chinese-American superhero on the big screen.
The movie begins by telling the story of Shang-Chi’s father, a warlord who, with the help of the Ten Rings, becomes immortal and goes around gobbling up power and riches throughout the centuries, building an army of super-ninjas along the way. He sets all this aggrandizement aside, however, when he meets Shang-Chi’s mother, who lives in a hidden utopian village that has been protecting the world from evil for generations. Because the other villagers consider Shang-Chi’s father unworthy of hanging out with them for the next thousand years, Shang-Chi’s parents leave the village and set up new lives in the real world. But outside of her village, Shang-Chi’s mother loses her special powers, and when she has to fight a group of gangsters who come to seek revenge for her husband’s past deeds, she is unable to overcome them and is killed. Shang-Chi’s father, angry at himself for ever going soft and taking off his invincible rings in exchange for a peaceful domestic life, redoubles his efforts at amassing his empire and trains his son to be an assassin. Shang-Chi, however, can’t bring himself to be what his father wants and runs away to San Francisco, where he hides his identity and works as a parking attendant with his best friend, Katy. His identity comes to light, however, when his father sends henchmen to bring him back for his ultimate mission. Several confusing plot twists follow, but in the end, Shang-Chi’s father admits his failings, and Shang-Chi and Katy are welcomed into the Marvel universe by other Marvel superheroes who make cameos after the credits roll.
Even in my excitement about the movie’s existence, it was hard to completely overlook the questionable, if not outright objectionable aspects of the film. There’s the gratuitous violence, first of all, which surpasses anything I’ve ever seen in traditional Chinese martial arts movies, which are certainly filled with fight scenes and impressive stunts, but in a stylized and non-bloody way. People fall down after getting roundhouse-kicked to the chest, but they usually just go unconscious so the hero can get away. Shang-Chi’s violence, however, gets the Marvel treatment: battle scenes are longer, bloodier, deadlier, and involve way more collateral damage.
The movie also promotes the typical single definition of masculinity that pervades the superhero genre: hetero-normative good-looking male with ridiculous physical strength, etc. But honestly, in this particular instance, I didn’t even mind such a portrayal of a Chinese-American man because of the long tradition of on-screen depictions of Asian-American men as weak, effeminate, and always hiding nefarious intentions while trying to misdirect you with their sycophantic ways. This Chinese-American superhero was just as manly and openly trustworthy as every other superhero, and while in principle I’m in favor of deconstructing manliness, in this case, I’ll take it.
There’s the “Chinese-people-live-in-a-timeless, never-changing-bucolic-village-nestled-among picturesque-mountains-with-a-ready-supply-of-dragons-to-ride” element. This is definitely problematic, as it suggests that we don’t have a part to play in the American story and will always be part of an ahistorical “elsewhere” of forever-foreigners.
Also problematic is the movie’s suggestion that all Chinese people, even those that are female and old, can secretly kick your ass. But I found myself setting even these thoughts aside as I watched Shang-Chi’s little sister and middle-aged aunt lay him out flat in hand-to-hand combat. Both women are also portrayed as leaders, the sister as an entrepreneur who built an underground cage-fighting empire to rival her dad’s, and the aunt as a woman who can silence even the male elders in the village and force them to accept her sister’s children as part of the community. And while Katy does not possess black-belt-level fighting skills, she is the one whisking Shang-Chi away from danger in every getaway scene with her incredible stunt driving, never the other way around.
Is the dialogue bad? Yes. Sometimes painfully so. But about 50% of it is in Chinese, with subtitles! That means every person who thought they were just going to see another run-of-the-mill Marvel movie is challenged to read half that movie while listening to our beautiful language being spoken. If the audience’s reaction in the showing we went to is any indication, I’m sure most viewers do not expect to have to do either of those things. People in our theatre got up and left or talked through the Chinese language parts; one guy yawned dramatically and continuously. I don’t care if no real human being would ever speak the majority of the lines that came out of those characters’ mouths. I am really impressed by the studio’s decision to force its audiences—whom they’re dying to keep coming back for the next 300 movies in the franchise—to actually be uncomfortable.
When we got home, I watched the boys play “Shang-Chi vs. the Bad Dragon” in the living room, imagining themselves as superheroes who actually look like them. I remembered staging similar mock battles with my cousin after watching Chinese martial arts dramas, the ones Shang-Chi and movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon pay homage to. But those were super low-budget productions circulated on ancient VHS tapes rented from the back rooms of Chinese grocery stores. We never imagined that our kids would one day go to a blockbuster Hollywood action movie with an Asian-led cast. We couldn’t even have imagined Asian Barbie, let alone someone who looked like our dads and brothers saving the universe and rubbing shoulders with Captain America. We did not expect to be represented in mainstream American culture; we would not have thought to ask.
But now we are. We are represented in mainstream American culture, and despite the shortcomings of the cultural productions that have made us un-invisible, I think it’s perfectly valid to celebrate them. We have a long way to go, but I am so grateful for how far we’ve come.