Ethan Yamashita
So, dragons. As we all know, they’re awesome. Giant wings, killer claws, razor sharp teeth, fire breath, cave hideouts, treasure troves, the works. Not all dragons are made the same though. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and the eternal classic How to Train Your Dragon are all built off of the western model of dragons, with its roots in Welsh, British, and Norse myths. Eastern dragons are very different from what you would see in a typical western movie. Eastern dragons are mostly wingless, with short legs, hair or whiskers, and are almost always spirits of water, not fire. This type of dragon, even in “eastern” media that jumps across the pond, is rarely seen in western pop culture. So, you could imagine my delight when I went to see Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and saw a gigantic, wingless dragon rise out of a lake.
Last year during the doldrums of late stage lockdown, this new Marvel movie started to creep onto my radar. A Marvel movie led by Kim’s Convenience co-star Simu Liu (a truly great sitcom, would recommend) and Crazy Rich Asians star Awkwafina? Interesting. I kept an eye open for it, but continued on as normal. Once the movie actually came out, I started hearing the buzzing in my ear. I saw the reviews come in, 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, 7’s on Metacritic and IMDb, and I decided I needed to see it for myself. So, my family and I got into our car, made our way to the Valley Mall Regal, and sat in our seats honestly not expecting much. The movie starts, the logos scroll across the screen, and the movie opens in Mandarin Chinese. Subtitled, of course, but Mandarin Chinese nonetheless. And throughout the rest of the movie I was taken on a ride through all these animals and symbols I recognized as part of my cultural heritage. The stone lions, the color scheming, the martial arts, all of it. It spoke to me and I was wholly whisked away into this world of fantasy grounded in the roots of culture.
Shang-Chi strikes me as an important movie for many of the same reasons that Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was so groundbreaking and important for so many people. It is a movie so wholly baked in the culture and influences that it became a celebration of them, a statement of purpose and a declaration that yes, we are proud of our culture and yes, people do constantly mispronounce our names but we’re not going to change them any time soon. We are who we are because of the parts of ourselves that not everyone can always understand.
Furthermore, when young Asian kids like me look at the mainstream superheroes, we don’t exactly see people who look a whole lot like us. Bruce Lee half counts, but when we look at Captain America or Superman, we can’t exactly picture them stepping into a restaurant and ordering a nice bowl of phở. Shang-Chi is an Asian superhero played by an Asian actor (somehow way rarer for Asian characters than it should be) with an Asian name that I have heard so many mispronunciations of. There’s finally someone on the silver screen who looks like me. And granted, this is a story that’s played over and over across many races and cultural backgrounds, but we still have more to do. AAPI people make up 5.7% of the US population, it’s about time we got some good representation. The rest of the month of May we’ll be highlighting Asian students and culture, giving a often marginalized and eerily forgotten group of people. And after a year like 2020 or 2021, we deserve it.
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