The moment chosen to present Disney’s new offering, Chinese American: The Series, at the prestigious SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, could not have been more auspicious: just three days after Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan completed their triumphant campaign in the awards race by hoisting their respective golden statuettes, and Stephanie Hsu and James Hong also taking the stage at Hollywood’s Dolby Theater to celebrate the Best Picture Oscar for All at Once Everywhere.
Although none of the four participated in the question and answer session at the SXSW Studio, the joy among the other members of the team was remarkable, especially since in the American community of Asian origin the impressive triumph of the film directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who are known simply as The Daniels, was seen as an acknowledgment of those who until very recently have been traditionally neglected in Hollywood.
Gene Luan Yang, the author of the comic on which the series is based, shared the feelings that seeing what happened that Sunday generated in him: “Everything has been truly surreal. I don’t think we could have predicted everything that is happening. For many reasons, Ke’s case is emblematic of the transformation our entire community is undergoing. That is why we also identify with him, because he represents everything we always dreamed of and that we knew was possible, ”he said.
Although Yang published the comic in 2006, back then it was unthinkable that a story set in Asian American culture would be brought to the screen by major studios. Just in 2018, after the success of movies like Crazy Rich Asians and series like Newcomers, Disney dared to launch Chinese American with the same director of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Destin Daniel Cretton and Kelvin Yu , Emmy winner for Bob’s Burger , as creator and showrunner.
Although the presence of the leading quartet of All at once everywhere in the cast is what has generated enormous anticipation, they all have supporting roles, since the story revolves around Jin Wang (Ben Wang) an American teenager The son of Chinese immigrants, the day high school starts he befriends Wei-Chen (Jim Liu), a Chinese exchange student with whom he discovers he has a lot in common.
What he does not know is that the newcomer does not really belong to this world, and is part of a battle between several Chinese deities, who have acquired human form. Yeoh is one of them, since although she is apparently Jin’s mother, she is actually the goddess Guanyin, while Daniel Wu is the monkey king, Poppy Liu is the princess Iron Fan and Hong, at 94, is the jade emperor. .
For his part, Quan plays Freddy Wong, a popular television figure who represents all the Hollywood stereotypes about Asian Americans, which led the Vietnamese actor to reject the proposal when he was first proposed, although they later managed to convince him why their participation was important.
The series, which opens next Wednesday the 24th at Disney, does not exactly follow the comic, but rather reworks it to tell the story in a traditional format. “When I started with Chinese American, I had been doing comics for five years,” Yang explained in Austin, adding: “It always had protagonists of Asian origin, but their relationship with his culture was never the focus of the story. I decided that this time was going to be different and came up with three ideas, but I couldn’t decide which one was the best. And while I was developing it, I realized that living between two worlds is what best describes what it is like to be the son of an immigrant. We feel like we live in one world when we are at home and another when we go to school. And when the book was published, I discovered that the feeling of being between two worlds is almost universal. It happens not only to the children of Asian immigrants, but also to Polish, Filipino and Nigerian immigrants.”
