. He has just written a memoir, We Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story, which is why we have met during a break in his schedule; he’s currently filming Barbie, the film based on the doll .
Writing the book – which involved long, detailed weekly conversations with his parents, with whom he now has a good relationship – allowed him to see how their own experiences of life had informed the way in which they treated him. “It made sense, in a way that doesn’t necessarily excuse or justify their actions,” he says. “Without that context, I just felt like they were out to rid my life of any sort of joy or happiness.
Eventually, they would both become successful aerospace engineers in Canada, but it took huge sacrifices and risks. In his early years, Liu was brought up by his grandparents in Harbin, a city in north-east China; his mother worked in Beijing, and his father had already gone first to the US, then to Canada to do a PhD. His mother would soon join him, supplementing their scholarship money with dish-washing jobs.
Films offered an escape as well as a place to escape to: going to the cinema would get him out of the house, which didn’t feel like a safe place. He loved Star Wars and Harry Potter films where there was “always a kid who didn’t come from the best family environment, but was told he was meant for great things and had to embrace his destiny”.
He also found that roles for actors with Asian heritage were limited, and some of those he was getting reinforced racist typecasting. People weren’t “having those political conversations” in the way they are now. “In the beginning, if I was a stunt guy who got beaten up by one of the white male characters, I was over the moon.” It was, he says, probably similar to what his parents felt arriving in Canada. “Survival mode. Figure out a way to get on sets, figure out a way to work, that was it.
Before he became a movie star, Liu was writing and making his own short films, and he has felt a strong need not only to create his own work, but also to tell stories that have been largely ignored. There has been a huge rise in the number of hate crimes against Asian Americans –, compared with the year before – previously encouraged by Donald Trump’s anti-China rhetoric and proliferating during the pandemic.
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