From The Nerds of Color
Dear Ms. Dargis,
Characters Hiro and Baymax during the Walt Disney Animation Studios? ?Big Hero 6? Premiere After Party at Yamashiro Hollywood on November 4, 2014 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for Disney)
I was born in Vietnam shortly before the tanks rolled into Saigon and my family was forced to flee. Raised in South Minneapolis’ largest, poorest, and most racially diverse neighborhood, my father taught me to walk to the library and got me hooked on free books. Later, I would learn to run there, mostly to avoid the myriad groups of bullies wanting to beat me for whatever reason they could conjure that day, and I would read books and comics to take me far away from who I was and where I was. It is safe to say that the majority of my boyhood was spent imagining that I was anything but who I was.
Perseus, Launcelot, Spider-Man, Superman, Wolverine, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Captain Kirk, Aragorn, Flash Gordon, Bilbo Baggins — yes, they are all men. But what else do they have in common? In my dreams I was always a white hero, because that was what I was taught to believe heroes looked like. Even the weird cartoon I loved from Japan — an animated space soap opera called Robotech — featured a main character, Rick Hunter, that I thought was white. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I found out his name in Japan was Hikaru Ichijyo.
Remember also that the 80s was a special time: “Buy American” was all the rage, most of that patriotic fervor directed against Asians, even Asian Americans, as if all of us were getting checks from the Japanese auto industry (we weren’t — and the American auto industry was really the one screwing over workers by building plants in other countries ). My people in particular were the target of a very special xenophobic hatred: people on the street would shout at us and other Asians on the street, blaming us for the Vietnam War and the deaths of their relatives, not knowing that people like my father fought alongside Americans in the war.
Like any kid, I wanted toys, I wanted to be a part of pop culture, I wanted movies. Because my family was poor, going to the movies was seen as a waste of money. But being the youngest, and going through a tumultuous time that saw my dad trying to spend quality time with me, occasionally he would cave and take me to a movie, usually at the Skyway Theater downtown. When I was about nine, he took me to a movie that he had heard had Vietnamese people in it. He took me to see Rambo: First Blood Part II.
If you haven’t seen it, let me give you a synopsis: Rambo, a white Vietnam war veteran, is sent back to Vietnam to photograph what is believed to be American POWs still being held in bamboo cages. A Vietnamese woman is his local guide. Things quickly go badly. About five seconds after the Vietnamese woman asks Rambo to take her to America with him, she is killed by a bunch of Vietnamese soldiers (played, I am pretty sure, by Japanese actors). Later, Rambo kills these Vietnamese men, taking his time with them, notching an arrow with an explosive head as the last one panics and runs away, and as Rambo’s arrow hits him, he literally explodes. The audience cheered when that happened.
Don’t blame my dad. He was doing his best. Even if he read movie reviews, white reviewers don’t have a good record of noticing racism against Asians in Hollywood films anyway. My dad, a working class war veteran, thought he was taking me to an action movie that had some Vietnamese characters in it. How could he know that, as usual, anyone who looked like us was going to be the bad guy?
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