Ikigai Leadership Podcast: Cinema Coach – A Review of American Born Chinese on Disney+

Dr. Dhru Bee: [00:00:02] Hey, everybody. This is Dr. Dhru Bee, and I’m here to welcome you to my podcast, Ikigai Leadership. We’re going to be talking to leaders in all different industries from all different backgrounds and demographics from all over the world. And we’ll be discussing topics like leadership development, culture, DEI, content creation, and marketing, and all things business and entrepreneurship.

Dr. Dhru Bee: [00:00:02] Hey everybody. Welcome to our first episode of Ikigai Leadership, my new podcast. Thank you guys for joining us so much. Well, joining me, at least in this situation. My name is Dr. Dhru Beeharilal and I go by Dr. Dhru Bee, makes it a little easier on everybody. This podcast is going to be a pretty fun endeavor, I think, at least for me. Hopefully it’s fun for you as well. Our first episode to kick this off, we’re talking about a lot of leadership development concepts, business, marketing, branding, all these different things within leadership development, within coaching. There’s going to be the concepts of DEI – diversity, equity, inclusion – and I know a lot of folks hear those words and immediately have a cringe reaction, a visceral reaction to those words. A big reason for that is because most companies and I will say most as in like 95% of companies out there, 95% of people out there in those companies, are implementing DEI wrong. They’re doing DEI wrong. How do you do DEI wrong? Do you do DEI wrong by focusing on optics and having optics be your primary thing that you focus on and that you promote? I can’t tell you the number of times I have companies folks reaching out to me because of the work I do. Asking me to do the work for them.

Dr. Dhru Bee: [00:01:43] I’ll give you an example of how that sounds. Ring, ring. Just the phone, obviously. And then phones are actually ringing like that anymore. Anyway. Phone rings. I answer the phone. Hey, we saw that you do some DEI work and we wanted to do some for our organization. We have some culture concerns, we want to really address those and we want you to do the work for us. Can you put together a proposal of what you want to do? Let’s say we talk for another 20 or 30 minutes about what the actual needs are there, and then I ask them what they have in mind. The inevitable answer that I get most times, unfortunately, Yeah, that’s too much in terms of what we want to do, we don’t really want to do a whole training or any kind of coaching or anything like that, anything significant. We really just want to do a couple of brown bags. Can we do maybe like a series of 2 or 3 brown bags? No, no, I cannot. If your budget and if your intention is only to do 2 or 3 brown bags, I would take that money and instead of doing DEI work, just throw a pizza party, it’s going to have the exact same effect, if not more frankly, than me coming in, talking at people about DEI. Brown bags do not work unless there’s already interest, a deep interest of some sort, in the content, topic area, or whatever you’re talking about.

Dr. Dhru Bee: [00:02:59] Now, do people have that interest? Some, yes, absolutely. But again, because of the way things are happening and the way things have unfolded since 2020, and honestly before that, but 2020 was really, with the George Floyd murder and everything like that that happened that whole summer, all the riots, all the everything that happened, that was really what kind of awakened a lot of people to the need for doing DEI work. And it is still a need. It is a real thing and it’s still a need. And there are a lot of folks out there who don’t believe that because of the way that it’s been marketed, the way that people focus on it, and the way that people have chosen to implement it, that is incorrect. And that is really annoying because it kills the thing that actually is needed very badly in the community for many, many reasons. We don’t have time to go into all of them here. But that’s one of the realities is that because these companies have changed their focus to be let’s spend money on this just to say we’re spending money on it, it’s virtue signalling on a company level and you see it happening all over the place with all the pride stuff right? I mean, there’s all these memes about about companies turning gay in Pride month because that’s really what happens, right? They act like they’ve been with them all the time, but then the rest of the year they completely ignore these groups, right? Whether it’s Asian Heritage Month, whether it’s Black History Month, it’s Pride Month, Women’s Awareness Month, these groups are invisible to these companies all year round, except for that month because they want to get the publicity and the clout from saying, Oh my God, look at all these, look at all this money we’re investing. Look at all this energy we’re investing into these wonderful groups that need to be supported. And yes, they do need to be supported, but they need to be supported consistently. When you turn DEI into a checkbox and you turn culture consulting into a checkbox, you’re minimizing and taking away all the value that those concepts, that those approaches bring to the table. And in the process of doing that, you’re also minimizing everyone else, everyone in those groups, right? And you’re taking away their value and you’re insulting their intelligence as well, by the way, which is I think is probably one of the bigger deals. Because let’s take away the consulting, all that additional stuff there. Right. Let’s imagine that doesn’t exist. Let’s imagine nothing. No solutions exist for this kind of problem. If people just had a basic level of respect for other people and other groups that are not their own, there wouldn’t be a need for DEI consulting.

Dr. Dhru Bee: [00:05:22] That brings me to my topic today, after five minutes of talking about this. It’s not just DEI as a whole, it’s actually, like I said, this is a cinema coach episode. And so we’re talking about American Born Chinese. It is a series that just came out a little while back and it is really good, actually. I was skeptical because of the fantastical nature of part of it. It’s an interesting balance you have to strike when you have a, let’s call it mythological world, and then you’re taking that mythological world and combining it with the real world that we live in on a day-to-day basis. It’s very rare that a movie or TV show or someone like that can actually make that work properly because like I said, it’s a very delicate balance. Sometimes, especially Disney, they tend to go a little too far on the fantastical side of things, right? And a couple episodes kind of go in that direction and it’s a little bit kind of a deviation from what you feel like. But, I would say the first episode hits you and hits you hard. And I wasn’t skeptical per se, but I was like, okay, I was cautious. I wanted to approach this and see what it’s like and see if I’m going to like it because maybe I won’t like it. There are some things where they are too heavy-handed with it and it’s too much. It’s not realistic, right? It’s so blatantly obvious and so like in-your-face that it’s like, okay, yeah, this is an exaggeration of what people actually experience. But no, this show actually tackles it very, very well, very accurately, very realistically.

Dr. Dhru Bee: [00:06:48] The main character, Jin, the actor Ben Wang, honestly, it was really well done. The character was played perfectly, I think, actually – so I’m looking at IMDb – it says Wang, but I wonder if I want to say his name is Wong in the show because I feel like the dad corrected the principal about that in the show. Anyway, that all being said, it’s a great show. I mean, Ben Wang plays that character so well. You feel for this kid. You’re watching him exist in this world, and they did a really good job of stepping out of the typical portrayal of an Asian kid growing up in this world. He’s actually not just a nerd, right? He plays soccer and he’s pretty good. He’s also trying to get away from the nerd world, like they talk about the, first episode he talks about, his parents ask him about his friend Anuj, who’s an Indian kid, soccer and the Indian kid and the Asian kid hang out, right? The Chinese kid and the Indian kid. Soccer. That happens because it happens in life. But his parents ask him, How’s Anuj doing? How’s he doing? And he’s like, Oh, well, we haven’t really talked since last summer. And he doesn’t really kind of go into detail about that. And then you see on the first day of school, he’s coming back and Anuj is there and just walks off kind of, you know, brushes him off. And my initial reaction to that was, Oh, great, they’re making another Indian kid look like a douche bag, because that’s kind of what’s been happening in the last few years, that they’ve shifted from making other bullies be, you know, white or black or whatever. And now the bullies are all Indian somehow, because somehow, at some point, Indians became cool. I missed that memo. That still hasn’t happened in the mainstream. So I think everyone missed that memo except for Hollywood. Just FYI, might want to circulate that one. I don’t think that anyone else got that memo. But yeah, Indian kids are apparently doing the bullying now, but that’s what I thought this was going. And, side note, there are going to be spoilers here. I forgot to mention. The spoiler-free version is it’s a great show, which I’ve given you already, but now we’re getting to spoilers, sort of.

Dr. Dhru Bee: [00:08:43] It turns out that the people, the new kids that Jin’s hanging out with, the soccer kids who he wants to be friends with and wants to be cool with, the cooler kids, I should say, one of the kids – they didn’t go into detail of what happened – but he made fun of Anuj and really teased him over the summer. And Jin didn’t defend him because Jin wanted to be friends with these guys. And so Anuj took that personally, understandably so. His best friend of however many years is not defending him, not standing up for him and kind of like tossed him to the side. So that, I thought, was a really cool nuance to the character, not just to Jin, but to that relationship and to the entire show. It’s not in your face. It’s not like a, you know, whatever, like pounding you in your face, like this is discrimination over and over again, right? It’s subtle. Every single experience of discrimination on the show, almost every single experience is subtle. It’s one of those things where it could be explained away, right? It could be like, Oh, well, maybe that’s discrimination, maybe it’s not. Is it a hate crime? Is it not? You know, like it doesn’t rise to the level of that. Maybe. We’re not sure. And that’s how it happens in real life. It’s always this ambiguous situation. It’s like, well, it could have gone either way.

Dr. Dhru Bee: [00:09:50] Is it because he’s Asian or is it because he’s not? Is it because he’s, you know, he’s a nerd or whatever, but he’s not a nerd in the show. He’s nervous. He’s kind of insecure sometimes and doesn’t really know how to talk to girls and all the typical tropes. But he’s not a traditional nerd because he actually makes it onto the soccer team, which is pretty cool, right? As a Chinese kid, that’s a big deal. As an Asian kid who’s smart and who knows what he’s doing and excels in school, they don’t really talk about that too much. But you’re assuming he does because he’s Asian. Again, stereotypes, right? But the way he acts and the way his interactions with his mom, the mom and dad – Chin Han plays his dad and I don’t know who Yann Yann Yeo is, but she is amazing as his mom – and Chin Han, I have not seen Chin Han in this kind of role before. You know you’ve seen him in The Dark Knight, played kind of the evil mastermind behind-the-scenes kind of guy. You seen him in Mortal Kombat playing Shang Tsung, but he plays the dad character so well. I mean, I’m sitting here, I’m not a father, obviously, yet, but I’m empathizing with this father character because he’s trying to keep his head down and do his work. And that’s frankly what my dad told me to do, you know? And I could see my dad in this guy because, you know, he’s not fighting for promotions. He’s not speaking up at work. He’s not trying to build relationships with people at work. He’s like, just keep my head down. My work will speak for itself. And that is such an Asian Indian concept, right? That’s something we’ve been taught our entire lives. Just keep your head down, do your work, your work will speak for itself. And then now you have social media and you have marketing and you have all these things that are almost bad words in our culture, right? This idea of promoting yourself, talking about yourself in a positive light, right? Self-deprecating humor, I feel like we create self-deprecating humor. We being like the Asians and South Asians because of our need for some kind of deflection when someone gives us a compliment. Because we don’t know how to take those, we’re not brought up getting compliments. Our parents saying, We’re proud of you? Unheard of. Right? It’s a huge deal. I remember my dad told my brother he’s proud of him one time and my brother started tearing up because he’d never heard that before in his entire life. And that was like two years ago. My brother is like 47. Yeah, that’s how things go. I’m still waiting to hear from them, by the way, from my dad. I haven’t gotten that yet.

Dr. Dhru Bee: [00:12:03] Uh, I digress. Those characters are played so, so well, and the acting is actually on point, you know, for a Disney Plus show, my standards are pretty low for Disney Plus shows, to be honest with you. Mandalorian was good, season one. Season two was, you know, eh, Boba Fett. The acting was good across the board, I would say. But the show writing and whatnot was questionable at best. Miss Marvel, let’s not even go there. I can do a whole nother episode about that show because that really frustrated me. But this show was actually, I think they knocked out of the park in terms of acting and casting and writing. Daniel Wu plays the Monkey King really, really well. The makeup, I will say I didn’t love the makeup. That’s one thing I think that they could have done a better job with, the makeup, with the characters, specifically around the Monkey King realm and stuff like that. They could have done a much better job with the makeup. But that’s a small, small issue in the whole thing as a whole because the issues it tackles, the way it tackles them, the acting is great, the writing is great, the characters are believable. I don’t know if folks have seen other portrayals of the Monkey King and, you know, the way that he is as a character. But this was a much different Monkey King than I’ve seen in other series, other seasons and other movies. This Monkey King was a father, right? He is a father. And his son, also played by Jimmy Liu, don’t know who he is, haven’t seen him before. He plays the character very well as well because he plays a Chinese character, Chinese boy in an American school, and his interactions with other students and everything. Again, it’s very realistic. It’s very much like how would a foreign exchange student coming into an American school act and be treated. And the first episode, there’s a scene where the principal comes in and is like, Oh Jin, I want to introduce you to our new foreign exchange student. He’s going to be shadowing you because you’re both Chinese and Jin’s like, I don’t really speak Chinese, like, okay. And she never asked him if he speaks Chinese. She never, it was just an assumption. And again, it was knocked out of the park the way that those three people and the principal – whoever played the principal, I don’t know her name – but she played that character really well, too, because that is how it comes across. It’s well-intentioned, we understand that. But the question becomes intention versus impact, right? That’s a whole nother debate we can get into. But intentions have to matter.

Dr. Dhru Bee: [00:14:26] I’m not one of those bandwagon folks who say intentions don’t matter at all, because impact is extremely, extremely important. It’s a scale. It’s a nuance, right? Intentions matter as long as you’re making an effort to get better, to improve. If you just rely on your intentions being good and never try to get better, never try to improve, never try to learn more about other cultures, about how to do things better, about doing things differently, your intentions no longer matter. But if you’re still trying to get better and better and better and you make a mistake and your intention is to continue to learn, well, then that’s when it does matter. But it never, never negates impact. It can offset, but it never negates it. Right? Impact is always going to be a consideration. And the way Jin feels in that scene, a lot of minority students can kind of empathize with Jin’s feelings in that moment. It’s like, Why me? You know, why am I being singled out? And now even more attention is being drawn to me and not the good kind of attention. It’s really cool, that first episode, like I said, it’s a longer episode. It’s about 40, I think 45 minutes, versus the other ones are around 30 minutes. It really does set the show up for success and it makes you want to watch more. I really appreciate the way that they put this show together.

Dr. Dhru Bee: [00:15:33] And Daniel Wu really, like I said, as a Monkey King, did a great job. He’s been very active in activism for stopping Asian hate and things like that, those different causes. And, you know, he actually didn’t really talk a lot about that in this show, who did talk a lot about that indirectly was one of my personal heroes, Ke Huy Quan. This guy, I love this guy so much. Honestly, I seriously, one day I want to meet him. I really would just love to love to meet him. I’ve been following that guy since I first saw him as a kid in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Short Round was one of my favorite characters growing up. And then Data in Goonies, obviously. Growing up as an Indian kid in PG County here, you don’t see a lot of Indian kids in cinema growing up, right? And he talks about this and he has a really, really amazing monologue in, I think it’s episode seven or episode eight, I think it’s episode seven. And that’s actually what got me to watch the show, honestly. Before I saw that monologue, the show was like, Okay, well, yeah, we’ll see. I’ll get to it eventually. But when I watched that monologue, he talks about a lot of things frankly. He talks about his experience. And I think, I’m not sure if that was ad-libbed or not because it mirrors his real-life experience. And that’s, I think that’s also why it hit me in the feels, because it really is how he felt in that moment. He’s talked about that in interviews in the past about how he felt invisible, how he felt like, you know, after his breakout roles in Goonies and Indiana Jones, the roles just didn’t come in anymore, right? He kept being asked to be a nerd or a neighbor or some insignificant character. He does this monologue where he talks about he hopes that there’s some kid out there watching this and realizing that they don’t have to be a punchline. And I’ll be honest, I teared up when I heard that because that’s all that Asian characters had been growing up. Right? Nerds. Punchlines. Neighbors. The goofy person. Maybe the ninja once in a while. Right? The martial artist. But that wasn’t even, that wasn’t Indians. That was always East Asians, right? Indians, South Asians, Pakistanis, we were always, always the convenience store owners, the gas station owners, all, every single one of them had an accent. The most prominent example is obviously Apu. Easiest one. But second is actually Ben Jabituya. I dOneon’t know if anyone knows that guy, but he’s not actually a real person, obviously, that’s the name of the character in Short Circuit. And that was Short Circuit One and Two, and that was an older movie in the 80s, dating myself a little bit, but obviously, you know, is what it is. That guy wasn’t even played by an actual Indian guy. He was played by a white guy. And I didn’t know that until maybe like ten years later. I mean, again, I’m watching this as a kid, right? But he had an accent and he was playing this guy. And I’m like, oh, he’s an Indian guy. I say, I saw an Indian guy in a movie. I’m like, Oh, that’s super, super cool. I remember thinking that myself. And then it didn’t even occur to me that this guy was a nerd and whatever, it was just that’s how Indian people are. That’s how we’re supposed to be.

Dr. Dhru Bee: [00:18:38] Our place in society is being the smart, nerdy person who gets tied up and thrown in a freezer. Right? That happens in part two, by the way, in case you’re wondering. That was our place in society as far as I was concerned. That was reinforced every single day when I went to school because I was a nerd. I, my dad, I told you my parents were very much of the mindset of just keep your head down and do the work. Keep doing the work, keep doing the work. Don’t worry about the kids bullying you, starting fights with you, you know, throwing your books on the floor or like tearing up your homework or, you know, calling you names and whatever and picking on you. Don’t worry about that. Don’t get into fights. Obviously I did not listen to any of that and got into a lot of fights in elementary school. But that was the advice I was getting. I didn’t get any real good advice about it. And then teachers obviously thought I was a problem because I was the one getting picked on all the time in different scenarios. I would always, I would be the common denominator, right? So I wasn’t getting any help from anyone. My thought was I’m also the only Indian kid in class until another Indian kid comes in and they’re like, Oh, you guys should be friends. We actually ended up hating each other to start, right? But we ended up becoming friends later on. But it’s just one of those things where until you see yourself represented somewhere else and I know this may sound trite to some people or may sound like you’re just parroting stuff out, but it’s really true. Until you see yourself represented, you ask someone who their heroes are, and who do you look up to? Who do you want to be when you grow up? And you’re going to look at what you see out there. You’re going to look at where the possibilities are. Right? I never saw myself as a president of the United States or that kind of stuff, or I definitely didn’t see myself as an NBA player or NFL, right?

Dr. Dhru Bee: [00:20:22] When I was a kid, I wanted to be an archeologist. Paleontologist, sorry, and then archeologist later, but kind of both. But that’s because I loved dinosaurs. But then when I really thought about it, what I wanted to do, I didn’t have anyone, any heroes to look up to growing up. Indian people, right? That guy that I thought was actually really cool, again, I was a nerd, so I thought that being a nerd was cool, Ben Jabituya was a white guy in a movie playing an Indian guy with brown face and everything. Darkened his hair, all that stuff. He was a robotics guy. Super, super cool. I would love to design robots, right? But then I realized he wasn’t really Indian, and I was like, Well, what does that even mean now? Right? And then Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. A lot of Indian people in that movie. None of them were cool. You’ve got Amrish Puri, who is a Hindi actor, famous, playing essentially like a voodoo priest that also, you know, that kills people and sacrifices them to Kali, who actually is a Hindu goddess but not that extreme and crazy. Those were our options growing up. And then Apu, convenience store owner. My parents weren’t business owners. They weren’t, they didn’t start a business. They didn’t have a convenience store or a gas station and that stuff. They worked full-time for other people. Right? And they dealt with a crap ton of discrimination and not the subtle stuff that we’re seeing in this show or in reality nowadays. I’m talking directly. People were telling them, actively saying to them, you foreigners always want something handed to you. You’re not going to get this job because you’re a foreigner. I’m going to give it to that person over there because they’re American. They deserve it. You came from your country to take our jobs. These are actual statements that were made to my parents directly, not in private rooms that they overheard. This is like I’m talking to you directly. I’m telling you, you’re taking our jobs. I’m not going to let it happen, even though you deserve this promotion, you’re not getting it. Tough. Deal with it. And what did my parents do? Kept their heads down and did their work just like Chinhan, Jin’s father in the show. So it really hits home.

Dr. Dhru Bee: [00:22:24] But back to Ke Huy Quan in the show, he plays an actor who played this character in the 80s. This, like, you know, comic relief character on a show, on a TV show back in the 80s. And he didn’t get a whole lot of work after that. And so, again, it’s kind of like, almost like a parallel, it is a parallel for his real life. He didn’t get any acting gigs after that, right? He kept getting typecast as nerds or neighbors or ninjas or whatever the situation might be. And they do like a reunion show, and they interview him and ask him questions, and he really just nails it with that monologue. But it’s just, it’s such a powerful statement that unless you take a second to actually listen to it and understand it, it can very easily go over people’s heads. And this is not people crying wolf. It’s not people, you know, finding stuff where it isn’t there. In the show Jin actually does the opposite. There are activists in his school, like students who are like, really active and like, Hey, hey, let’s get justice for this situation that happened. And there are a lot of situations that happen in the show, you know, that are pretty messed up, to Jin. But he just wants to be a regular kid and his way of dealing with it is sweeping it under the rug and saying, Oh, no, everything’s fine. Everything’s fine. Right? The kids in the show, there’s no like, evil kid on the show, which I also appreciated because there’s not, it’s very rare that there are kids out there who just like evil, right? There are kids out there who just, they’re being dicks not because they want to be dicks, but they’re being dicks because they think it’s fun or funny or whatever, and they think it can advance their social status, right? If they make fun of another kid, then that puts them above that kid.

Dr. Dhru Bee: [00:24:06] I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s the way people reason, right? Social status and whatnot. And so that’s what happens in the show. And Jin’s response is, let’s minimize. I don’t want to rock the boat. I don’t want to do anything crazy. I just want to just be a kid and play soccer and be successful and be happy. And that hits home. It really does, for a lot of people. So if you haven’t watched the show yet, I would highly, highly recommend you check it out. I hope this review was helpful for you guys. And like I said, there’s a lot of amazing themes in this show that are really well tackled, but one of them is definitely that as theater, as entertainment evolves, we have to hold companies and industries and studios accountable. Because at the end of the day, portrayal matters. And I’m not saying there’s not going to be a nerdy kid, Indian kid or nerdy Asian kid out there. What I am saying, though, is that there’s got to be more than that, right?

Dr. Dhru Bee: [00:25:06] Another quick line from that show is when Ke Huy Quan is talking about his experience, he talks about wanting to be the hero and the interviewer is like, oh, Batman didn’t call? And it’s kind of a dick response, right? But then Quan, without missing a beat, responds really, really beautifully. And he’s like, not a superhero. I just want to be the guy who has a journey. I want to be the guy who stands up for what he believes in. That’s a hero too. That’s real. That’s very, very real. And if you think about it from that perspective, you think about it from that point of view where these Asian characters, they’re not saying – Asian, South Asian, whatever marginalized demographics are out there – they’re not asking to be a superhero or to race swap or gender swap a superhero or a beloved character. That’s an easy cop-out win, right? Frankly, it’s just divisive and it’s stupid. And it makes no sense, to be honest with you. We’re just asking to have a character arc, to make sense, to stand up for what we believe in, to be not a pushover character, to not just be comic relief, right? That can be very, very powerful.

Dr. Dhru Bee: [00:26:16] So with that, I will end today. But thank you guys so much for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did hit the like button, hit the comment, let me know what you think and tune in next week. We’ll have an interview and we’ll talk more about leadership, business, marketing, all those things and more. This has been the Ikigai Leadership podcast. Thank you guys so much. Take care. Stay safe.

Dr. Dhru Bee: Thank you all so much for listening to the Ikigai Leadership podcast today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a five-star review with comments to let me know what you thought. It really helps me keep on delivering valuable and relevant content to you all, and if you want to connect with me directly, please feel free to do so on my socials. That’s at @DhruBee on Twitter, at @DhruvaBee on Instagram and LinkedIn, it’s linkedin.com/in/dhrubee. Thank you all so much. Take care. Stay safe.