Ode to the Asian Henchman
We members of Generation X have missed out on a lot of things — as the media constantly reminds us. (Will someone from our cohort ever become President? Kamala is the only option at the moment.) The indignities are plentiful: labelled as “baby busts,” deemed culturally and demographically enfeebled (or just irrelevant), skewered by Douglas Coupland.
Younger Asian-American generations can point to at least some amount of representation in pop culture. Oscar-winning directors, hunky or comedic TV stars, talk show hosts. But we Gen-Xers had less to hang our hat on. Growing up, our role model was Bruce Lee — a freak of nature with a keening cry and impossibly cut physique. Cool, yes; aspirational, sure; attainable, not bloody likely. And he wasn’t really Asian-American anyway. Technically he was from the US, but he grew up and became a superstar in Hong Kong, so in all honesty, they own the rights. Nevertheless, when I was in high school, a classmate insisted that I looked like Bruce, and urged me to train up in kung fu. (Apart from my mop-top head, I didn’t look like Bruce, at all.) This was my classmate’s way of being ingratiating, and I didn’t doubt his sincerity in wanting me to nurture muscles of iron and kick some ass, keening all the way.
In their time, boomers could point to some honest-to-goodness Asian-American actors on the silver screen in meaty parts: Nancy Kwan, Philip Ahn, James Shigeta, Mako, Keye Luke, Miyoshi Umeki (the first Asian-American woman to win an Oscar). They even had Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals with a Chinatown milieu (Flower Drum Song). The best we got during my formative years was Pat Morita (and though we all loved Arnold and Mr. Miyagi, he wasn’t bedroom poster stuff). Otherwise, we had to make do with comic-relief roles: Long Duk Dong in Sixteen Candles, Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (“No time for love, Doc-tah Jones!”). Asian-American actresses of the eighties were slightly more prominent, but shoehorned into cookie-cutter parts: seductive women of mystery, martial arts gal, often both at the same time.
What was left for actors from my generation to play other than henchmen? My early cinematic education came in the form of James Bond movies, and to watch Bond films is to get a crash-course in the pervasive nature of Asian henchmen in cinema. Dressed in the same unflattering jumpsuits, running around like headless chickens armed with machine guns, getting mowed down by friendly forces (or even by the bad guys they were working for — how appropriate). For every Tiger Tanaka (Tetsurō Tamba) who was the ultra-smooth head of the Japanese Secret Service, there were dozens of nameless, sullen underlings, their mute scowls a shorthand signifier for evil, or CIA sidekicks like Chuck Lee (David Yip) who would provide a few lines of helpful exposition before getting killed off. They were so expendable that actors like Burt Kwouk were brought back to play different henchmen, as if we couldn’t be expected to remember they were there the first time around. And when it came time for an Asian character to grab the spotlight — as in the very first Bond movie Dr. No, which featured a half-Chinese villain — a white actor in yellowface would perform the honors. None of the above impacted my love of Bond movies, but they exemplify what we Asians had to work with at the time. Charles Yu’s acerbic, funny take on the plight of Asian-American actors, Inside Chinatown, puts it best: be prepared to settle for “Background Oriental Male,” but if you work really hard at your craft, maybe you’ll be the “Kung Fu Guy” someday.
During my impressionable teen years in the eighties, no one embodied “Asian henchman” more than Al Leong. To see him is to know him: the compact frame, the long hair, the Fu Manchu goatee, always off to the side, visually notable but otherwise meant to be an accoutrement, like a nice little table in an interior design scheme. Of course, he was more than just a side table: he was a formidable stuntman and stunt coordinator, a raconteur, and most importantly, he was good at dying. “I think I am hired to die because they’ve seen me on another show and said, ‘We wanna bring this guy in. I like the way this guy dies,’” he once said. And die he always did, in memorable fashion. Neck snapped by Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon. Blown away by Bruce Willis in Die Hard. Impaled by an ice cream cone in The Last Action Hero. As in the movies, so it’s been in real life with Leong, who’s survived broken ribs, collarbones, sternums, and arms, along with brain cancer and a few strokes. Even his nickname — “Ka Bong” — suggests one of those springy, rubbery bouncing balls that always return no matter what you do to it. Try as these films did to erase him from the frame, he would always be back for another round. And even an Asian-American henchman can have a day in the sun, as Leong got to play the baddest Asian of them all, Genghis Khan, in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
Speaking of days in the sun, fans of Asian henchmen and heroes can point to one glorious high point: John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China (1986). Anticipating the wire-fu Hong Kong movies of the late eighties and early nineties, the film is a rousing paean to chop-socky, generously populated with Asian-Am faces of all types, from elder statesmen like James Hong to the wiry stunt actors of the day (yes, including Al Leong). Kurt Russell gets his share of iconic lines as the lead, but in a wry twist, he turns out to be more henchman than hero. As his diminutive sidekick Wang, Dennis Dun represented the Average Asian-American Dude, and elevated the archetype. Friendly, relatable, and suddenly, surprisingly kick-ass, he wins the day and gets the girl, while Russell gets out-wisecracked by Victor Wong’s sage-like Egg Shen. Big Trouble was more like a shooting star than a portent of things to come, but for one moment at least, the dream of Asian-American henchmen was fulfilled, as they stepped out of the shadows and into the spotlight.
The nineties saw less of the same, as Hollywood began to wake up to the thrills of Hong Kong cinema. Why spend time home-growing henchmen and heroes when you could simply import them? Jackie Chan, Chow Yun-Fat, Michelle Yeoh and Jet Li couldn’t help but prop up Asian representation in cinema, but like Bruce Lee, their physical feats and accented English represented something Other, something funny and cool and decidedly exotic, safely separate and unconnected to Asian-American experience. While Asian-American female and queer lives were finally gaining appreciation thanks to mainstream films like The Joy Luck Club and actresses like Margaret Cho and Sandra Oh, we males had to contend with being outshone by our overseas cousins. The best we could offer up was Russell Wong’s Vanishing Son; both actor and series were a handsome, wooden pastiche of the Hong Kong superstars who already knew how to do it.
For an example of what the Asian-American henchman had come to by the end of the nineties, you won’t find better (or worse) than 1998’s Lethal Weapon 4. On the surface, the movie is just another romp in the franchise, featuring a strutting, smirking villain in the form of Jet Li, and as you’d expect, gaggles of Asian henchmen are taken out by Mel Gibson’s frenetic Sergeant Riggs and Danny Glover’s redoubtable Sergeant Murtaugh. If nothing else, the film is dated by its racial callousness. (“Hey Bruce, nice pajamas,” Gibson sneers at Jet Li when he enters the scene dressed in his tunic.) But while Jet wows us with his acrobatics and Riggs and Murtaugh’s banter provides the comedy, the only prominent Asian-American henchman is Conan Lee (born Lloyd Hutchinson), playing Jet’s brother, who doesn’t get a single word of dialogue.
Conan’s career is an abject lesson in henchman-dom; thirsting to become a Bruce Lee-like superstar, he relocated to Hong Kong in the eighties, appeared in exactly one good movie (Tiger on the Beat, alongside Chow Yun-Fat), and promptly vanished from sight. (He had too much ego, it was said — clearly a henchman who didn’t know his place.) Unceremoniously gunned down within minutes of being introduced in Lethal Weapon 4, he’s merely a plot device: as Jet wells up with pain and rage at the sight of his fatally wounded brother, and we continually cut to Riggs and Murtaugh as they bicker about how in the world they can subdue Jet, Conan just lies there and dies, the fate of all henchmen. Elsewhere, the Asian presence is reduced to tropes: the illegal immigrant (Eddy Ko), the cop in the background who explains how Hong Kong’s triads work (Paul Ng). Riggs and Murtaugh are allowed to wax indignant about the plight of Chinese refugees, while the only other Asian-Am character of note, Uncle Benny (Kim Chan), is a mob boss who doesn’t give a fig (“Over a billion more from where they came from”). In a strange twist, Chan would play virtually the same character (also called Uncle Benny) a year later in The Corruptor, starring Chow Yun-Fat and Mark Wahlberg. Hong Kong and Caucasian stars change, but henchmen stay the same.
All this is not to say that my childhood lacked notable Asian-American actors. Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa carved out a nice niche playing slippery bad guys (as he once said, “At least bad guys have balls”), John Lone and B.D. Wong flirted with gender boundaries, and Tzi Ma could always be counted on for prickly warmth in supporting roles. Even though he tended towards Latin or Native American roles, you can even throw Lou Diamond Phillips in there (he’s half-Filipino, look it up). And naturally one can’t discount Keanu Reeves, whose popularity was aided by his lack of specific ethnic background: was he Asian? Caucasian? In between? The truth was that he was all of these things, and thus could be anything, which was certainly a step up from the boxed-in henchman stereotype, even if it didn’t necessarily advance the cause of Asian-Americans in movies.
Nevertheless, others would eventually join the cinematic ranks, and by the twenty-first century Asian-Americans were emerging in all their multivariate glory: we now play honest-to-goodness leads, headline rom-coms, and take charge behind the camera. Today, China looms large in box office calculations, and Asian representation in movies is more prevalent than ever. Of course, henchmen are still around, and even henchwomen: cynically speaking, how else can one explain the fleeting, near-invisible role Chinese actress Jing Tian plays in Kong: Skull Island as anything other than a sop to Asian demographics? Still, people of my skin color now have a seat, however modest, at the Hollywood table: the prestige indie picture, the latest Fast and Furious sequel, frothy crowd-pleasing Netflix movies. Yet I maintain an affection for the Asian henchmen of my youth. They existed during a time in which tokenism wasn’t even in play, were never given the opportunity for more, and could only find celluloid immortality via death on screen, but they were always there, without complaint, ready to get mowed down and return, resilient and ever-present. You can kill us any way you like, but we’re not going anywhere. ■
Ho Lin is a Chinese-American writer and musician, and co-editor of the literary journal Caveat Lector. More of his work is featured on www.holinauthor.com.
