I love Iron Fist. Sometimes the Immortal Iron Fist. Sometimes he’s called The Living Weapon. He punches people real good and runs around in green silk pajamas with the world’s cheesiest dragon tattoo on his chest. Oh, and a gold do rag. It’s one of the more amazingly terrible costumes in comics.
Iron Fist spends a lot of time hanging out with a guy named Luke Cage. If my superhero name was Power Man, I’d probably give up on my secret identity too. They ran around as something called Heroes-for-Hire for a while which was exactly what it sounded like. Iron Fist and Luke Cage made up the heart of a seedier side of the Marvel comics universe.
Iron First and Luke Cage were the pulpy counterpoint to the flashy clean fun of Fantastic 4 or the teen-angst fest of the X-Men. And now they’re all coming to Netflix. Starting with the already-released Daredevil, Marvel is opening the “street-level” phase of the MCU to be followed by three more shows, Jessica Jones — a super-hero with PTSD turned badass private eye, to be followed by a Luke Cage show and an Iron Fist show.
I am tremendously excited. Yeah yeah, DD is great. Jessica Jones is a super cool, flawed heroine. Luke Cage is hilarious and awesome. But this is about Iron Fist. Because, let’s be real, kung-fu is awesome. ergo Iron Fist is awesomer than the rest of the Defenders.
But sometimes loving something is also about seeing its flaws. And Iron Fist has a really big one. I have a secret hope, a deeply held desire that I didn’t really realize until I finished watching the interesting but flawed Daredevil.
I really, really want Iron Fist to be an Asian dude.
OK, let’s back up a sec. Iron Fist is a living weapon charged with the power of Shou-Lou the Undying (he’s a dragon, you stick your hands in his heart, you get the Iron Fist power. good? good.) The Iron Fist is able to channel the chi energy of the mystical city K’un-Lun (aka Shangri-La) and punch things real real good.
Everything about K’un-Lun indicates its culture and history is Asian in origin (or possibly Asian culture in the Marvel continuity derives from K’un-Lun and the six other heavenly cities). The architecture, the art, the undying dragon thing. Everyone’s names are like Shou-Lou, and Lei Kung, and Crane Mother. It’s, like, super-duper Asian. Kung-fu movies went to comic-book land. Again, still awesome.
Here’s where it gets tricky. Iron Fist’s name is Danny Rand. He’s the son of an industrialist/explorer named Wendell Rand who discovered K’un-Lun as a child, left to make his fortune, and returns to find the lost city. In the attempt, he brings his wife and son along with a business partner. It’s kind of confusing in the way that origin stories can be, but basically everyone dies except for Danny who gets adopted by K’un-Lun and is given over to Lei Kung the Thunderer for training. He not only learns kung-fu, he wins the right to face the dragon, defeats it in single combat, and inherits the power of the Iron Fists. He’s the greatest hero of K’un-Lun and is tasked with defending the city and saving the world. By punching things.
Danny Rand has blond hair and blue eyes. He’s from New York. These things aren’t intrinsically a problem, but it also follows in a tradition of pulp stories that dates back to the eighteenth century. There’s the classic storyline of the intrepid adventurer exploring the mysteries of the Orient and uncovering some secret treasure, some mystical ability that gives him great wealth or power. Think, like, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom where the wisecracking archeology professor descends into the dark heart of India to meet a guy who rips the still beating hearts out of peoples’ chests by shouting “kalimaaaan!”
I’m not saying these stories can’t be fun. They often are. But they’re also rooted in a view of Asia and Asian cultures that dates back to colonial, imperial Europe. A period that was rife with slavery, brutal colonizations, and “trade” deals that amounted to little more than exploitation and conquest. These stories often rely on a savior complex where the natives have some secret treasure or power but need the outsider, the imperialist, to arrive with their intellect, civilization, or sheer grit to overcome the challenges that have flummoxed the natives.
Iron Fist originally debuted in the 1970s — in the early days of Bruce Lee’s legend, the Shaw Brothers were at their height, kung-fu was coming to America. The story of a blonde haired, blue eyed guy learning the secrets of K’un-Lun (aka Xanadu) and punching bad guys real good was still novel and relatable to the audience of comic books. I’m not making excuses for the original creators, but this isn’t about attacking them.
This is about an opportunity. Iron Fist is about to get introduced to American audiences in a big, big way. While he has been bopping around the comics world for some forty years now, he isn’t a lead title like Captain America or the X-Men. He gets cancelled, brought back, shoved into someone else’s costume, added to another title, killed, resurrected, etc. But with his entrance into MCU we’re about to see a whole new side of the character for a whole new audience.
And what we’ve seen so far hasn’t been encouraging. Daredevil contained a lot of clues for the upcoming Iron Fist show. DD Spoilers to follow:
Wilson Fisk’s partner, Madam Gao implies that the blind drug mules are from one of the seven heavenly cities (0f which K’un-Lun is one) and the symbol on the heroin envelopes is the icon of the Steel Serpent, a classic Iron Fist villain. It’s also likely that Madam Gao herself is the sometime antagonist of Crane Mother from the comics.
None of this is particularly reassuring for an inclusive and balanced portrayal of Asian culture in MCU. From the mystical ninjas of the Hand to creepy disease/human trafficking metaphors in that whole unexplained Black Sky subplot to Chinese opium dealers — it all reeks of age-old cliches and racially-charged stereotypes.
More than that, it’s hacky. We’ve seen these tropes over and over again. So why are we re-treading that territory? Iron Fist needs to break away from its legacy of lazy orientalism and exoticization and find fertile new ground.
Surprisingly, given their flawed track record with minority and women characters, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has faced this very issue before and come out on top. When Iron Man 3 was announced to feature The Mandarin as one of the main villains, I cringed internally. The Mandarin and his Ten Rings situation is often portrayed like a mashup between Genghis Kahn and Fu Manchu, parading around in silk robes with a long wispy mustache and beard. In the comics, he’s a relic of a different time with a different context.
But, for the MCU, Marvel pulled a neat trick (spoiler warning) by pulling back the curtain on The Mandarin and revealing him as nothing more than a washed up actor put on camera by the real villains to create a climate of fear and terror. Marvel/Disney flipped the script by showing that the bad guy is such a bad guy that he was playing on the public’s internalized racism when he constructed a fictional boogeyman to haunt their nightmares.
It was clever and fun — in part because Ben Kingsley is who he is. But it showed an awareness on the part of the Marvel/Disney powers that be that they can’t just roll out old comic book characters without reconsidering their context.
Which is why, against all odds, I find myself thinking about what it would mean to have an Asian Iron Fist. Does it mean that they might lose some viewers? Maybe? There are so few Asian leading men that it’s hard to say what kind of impact it would have. And, let’s be honest, casting an Asian dude as a kung-fu superhero isn’t exactly breaking new ground. I think a lot of casual comics fans don’t even really realize that Iron Fist isn’t Asian already.
But putting a white dude in that gold do rag feels like giving in to a legacy of cultural imperialism and appropriation. I’m not even suggesting changing the character’s name or back story. He can be the Asian-American son of a billionaire who goes to the mountains of Tibet to discover his heritage. Or a thousand other variations on the core elements.
Marvel has become a flashpoint in the ongoing culture wars as a growing and increasingly vocal viewership has demanded more inclusion, more diversity, and, honestly, better storytelling, Marvel has responded with messages of patience and asking the fans to trust them. And, as flawed as Age of Ultron was on this front (a subject of much debate), I can also see a good faith effort there to do the right thing. The storytelling failed to properly communicate their intent, but I have faith the intent was there to give us a more diverse superhero world.
The comics front has shown a real willingness to change with the times. New female and minority lead titles are rising on the bestsellers charts, notably Ms. Marvel, Spider-Gwen, and Miles Morales’s continued popularity as Spider-Man. But the track record of Asian-Americans in the comics world is still shockingly poor with the British-lady mind trapped in a hot ninja body that is Psylocke and bubblegum popping teen Jubilee as the two standouts in the X-men side of things, it doesn’t look too good. I’m having a hard time of thinking of an Asian Avenger — and seriously, everyone’s been an Avenger.
I know it’s unlikely to happen. There’s a strong pull to conform to the original way of telling the story, the comic-book origins, and casting an Asian Iron Fist would likely cause more disruptive waves amongst the fans than the positive approval from the minority of Asian-American readers like me.
But part of me still hopes that we can find a new way of telling this story that honors its connection with the fans without divorcing it from the culture and heritage that provided the awesome kung-fu that fuels it.
I love Iron Fist. I’d love him more if he looked like me.
