SIMU LIU IS MORE THAN A SUPERHERO
YOUR REFLECTION CAN BE LONELY.
IT SHOULDN’T BE THAT WAY, especially not for a kid. Yet if you watch enough screens, whether phones or laptops or TVs, at some point you start to believe those screens reflect the world. And if you never see anyone who looks like you reflected back on those screens, you just might question how you fit into that world. You start to believe that the infinite possibilities you see onscreen aren’t for you.
Once the thought penetrates your head, it’s hard to shake. Your peers only stoke that belief. They’re watching the same TV shows, playing the same video games, in awe of the same superheroes as you—except the stars look like them, so heroism in everything from freeze tag to cops and robbers is their birthright. You? You’re forever sidekick, so unimportant and invisible that the playground dash to the fence starts before you’ve finished tying your shoes to join in.
So that damn reflection? Each day, you reject it more, bartering your identity away to “fit in,” whether that means changing your look or changing your accent or hating your lunch or maybe hating your mom, too. And when none of that solves a problem that should never exist, you consider changing other things, like your name.
This is what it’s like to be “other”—and it sucks. And Simu Liu knows this feeling well. We’re speaking about it right now in a Zoom interview while he’s sitting in his Los Angeles hotel room. Liu is clad in a slightly baggy Toronto Raptors T-shirt that hides a chiseled physique, and he’s sipping boba tea, a decidedly Asian American blend of green or black tea, milk, and tapioca pearls.
In September, the 32-year-old will star as the titular character in the first Marvel Cinematic Universe film with an Asian lead. This matters. It comes in the midst of a moment for Asian Americans, who’ve grown more and more conscious of (and vocal about) the racism and lack of representation that have long defined their American experience. It is not a new feeling for many Asian Americans, but it is a new discussion, one with new hope. As the son of a Chinese mother and an Indian father, I understand this intimately. It’s been
