I guess heads up: this is gonna get a bit long, a bit rambly (surprise!), and a bit personal. Also, Bruce Lee is a big theme throughout this.
The last year or so has been… weird and very introspective. And over the course of the year, for reasons I didn’t fully understand until now, I have watched a LOT of AAPI films (and discovered I am addicted to depressing ultraviolet south korean crime dramas). For the purposes of this post, I’ll talk about the Ip Man series and (a bit cheating) the Warrior tv show.
Ip Man 1 is… straight up chinese propaganda. Don’t get me wrong, Donnie Yen is frigging godlike (best german suplex in huiman history) but he also knows who butters his toast and has zero issues with pandering to them. And Ip Man 1 is right up there with “baby panda loves the value of labor” levels of propaganda for the CCP. It is still awesome but… keep that in mind. 3/5 because I love the scene where Master Ip fights ten dudes.
Ip Man 2 is when things start shifting to a more traditional action movie style series and I love it. Not a lot to speak of because it is generic as hell but… Donnie Yen. 2/5
Ip man 3 is… a mess. The first half is a weird action movie where Ip Man saves education from Mike Tyson (who apparently learned how to phonetically recite a few lines) and … I genuinely don’t know what is going on. But the second half is a weirdly good guy-romance that does the wife character justice and has probably the best fight scene in the entire of the Ip Man series where Master Ip fights a Muay Thai expert in an elevator while protecting his sick wife. 4/5 because I positively loved the last half when it stopped being a martial arts film and became all about a guy who realizes he has been shitty to his wife and is trying to make it up to her before she dies. And a bonus 7/5 for whatever Mike Tyson was. Like… what the fuck?
But Ip Man 4… that fucked me up for a lot of reasons.
And now we get to the back story. I am half chinese and half… lots of white. Growing up I had a racist white grandmother who thought I was too yellow and a a racist chinese grandmother who thought I was too white. My father barely gave a shit and my mother is a chinese white supremacist (THAT is one of those things that oscillates between hilarious and anger inducing depressing). Elementary and middle school was mostly being reminded I was weird. Once I got into high school (I went to a math and science high school… shit was weird), I was ALSO reminded that I am not REALLY chinese but was further reminded I was not white even though I should probably identify as that because I wasn’t smart enough to REALLY be asian. So…. yeah, I spent a lot of time finding ways to eat lunch on the roof.
And Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan were both big parts of my childhood. Even though I wasn’t REALLY asian, I loved that these were two guys who completely dominated cinema and transcended race. And being able to watch that, particularly around the time that action movie stars were coked out lunatics who gave Kylie Minogue herpes (JCVD), slow shitheads (Seagal), and martial artists who would never be allowed to film a good scene (American Jet Li and Jason Statham)... it felt good to see someone who looked like the other half of me.
Anywho the past year has been… great. Apparently with a mask I mostly look chinese so I have been reminded far more than once by my racist white trash neighbor who loves to run to his car while waving a tacticool m4 that I am the cause of the pandemic and LOTS of racist slurs and… yeah.
Speaking of, fuck GB for STILL having an emote of a piece of racist shit who commit violent hate crimes against vietnamese folk. Not really relevant to the topic at hand but… seriously, how is that still a thing?
And, from talking with friends in a similar boat over the years, my experience is pretty normal. Too chinese/vietnamese/taiwanese to be white but too white to be chinese/vietnamese/taiwanese so we tend to just identify as “asian” (now “AAPI”) regardless of what country we come from.
Anywho, that gets us to Warrior (cheating but that show is so frigging good) and Ip Man 4.
Warrior is… a weird ass show that is depressingly timely and even more depressingly always timely. For those unaware, it is based on a show Bruce Lee tried to get made before his passing that is about the chinese in san francisco at the tail end of the gold rush. It starts off with the “you aren’t worth being properly racist to” levels of discrimination toward chinese people and rapidly escalates to full on race wars as the Irish blame the Chinese for taking all the cheap labor jobs and politicians build on that to get reelected. A lot of the show focuses on Ah Sahm, Li Yong, and Hong as almost a three phases of a warrior where each wants to make the world better for their people but each has their own way of doing it that mostly has to do with their place in the world and largely align with the writings of Bruce Lee. It i a GOOD fucking show and Joe Taslim plays Li Yong and that handsome Indonesian (?) murder beast can do no wrong. And while it definitely started as skinemax, the female characters are arguably even more interesting than the men. I’ve watched one episode in particular multiple times that starts truly horrifying but becomes one of the most satisfying hours in television and I love it (if you have seen season two you should know exactly which one I mean). And while it is probably not great that Ah Sahm is a Japanese/British guy playing basically Bruce Lee, I love that it transcends this to a more universal AAPI experience as a result. Also, Andrew Koji (and Joe Taslim) are frigging awesome. 4.5/5
But that gets me to Ip Man 4. Ip Man 4 is probably a bad movie as there is no real unifying plot and it is mostly Donnie moving from scene to scene. But given the state of the world… it fucked me up something fierce. It is about Ip Man heading to San Francisco to try to make a better life for his kid before he dies of cancer (and I fully acknowledge having a cancer scare over the past year did not help me…). Because it is Ip Man and still some hardcore chinese propaganda it involves Master Ip fixing racism but also deciding that China is a better place for his son. Yeah…
But throughout the course of it, it was real as hell. Yonah is the daughter of one of Ip Man’s rivals and some bad shit happens to her and she gets her hair cut by a racist asshole. And I truly love that she asks “Uncle Ip” to help her even it out and it is painfully clear in the next scene that he did a shit job of it. I similarly love that her father blames her for starting a fight in a way that anyone with a chinese parent will understand: the instinctive assumption that it is all your fault that a bunch of shitheads beat you up and abused you. Like, I god damned love Yonah.
But also, I love the role Bruce plays even though he probably had less than five minutes of screen time. Ip Man 4 is very clearly passing the torch in a way I love (and that I suspect was not what the directors and CCP planned). From the end credits of Ip Man 1 on you are constantly reminded that Master Ip is one of Bruce’s masters (because propaganda, heavily implied only master) and he increasingly becomes a character over the moives. He is an obnoxious and arrogant little shit but he also, especially by 4, shows that he can back up his arrogance*. And I positively love that it is immediately established that he is “the next generation” and actively does not care about racism and “being chinese” with the student he sent to China being a black guy with a decent ‘fro. But also, it is rapidly established that the rest of the chinese immigrants don’t really feel that way and the white americans REALLY don’t feel that way and there is a constant background theme of how he probably made things a LOT worse in the short term but hopefully has made things better in the long term (not sure if I believe that at this point but… Bruce tried). And stuff like Yonah caring more about being a cheerleader than martial arts but also incorporating what her father taught her to help a lot with that. And Master Ip is very clearly portrayed as someone who is not quite there but who clearly influenced the man who was. I am always a sucker for acknowledging that change takes time and that it isn't an overnight thing. 4/5
So yeah, mostly rambly and a good reminder that i should just get a god damned blog at this point. But also felt like something I had to type out regardless of who reads it or where it goes. One of those things where it was more important to type out my thoughts and... after you type that many words you might as well spam some folk.
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*Also, tangential :Fuck Quentin Tarantino for portraying Bruce Lee as an ineffectual and arrogant loser in his “what it would be like if Hollywood stayed great” racist shitheap where the white blonde guy needs to go over everyone. I am ALL for portraying Bruce as a cocky and violent shithead because… for as awesome as he was, he definitely was one. Like, Bruce may be one of the all time greats but he was very definitively a mother fucker. But for all his arrogance… that was one guy who could back it up. But it is hollywood so always gotta be a bit racist, I guess.
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