Book Review: We Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story, by Simu Liu (2022)

 

The cover of We Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story, by Simu Liu, 2022, plus a handsome headshot of Liu. 

The excellent cast of the CBC sitcom Kim's Convenience. From left to right, Simu Liu, Jean Yoon, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, Andrea Bang, Andrew Phung, and Nicole Power.

Actor Simu Liu has rocketed to fame over the past few years, thanks to his role as Jung Kim on the CBC hit TV show Kim’s Convenience, and his groundbreaking lead role as Shang-Chi in 2021’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Liu is now the author of a memoir, We Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story, which tells the story of his parents, who were born in China and immigrated to Canada in the early 1990’s.

Liu’s parents were both engineers, and they placed high expectations on him to follow a similar career path. However, from an early age, Liu had the feeling that he might be better suited to a more creative career. Much of We Were Dreamers focuses on Liu’s relationship with his parents, which turned abusive turning his teenage years.

Liu is an excellent writer, and he is honest about his own shortcomings as he chronicles his journey through a private high school and on to college, where he majors in business with the hopes of becoming an accountant. But the acting bug bites, and when Liu is fired from his accounting job in 2012, he jumps into acting, working as an extra, stock photo model, and stuntman—anything to gain experience.

Getting cast in Kim’s Convenience in 2016 was Liu’s big break as an actor. I would have liked more tidbits about Kim’s Convenience, as the show was my introduction to Liu, but he makes it clear that while he appreciated the show, he had his eyes set on making it big in Hollywood. Even after the success of Kim’s Convenience on Netflix, it was a struggle for Liu to break into American movies. That all changed in the summer of 2019, when Liu was cast as Shang-Chi, the first Asian superhero in Marvel’s Cinematic Universe.

Unfortunately, Kim’s Convenience fizzled out, and the show was canceled in 2021, due in part to the departure of Ins Choi, who wrote the play that the show was based upon. Cast members, including Liu, were vocal about how the show minimized their creative input, and criticized the shows’ lack of Asian writers. It was an unfortunate ending for a show that was groundbreaking, and in the beginning, quite funny and touching. But the last two seasons of the show were marred by a decision to lean into typical sitcom cheesiness, and as Liu writes, “story lines that didn’t carry past a singular episode.” (p.258) One of my pet peeves during the final two seasons was how Janet’s character seemed to change arbitrarily from week to week, for seemingly no reason. 

We Were Dreamers is an excellent book, as Liu details the struggles of being an Asian-American actor at a time when Asian representation in the US media is still shockingly low. I wish Liu wrote more about Kim’s Convenience, and I wish he wrote more about how his relationship with his parents has changed and improved over the years, but those are small quibbles. For anyone interested in Simu Liu’s rapid rise to stardom, or about what it’s like to be the child of immigrants, We Were Dreamers is a must-read.