Read: 2026-07-11
Recommend: 10/10
I did not expect a book to make me cry, but We Were Dreamers did. Simu Liu’s memoir is moving, funny, and surprisingly honest. He writes about his childhood in China, watching Calabash Brothers (金刚葫芦娃) and imagining himself as a superhero, and then about the shock of growing up in Canada as a Chinese immigrant child under the pressure of a tiger mom and tiger dad.
What stayed with me most was how hard it can be to grow up as a minority in a Western country. Then again, maybe growing up is hard anywhere. Liu’s story shows both the pain and the love inside many immigrant families: parents sacrifice everything for their children, but sometimes they also pass down fear, pressure, and unspoken expectations.
Liu followed the “safe” path at first. He earned his business degree from Ivey Business School and started working as an accountant at Deloitte. But he found the job miserable and was fired after less than a year. Strangely, that failure became a turning point. Losing the stable job pushed him to take acting seriously and turn his side hustle into his real pursuit.
I am glad I read this book, especially because we now have two boys growing up in the United States. It made me think about what kind of parent I want to be. I hope I can do better than Simu’s parents in one important way: I want to help my kids build passion and discipline, but also make them feel safe enough to choose their own path. I do not want to impose my dreams on them. I want them to have the courage to discover their own. ❤️
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
Exchanging I love yous was a uniquely Western custom, and I had long ago come to terms with the fact that my parents expressed their love in a very different way—by telling me to put on a jacket, asking if I had eaten yet, or yelling at me when they felt like I wasn’t studying hard enough. The actual words were not a part of our family’s vocabulary at all.
Sometimes, if they ran out of toilet paper for the month, my mom and her siblings would tear the pages off their old notepads and repeatedly crumple and un-crumple them to soften the texture of the paper on their skin. There was no shame in doing what you had to in order to make ends meet; it was just life.
Today, they find themselves torn between two vastly different ideologies, perspectives, and media biases . . . and they worry the rift is only growing wider. As uncomfortable as they feel reading some of their Chinese colleagues’ texts over WeChat that demonize the West, they feel equally unsettled watching CNN, Fox News and the rest of Western mainstream media lambast a villainous, straw-man version of China over and over again. Like many immigrants who left their homes, they acknowledge that theirs wasn’t perfect—but home was home, and always would be.
there was the total mindfuck that came with growing up Asian and male, in a society that saw us as nothing more than a bunch of derogatory stereotypes. Asian men were frequently depicted in Western media as awkward, nerdy and completely undatable—pretty much exactly what my parents were trying to make me into. I know this is a lot of really heavy stuff to put into the psyche of a twelve-year-old, but it definitely affected me, and it definitely affected every Asian boy that grew up in a Western country. The double whammy of being teased on the playground with ching-chong noises and then seeing ourselves ridiculed on the screen robbed us of our natural confidence. Without proper guidance from our parents, who were not terribly concerned with our self-confidence, most of us grew up feeling like we weren’t worthy to be loved or desired; like whatever we were was not enough.
I remember having a crush on nearly every girl in my class at some point or another, like a lost puppy trying to latch on to anyone who would give him scratches and treats. One week I was head over heels for Francesca (another future Harvard Law alum, ugh), and another I was totally smitten by Zoe from the grade above. By the end of that week, though, I had already moved on to Ashley, the rebellious girl with a belly button piercing. These crushes didn’t just materialize out of nowhere—they were cultivated over hours spent talking on MSN Messenger, when I probably should have been finishing my school assignments on time. Looking back, it’s easy to see that I was just looking for the love and intimacy I wasn’t getting at home.
My parents would always deflect any compliments I received from their colleagues about my appearance. They loved to quote the Chinese proverb sìzhīfādá, tóunăojiăndān—roughly, “developing in all areas of the body except the brain.”
Going into my senior year, with graduation looming just over the horizon, I finally began taking the reins of my life, rather than just allowing myself to be dragged along. I gave up on being an engineer or a doctor (I think we all knew that was coming) and dropped all of the science courses that were weighing me down. I built my course load around English, art and math instead, which were my strong suits.
If I had learned anything throughout my senior year, it was that I didn’t need my parents in order to feel happy, or listened to, or loved; I had my friends for that. I had already spent far too much of my life crying over the way they treated me; I wasn’t going to give them the power to hurt me anymore.
And while some of my classmates may have been feeling anxious about leaving home for college, I could not have been more excited. Homesickness was for people who actually had homes; I was an astronaut, after all, whose only home was the eternal vastness of space through which I floated, untethered and unencumbered by any familial attachments. High school was over, and I was finally on my own; I was finally free.
Over the summer, my AEO friends racked their brains looking for summer jobs that would bolster their resumes—internships at financial institutions, data-entry clerkships, even bank teller positions—you know, building blocks for an actual future in the business field. I, on the other hand, had set my sights on something that would bolster, shall we say, a resume of a very different kind: I wanted to be an Abercrombie model. Maybe it was because my parents never raised me to be “cool,” or because the media always portrayed Asian men as nerdy, asexual sidekicks—either way, I had grown sick and tired of having that social status withheld from me. I wanted to be HOT, goddamnit!
most business schools will tell you to use the CAR technique to formulate a proper answer—Context, Action, and Result.
I was utterly humiliated as I went to my cubicle to collect my things in plain view of the entire office. My cheeks flushed red with embarrassment as everyone continued working in dead silence, pretending not to notice what was happening. Nobody made an effort to console me, or even offer a look of sympathy. Instead, they continued working, transfixed to their screens as if they would somehow suffer my fate if we made incidental eye contact.
I was a person of color in a pre-Black Panther and Crazy Rich Asians landscape, and I wasn’t anything special in the looks department; my work ethic was my only X factor, my secret sauce. Without that hustle, I’d still be in Toronto flirting with the poverty line, waiting for someone to give me my big break.
I think about those kids often—the graphic designers, architects and artists masquerading as accountants, engineers or bio majors—and I wish I could help them all find their greater purpose. But not everyone is ready to be unplugged from the Matrix. I don’t think I was either, until my life hit rock bottom after getting laid off. Looking back, the decision to pursue acting felt more like a series of happy accidents than a premeditated plan; it was anything but graceful. But, thanks to the most fortunate misfortune of all time, I still stumbled through it. I hope these kids will too, and while I can’t force the red pill down their throats, I hope that I can at the very least plant a seed in their minds that will spark a curiosity. To them I would say that there’s no harm in tasting different things—you never know what part of yourself you might awaken. Your parents did not defy destiny and settle halfway around the world so you could live a miserable and empty life. They want you to be happy doing what you love . . . they just might not know it yet.
A typical class was held once a week in groups of no more than ten students and was designed to mimic an audition environment. Some were even held in major casting offices. We would receive a scene to rehearse for each class and then perform it with a camera trained on us. I had the opportunity to play superheroes, police officers, drug addicts and a slew of characters I never would have gotten the chance to audition for. We got a copy of our footage after every class so that we could track our progress. I really loved the emphasis on play and self-discovery, in a space where it was safe to take risks and try new things. Acting, like life, gets a bit stale when you only make safe choices.
In my darkest night, I clung desperately to the belief that my salvation was just around the corner—I just had to hang on and keep fighting. And so I endured my parents’ scathing disapproval and scraped together what money I could from my odd jobs so I could continue to act. As I toiled away, the light inside me growing progressively dimmer, I kept telling myself over and over again that my glory would come. I had to protect my dream, and it would endure all hardship and blossom into the most incredible reality I could possibly imagine. Deep down, in the recesses of my mind, I wondered if I had gone completely mad.
I was indescribably relieved knowing that I would never have to record a time sheet, update a ledger or build a pivot table ever again. Nothing—no accolades, no parental love, no amount of money—was worth spending my life shackled to a job that I hated that much. That is no way to live, and if you are reading this paragraph with that sinking feeling in your stomach because I have just described your life, I implore you to begin taking the steps to find an occupation that leaves you with a sense of joy and accomplishment when you come home every day. At the very least start looking at ways you can get a side hustle going. The unknown is always scary, but not nearly as much as waking up one morning realizing you have wasted your precious life in pursuit of someone else’s idea of success. I choose the unknown, every time.
The best training I would ever get as a performer came with the opportunity to do theater. I was cast in a tiny play called About Allegra for the 2014 Fringe Festival, which marked the first time I had ever done stage acting. Up until then my understanding of acting only spanned from “action” to “cut”; I would stand on a mark, deliver some lines, and then do the same scene a bunch of times until we moved on. I was suddenly being asked to memorize an entire script and then perform it from beginning to end with no margin for error. I wasn’t paid a dime for About Allegra, but going through the rehearsal process was easily more useful than any class I had ever attended. I had to track a character chronologically through a story and to fully live in each moment, beat by beat. I learned the importance of physicality on the stage, where the audience was too far away to read facial expressions. I cultivated a chemistry with my costar and learned how to react off of her instead of delivering my lines the same way every time. The production itself performed very modestly—we struggled to fill even half of our seats on any given night—but it was truly an invaluable experience. To this day I’ve experienced very few highs like the one that comes from the sound of applause at curtain call.
Although I knew the show and my short film were two completely unrelated projects, I took this as another sign from the universe that good things happened to those who did the work. I cannot stress enough that without Blood and Water, or Taken, or Kim’s Convenience, or Marvel, I would not simply be waiting for someone to give me my next break. I was and am the master of my own destiny, with full ownership and accountability. I would have made more short films, written more scripts, or found more programs and classes and conservatories to be a part of.
Owning a dream to me consists of two key components—declaring it to the world, and taking action. When you put your dream out into the universe you will attract those who dream the same thing, and who understand its struggles. These people will become your allies, your collaborators, your mentors and your guides. But it’s not enough to simply pay lip service to your dreams—you’ve got to walk that walk and act on your ambitions. You’ve got to DO. Without taking action, your best ideas are just random neurons firing in your brain, like lost ships passing through an endless ocean of consciousness, doomed to be forgotten.
I was, and am, endlessly grateful for all that Kim’s Convenience gave to me. But I refused to let that gratitude silence my voice or cloud my desire to demand better for myself. I put my heart and soul into our show, but I knew that it did not love me the same way. The salvation of my career would lie elsewhere—in the place where my shining star was washed out by the blinding lights of a million other dreamers who wanted the same thing.
I carried this mentality with me throughout my career as an actor, where it served me well. It was very much me against the world, fighting against whatever or whomever stood in my way. I remembered every time I was passed over, second-guessed or outright rejected, and used it to fuel myself to work harder. I refused to accept any status quo that the world attempted to impose on me, whether it was a casting director, a schoolteacher, a classmate or my own parents. I always liked that about myself—it made me scrappy, hungry, self-motivated and maybe even a little mysterious?
I realized that the reason any of those people gave me the time of day was because they knew firsthand the struggle of being Asian in this line of work. Like me, they had wrestled with identity their whole lives, constantly fighting to be seen as equal to everyone else. Having laid down roots in a city that exports culture all over the world, they understood that representation on-screen did not come easy, and needed to be supported.
America invited the Chinese people to work on their railroads because they did better work for a lower wage, and then turned on them . . . because they did better work for a lower wage.
even though Western countries like America, Canada and Australia have leaned on and benefited greatly from Asian immigrants for over 150 years, our place in the Western world has always had an asterisk beside it. For some (maybe even most) white people, those who look like me and my family will never truly belong. Just ask the tens of thousands of Asian people who have suffered verbal and physical harassment in the wake of COVID-19, empowered by Donald Trump’s never-ending (and scientifically unsupported) stream of “China virus” rhetoric. The perception of all Asian people as perpetual foreigners meant that no matter where we grew up, claimed citizenship, or paid our taxes, we would always be seen as “other.” Perhaps that’s why every time I scrolled through my phone, I’d see countless instances of Asian people being pushed to the ground, or punched, or stabbed, or shot. Enough was enough.
Our culture deserved to be normalized and celebrated without being made into a punchline in movies and on television. We, in turn, needed to fight for our right to be treated as human beings. As my platform grew, I began to realize that I had a responsibility to be an outspoken representative of our community. When it seemed that our world was being consumed by xenophobia and hate, a sea of voices emerged and pushed back with an equal and opposing force of love and pride in our cultural heritage.
while we need to be grateful for the wisdom of our parents, we also need to forge our own path in this society. Many of our parents told us to keep our heads down, but I wanted us to stand up, to not be afraid of taking up space in the room, and to understand how powerful we could be if we banded together.
The idea of speaking on behalf of an entire race of people used to make me uncomfortable, but I would happily attack that question now, boldly, for every Asian boy or girl who has ever felt like they were less than. I want to stare right at them through their screens and let them know that their Asianness is a part of what makes them amazing, that they are a part of a rich and vibrant culture, that their parents moved mountains to be able to settle in a new country, and that they should always hold their heads high and NEVER apologize for who they are.
In December of 2018, on the heels of a wildly successful premiere of Black Panther that shattered box office records as well as the notion that people of color could not carry big-budget tentpoles, Marvel Studios announced that they were fast-tracking a movie about an Asian superhero.
It seems like such a paradox to me that human beings are both great adapters to change and terrified by it at the same time. So often we drift through life bound by the poor decisions we’ve made in the past, too afraid of the uncertainty that comes with challenging our status quo. We find ourselves stuck on a ship that is headed full speed to a place we’re pretty sure we don’t want to go, but we also don’t want to deal with the discomfort of jumping. So we say nothing, watching helplessly as we sail toward our doom like silent prisoners of our own past.
it made sense that I would inherit my parents’ words as my internal monologue. I was extremely hard on myself all the time, constantly berating myself for taking too much time off, or being distracted by social media (to be fair, I am constantly distracted by social media; it’s a problem). I placed my personal well-being dead last on my list of priorities, behind my career—something I had most definitely inherited from my immigrant parents. I wish I could tell you I’ve since resolved to be kinder to myself, but undoing my programming has proven to be difficult; it’s definitely still a work in progress.