Once Liu becomes an actual player in his own memoirs, the reader sees how very close he came to following the cookie-cutter immigrant child life – instead of breaking molds as a successful Asian actor in an industry that didn’t want him. Barely a year out of college, his life hits rock bottom when he is laid off from his first job as an accountant. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. I seem to watch fewer movies every year and had very limited knowledge of Simu before listening to this audiobook, which he does an excellent job narrating.

We Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story - Goodreads

Both she and my yeye passed away in 2021, shortly after my thirty-second birthday, while I was in the middle of reshoots for Shang-Chi and The Legend of The Ten Rings. I loved that when he wrote of his struggles with a 9-5 job he explained so perfectly what it feels like to be lost in expectations. I happen to love many of the same things he does about Canada —(starting with Canada’s delicious tasting tap water)….There are the party officials, the pure-of-heart idealists, the Crazy Rich Asians, the activists, the social media influencers (smash that subscribe button! An immigrant who battles everything from parental expectations to cultural stereotypes, Simu Liu struggles to forge a path for himself, rising from the ashes of a failed accounting career (yes, you read that right) to become Shang-Chi.

We Were Dreamers by Simu Liu eBook | Perlego [PDF] We Were Dreamers by Simu Liu eBook | Perlego

However, despite their flaws, his parents hoped that others could learn from their mistakes and avoid similar parent-child relationships. You don’t know if opinions are coming from real people, or if it’s a targeted attempt to bring you down,” Liu says. I’ve mentioned that his new memoir, We Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story, has a subtle theme of atonement to it – for how he’s mistreated girlfriends, how he accelerated his parents’ car straight into their garage door, how he once aspired to live like the stars of Entourage, the US comedy about famous scumbags who date supermodels. But I will say, if it had just been that, it would have been a lot harder for us, and I would feel distrustful. Through a swath of rejections and comical mishaps, Simu's determination to carve out a path for himself leads him to not only succeed as an actor but also open the door to reconciling with his parents.I had an attention deficiency at home, but also I was probably just a dumb kid who wanted a girlfriend and to be thought of as attractive. Somehow it shines a brighter light on Liu’s character, as if his status as a superhero isn’t predicated upon how people respond to him. After he finally makes an appearance, he continues to dedicate the next 30 pages to how his parents managed to bring them all to Canada. His story makes you wanna feel sad for him, but his dumb manor makes you laugh and say karmas a bitch lol.

We Were Dreamers – HarperCollins

Canada is not unilaterally friendly, nor is “friendly” even something that an entire country can be. I love Kim's Convenience, I enjoyed Shang Chi (even though I'm not really a Marvel hero fanatic), and I really like social stances that Simu embodies.What emerges is a portrait of a young man who spent his childhood despising his parents but now desperately wants to humanise them. His parents put an inordinate amount of pressure on him to be “successful,” but only by their definition. Simu Liu delivers a page-turning memoir that is all at once funny, inspiring and relatable, while also providing a refreshingly honest and impressively astute look at the immigrant family experience, the cultural trends of Hollywood in recent years, and what it means to be a dreamer fighting to achieve an (im)possible dream. On that day I became more than just a comic book character—I became a part of an idea that everyone deserves to see themselves as superheroes, as the leads of their own stories, or simply, just as multifaceted beings with hopes and aspirations and flaws. Lastly, the whole last section focused on him just struggling to be an actor and finally succeeding, but says nothing about how his relationship with his parents improved, or any other aspects of his personal growth.