Being Big Isn’t the Same as Being Free

“Go big or go home!” Expats like me traveled across continents and endured a lot of bullshit along the way to build a career in a foreign land. It is only natural that we aspire to be big—recognition, popularity, money, and power—things our home can hardly offer. Yet, so much evidence in my recent everyday life shows me that true freedom is not about being big; rather, it is about having the flexibility to vary our scale.

I choose to write, teach, and think in English because I want to do cultural analysis unapologetically. Being proficient in English is a little pass to get me into Anglophone cultural circles, which, objectively speaking, are more open than Sinophone ones, to a certain extent. I emphasize “to a certain extent” because Anglophone cultural circles do set thresholds for freedom, and these thresholds are highly contingent on who you are.

Let’s consider the example of the reputable, made-in-Hong Kong, action-movie director John Woo. Woo directed several top-notch “heroic bloodshed” movies in Hong Kong cinema in the late 1980s and the 1990s, including A Better Tomorrow (1986), Hard Boiled (1992), and The Killer (1989). Woo caught Hollywood’s attention and was recruited to make a few big hits there, including Mission Impossible 2 (2000), starring Tom Cruise. (Fun fact: Woo’s office is just a 5-minute drive from where I live now in Santa Monica!) Woo is so admirable because he basically “scaled up” the Hong Kong perspective, which had long been seen as culturally niche or dismissed as an unoriginal derivative of Chinese or Western cultures. At least in terms of scale, no one would doubt that Woo’s transition from Hong Kong to Hollywood counts as an “upgrade.”

However, in his later years, Woo has told the media on several occasions that he was often locked into “big-budget” films in Hollywood and that he actually wanted to craft something more nuanced in smaller-budget projects (see his latest film Silent Night (2023)). Woo’s vision is that action in his films should not be consumed raw as entertainment, but treated as an ingredient leading to a larger emotional drama. Yet he has rarely found those smaller opportunities because Hollywood didn’t trust him enough to let him scale back; instead, they wanted Woo to always remain the master of the heroic bloodshed sub-genre. Isn’t it a little crazy that, even for a big name like John Woo, he still can’t direct whatever he wants here?

This conundrum reveals another layer of the model minority myth: Asian and Asian Americans often have to be “big” in the United States because they have very little room to stay small. They always have to prove their market worth—”I am a really good deal!”—to be accepted, not to say liked or loved, by society. You really cannot blame those immigrant parents who groom their kids into good workers and professionals; they have legit reasons.

Is there a way for us to scale back? I am trying to learn from the small, self-sustaining “scallion system” I set up on my patio. I bought some scallions from the grocery store and regrew their root ends in a pot. The thirteen bulbs do not give me an ample supply of scallions, but with the help of Southern Californian sunshine (which I technically pay for through my taxes), the “scallion system” reliably provides hotpot seasoning once a week with minimal care.

Perhaps, if we manage our expectations well and with the right soil and climate, we can really build a system and live upon it.