On March 26, Marvel announced the cast for “Avengers: Doomsday.” While other fans were excited to see characters like the X-Men or the Fantastic Four, I was most excited for the return of Shang-Chi.
The Master of Kung Fu made his cinematic debut in the 2021 film “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.” The movie won the Unforgettable Gala’s Vanguard Award and was praised by reviewers for its Asian representation. But while many Asians like myself love the character today, this wasn’t always the case.
The character Shang-Chi was created in 1973 by Steve Englehart and Jim Starlin, who were inspired to create a martial arts-centered comic after watching “Kung Fu,” a television series featuring white actor David Carradine as its half-Asian protagonist.
After being turned down by DC Comics, they brought their pitch to Marvel. Editor Roy Thomas agreed on one condition: they were to include the character Fu Manchu, whose rights Marvel had just acquired. Englehart and Starlin agreed and made their protagonist Fu Manchu’s son. However, they would later regret including such a character in their comic, as Starlin noted the source material was “the most racist pieces of sh*t I’ve ever seen.”
Fu Manchu was a villain created in 1912 by English novelist Sax Rohmer. He is an immortal mad scientist and sorcerer with a vicious hatred of Western culture who wants to rule the world, making him a poster child for anti-Asian propaganda.
In his first appearance in “The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu,” he is described as “the yellow peril incarnate in one man.” Despite facing criticism for his racist portrayal, Fu Manchu became popular in Western media, and his character was adapted in several movies, television shows and radio series, usually depicted by white actors in yellowface.
To Englehart and Starlin’s credit, their comic, titled “Master of Kung Fu,” challenged the East-versus-West thinking present in Rohmer’s novels. It made clear that Shang-Chi, as well as other Asian characters introduced later on, disagreed with Fu Manchu’s goals. Several stories even called out the white supporting cast’s racism.
Yet, the ties with Rohmer’s novels persisted. Besides Fu Manchu, other Rohmer creations were also present, like the protagonist Sir Denis Nayland Smith as Shang-Chi’s mentor. Moreover, the fact that both Englehart and Starlin – and Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy, who helmed the series after they left – were white was apparent in Shang-Chi’s stereotypical characterization. He was a reserved philosopher who meditated frequently and rejected Western notions like wearing shoes. There was also the egregious yellow shade used to color his skin, which Starlin would later admit was “embarrassing.”
Thus, Shang-Chi existed in a paradox. He was an Asian character inspired by a whitewashed show, with ties to an undoubtedly racist book series, and characterized based on white people’s preconceived notions of Asian culture. Conversely, he was also progressive at a time when Asian characters in comic books were usually sidekicks. As Gulacy explained in a 2000 interview, “Back then, mainstream comics usually featured blond guys with big muscles, and that was about it. So early on, we had a diverse character and an equally diverse audience — and that’s one of the things that Doug and I are proud of.”
As the kung fu hype of the 70s died down, so did “Master of Kung Fu.” Marvel cancelled the series in 1983 after maintaining Fu Manchu’s copyright became too expensive. The character continued to make guest appearances in comics like “Spider-Man” and “Secret Avengers” but was no longer a main character.
On the bright side, the loss of copyright prompted Marvel to distance Shang-Chi from Rohmer’s canon. In 2010, a “Secret Avengers” storyline by Ed Brubaker revealed that Shang-Chi’s father’s true name was Zheng Zu, and that any other name he had gone by in the past was a pseudonym. Shang-Chi’s half-sister Fah Lo Suee was similarly renamed to Zheng Bao Yu, and other characters like Smith simply stopped appearing in the Marvel universe.
Finally, in 2020, Shang-Chi starred in his own series by “American Born Chinese” author Gene Luen Yang. Yang admitted that he was not a Shang-Chi fan growing up, as he said to Syfy Wire, “I didn’t want to be the Asian kid trying to buy a kung fu comic.” But he saw a chance in writing Shang-Chi to craft a story that would have meant something to his younger self. He said, “We want our story to present Shang-Chi as a three-dimensional hero with human wants, human fears, and human needs. We want him to be relatable to any reader from any background.”
The comic, simply titled “Shang-Chi,” followed its title character juggling his desire to live a normal life in Chinatown with his responsibility toward guiding his half-siblings who were left aimless after Zheng Zu’s death. Shang-Chi retained his reserved personality, but when asked by another character why he spoke “like that” – referring to the fortune cookie dialogue that has long been associated with him – he mused, “I’ve found that if I slow my cadence and use ‘wise’ words, Westerners look at me, rather than past me, when I speak.”
The movie’s creators shared Yang’s goal in making Shang-Chi more relatable. But while Yang had to adhere to Shang-Chi’s prior characterization, the filmmakers had something he did not: a clean slate.
In the movie, Shang-Chi, portrayed by Chinese-Canadian actor Simu Liu, displayed a much more outgoing personality than his comic book counterpart, singing in karaoke bars and getting drunk with his best friend Katy (Akwafina). As half-Japanese director Destin Daniel Cretton explained, “We wanted to make sure that Shang-Chi was just like any of us. I want to watch this movie and say, ‘Yes, that’s how I feel. I feel out of place sometimes, and I cover it up with humor.’”
The part from the comics where Shang-Chi was a British superspy was completely cut out. This might have been due to the spy agency’s ties to Rohmer’s novels, or it might have been because Shang-Chi’s adventures in the comics often highlighted the differences between him and his white coworkers. He remained the only Asian member on the team for 32 issues until the introduction of Chinese-British love interest Leiko Wu. Even then, the comic treated all Asian cultures the same, having Shang-Chi and Leiko disguise themselves as different Asian ethnicities on missions.
In contrast, the movie begins years after young Shang-Chi fled to America, thus skipping the fish-out-of-water phase to focus on other aspects of his character arc. Instead of befriending any spies, the movie introduces regular Chinese-American citizen Katy as his best friend, serving as his introduction to Asian-American culture and providing the writers with the opportunity to explore differences between it and Asian culture. An example is when Shang-Chi and Katy visit Macau and Katy struggles to converse in Mandarin, to which a character responds, “Don’t worry, I speak ABC” – which Liu clarified “stands for ‘American-born Chinese.’”
Of course, the biggest change the filmmakers had to enact was with regard to Shang-Chi’s father. Taking Fu Manchu’s place is original character Xu Wenwu, who doubles as The Mandarin whose Ten Rings organization was referenced in “Iron Man” movies. Much effort was devoted to ensuring that Wenwu’s characterization counteracted Fu Manchu’s racist portrayal in the comics, as screenwriter David Callahan described, “It became the ‘Wenwu List’ of stereotypes we wanted to explode.”
In the end, the solution they came up with was simple: they treated Wenwu as a human being. According to Callahan, “He’s loving, caring. None of these things are a yellow peril.”
Wenwu is still the story’s antagonist who abused Shang-Chi as a child, but both the good and bad sides of him are explored to give him a nuanced characterization. The movie opens with a scene in which the immortal, portrayed by handsome Hong Kong star Tony Leung, falls in love with Shang-Chi’s mother, Ying Li (Fala Chen). Inspired by this love, he puts his criminal past behind him to raise a family with her. Then she dies to a rival gang, and he becomes cold again, causing a strained relationship between him and his children.
Though Wenwu can accurately be called a supervillain with an army of henchmen at his command, the story is never about taking down his organization. Instead, the plot revolves around the family drama between Wenwu and Shang-Chi. Rather than foiling his father’s plans of world domination, the climax showed Shang-Chi talking his father down from releasing an evil creature who promised to return Li to him, because Wenwu had to accept that she was gone.
Thus, Cretton and Callahan were able to take the core elements of Shang-Chi – a “master of kung fu” raised by an immortal – and turn it into a heartfelt story that spoke to Asian experiences.
Part of their method was ensuring that Asian voices helmed the project both in front of and behind the cameras, as Cretton explained, “It’s like this big mix of Asian cultures coming together and responding to the script and [saying things] like, ‘Oh, that doesn’t feel quite right.’ All of that helped contribute to what I think is a really beautiful update to what started in the comics a few decades ago.”
From an obscure character written by white creators and related to an anti-Asian caricature, to a major cinematic hero built from the collaboration of an Asian cast and crew, and soon to appear in an “Avengers” film, Shang-Chi’s evolution is proof of how far Asian representation has come.
Reem Fan can be reached at [email protected].
