When he was young, Wilber Pan wanted to be a basketball player. His parents had run a grocery store while they were living in the U.S., then moved back to Taiwan in 1987, where Will started studying bopomofo and Chinese while attending Taipei International School. There, he began to participate in school plays and found that he really enjoyed performing.
Back in the States for college, Will tried out some singing contests but didn't really have any success. One of them, however, was hosted by Sony BMG in Los Angeles, and while he didn't place in the finals, that was where Andy Lau's manager discovered him.
attended Williams College and Berklee School of Music
received a recording contract after entering a talent contest in Taiwan while visiting his grandma in 1995
has since made 13 albums + one Japanese album
was one of the torchbearers for the Beijing Olymic Games and performed at the closing ceremony
began his acting career in a Hong Kong action movie and has since worked with Ang Lee and Jackie Chan
latest projects are his directorial debut Love in Disguise and a new album, The Eighteen Martial Arts
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Leehom is everywhere in Greater China!
Visiting China since 2001, I'd always wondered why this one person was on every bottle of Wahaha mineral water. I just couldn't understand who would want to be Wahaha's human mascot and assumed that he was either a Taiwanese drama heartthrob or a popstar.
It turns out that Wahaha, the hugest Chinese water & beverages company of all time, was looking for a new young singer's face to represent them, and at the time, Leehom already had a solid fanbase in Taiwan and was looking to expand his audience to Mainland China.
is now Baidu's director of international communications
lives in Beijing with his wife Fanfan and two kids
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Hotties.
Kaiser Kuo (Guo Yiguang) was born in 1966 in New York to immigrant parents and grew up listening to the Who, Led Zeppelin, Peter Gabriel, Sabbath, Iron Maiden, and others that would totally influence his life as a musician and writer.
while visiting Hong Kong with her sisters at the age of 17, she sang a Whitney Houston song at a talent contest hosted by Hong Kong channel TVB and received an offer
has since released too many albums to count, including Coco Lee (1996) and Exposed (2005) (English)
sang the Mandarin versions of "Colors of the Wind" and "Reflection" and did the Mandarin dub for Disney's Mulan (1998)
has done duets with Jacky Cheung, Van Ness Wu, and non-Chinese singers including Kelly Price and Julio Iglesias
was friends with Michael Jackson
performed at the 73rd Academy Awards
sang a song for the Beijing Olympics, "Forever Friends"
is a YouthAIDS Ambasssador in Thailand
married to president of trading group Li & Fung, Canadian Bruce Philip Rockowitz
recently projects include a song for the Shanghai Expo and the second leg of her East2West World Tour
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Coco Lee has had a remarkable number of firsts as an Asian pop singer in the international music scene. A whole ten years after her crossover debut, she has been listed by E! Entertainment as one of the world's 25 sexiest divas ahead of Fergie, Madonna, and J. Lo.
Baccarat Hong Kong, June 2009
While she spent her younger years in Hong Kong, at age ten, she and her two older sisters relocated to the US with their mother, who was going to med school in California. Young Coco totally loved listening to Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey. It was after high school that she returned to Hong Kong and entered the talent contest through which she was discovered.
graduated from the National Taiwan University of Arts, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and New York University
nominated for Best Director at the Academy Awards for Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000)
received Academy Award for Best Director for Brokeback Mountain (2005) along with seven other nominations
has also won awards at the Berlin Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival, British Academy Film Awards, among others
latest films are Lust, Caution (2007), Taking Woodstock (2009), and Life of Pi (2012)
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Ang Lee was born in 1954 to parents who had come to Taiwan after the Communist victory in the Mainland. His father wanted him to become a professor, but Ang failed the the University Entrance Examination and later studied at an arts university in Taiwan. In 1979 he went to the US to study theatre at UIUC and did his MFA at NYU.
wrote for the United States Information Agency in the early 50s
relocated permanently to the US when she was 35
was a writer-in-residence at University of Southern California, Radcliffe College, and UC Berkeley
has had many of her novels made into films, including Lust, Caution directed by Ang Lee (2007)
is one of Greater China's most popular and influential writers into today
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Eileen Chang was born to upper-class parents in Shanghai in the year 1920. Her father had affairs, got hooked on opium, and was very violent, and they divorced when Eileen was ten. So her childhood was very tumultuous and sad. She was able to have an English education beginning at a young age and attended a Christian high school in the city. She was already writing prolifically as an undergraduate in literature at the University of Hong Kong, where she studied until Japan took over.
"When I'm in the United States, they do not think of me as an American. In Hong Kong, Hong Kong people do not feel that I am Chinese. So I would always tell myself, I am a citizen of the world"
-- Daniel Wu, Shanghai Times interview
Young Daniel Wu trained in kungfu as his Shanghainese parents reminded him to never forget that he was Chinese. After graduating from college, he went backpacking in Asia to feel connected to his roots. Then he became a model in Hong Kong:
Note: This is actually a 2009 Men's Vogue cover and not from his early modeling days.
And now, he lives in China making his career as an actor, a director, and--more recently--as a producer.
became famous for rap battling on Black Entertainment Television's Freestyle Fridays
has made mixtapes and 4 albums, including his debut The Rest is History (2004) and ABC (3007)
acted in the movie 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)
has done songs with Kanye West, Wyclef Jean, and Leehom Wang
featured in the documentary 1040 (2010) along with Van Ness Wu
will play Bruce Lee's BFF in Bruce Lee, My Brother (2010)
currently living in Hong Kong
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Jin grew up in a neighborhood of Miami with a large African-American population and early on began to have an interest in hip-hop and rap. His parents were alarmed and ashamed that their son was like a black kid.
graduated from Juilliard School of Music and Harvard
has honorary doctorates in music at both Harvard and Princeton
has made over 80 albums and won 17 Grammy Awards, including a Latin Grammy, along with many prestigious music awards including the National Medal of the Arts
has played on movie soundtracks including that of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000) and Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)
performed on the site of the WTC in 2001 and at the Olympics in Salt Lake City in 2002
has performed for Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy (1962), and Obama (2009)
created the Silk Road Project in 1998 to put into cultural exchange musicians from various countries
USDS CultureConnect Ambassador since 2002
UN Ambassador of Peace since 2006
on the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities since 2009
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Yo-Yo Ma was surrounded by music from a young age: his father was a music professor and his mother a mezzo-soprano singer. They had both immigrated from Mainland China and met in France, living there through WWII and later settling in New York City in 1961.
Ma was homeschooled by his parents. As a toddler he wasn't feelin' the violin and promised his parents to stick with the cello at about age six, and by the age of eight had already played at the White House for President JFK and debuted in Carnegie Hall along with his sister (on piano).
Van Ness grew up in Los Angeles. He had a job as a telemarketer before he decided to go to Taipei "with a pocket full of dreams" and was chosen to be in the original mega-hit drama Meteor Garden, playing Mei Zuo, one of the boys of the "Flower Four" or F4. And so his acting-singing career began. F4 turned into a super boyband that had hundreds of millions of girls totally in love across East Asia.
Now, he is a solo artist who dedicates his life to God.
went to Seattle Central Community College and University of Washington
founded his own martial arts schools
established his own form of martial arts and philosophy called Jun Fan Jeet Kune Do
trained students such as Joe Lewis and Chuck Norris
did 32 movies, including Fists of Fury and Way of the Dragon (1972)
could throw grains of rice into the air and catch them using chopsticks
is totally world-famous and a pop culture icon
in Time Magazine's "100 Most Important People of the Century"
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baby Bruce with his parents
Bruce Lee was born in 1940 in San Francisco. His parents moved back to Hong Kong when he was a baby and were stuck there during the Japanese occupation. They sent Bruce back to the United States when he was 18 to escape the dangerous environment of HK in the 40s and 50s (he was getting into a lot of street fights) and to go for his higher education.
"All types of knowledge ultimately mean self-knowledge." -- Bruce Lee, Pierre Berton interview (1971)
While studying in Tianjin, pre-food-poisoning episode, I’d begun to occasionally stop by the little breakfast stands before class in the morning. People would be making jianbing right outside the main gate of the school, and it always smelled so tasty. Yet I’d previously resisted in fear of ingesting some malicious bacteria and having to drink Pepto Bismol for a week.
The day I gave up my street food ban, a woman and her husband had waved at me and asked if I wanted something to eat. She’d just scooped a fried egg off of her pan and put it inside a green onions pancake, with cucumber slivers and pickled radish. I eagerly said, "YES, PLEASE!" in Chinese. She asked if I was huayi, or ethnic Chinese.
"Ah, ni shi meijihuaren!" You are Chinese American!
Yes! I said. Yes. She'd guessed that I'd come to study Chinese.
"Women dou shi zhongguoren," she declared. We are all Chinese people.
They smiled and said to enjoy the breakfast, and I smiled back, SO HAPPY!
After many weeks of navigating life in Tianjin, trying to be brave but still confusing people with my hesitant, not-very-fluent Chinese, it was a relief not to be asked where I was from.
A week later I came across the couple again at the gate. They waved and gave me some food in a plastic bag and asked if I wanted soy milk. When I shook my head, they started speaking more slowly than before and asked if I knew what "soy milk" was, saying "soy milk" a few times, then offered me cow’s milk and tried to explain to me what cow’s milk was. I was so flustered and just said "no thank you" through everything, finally paid, thanked them, and ran away.
Breakfast was lukewarm that time, and overly salty.
That was totally the day that I got food poisoning.
And admittedly became emo. And wanted to punch the Wang Leehom Coca-Cola ad on that one guy’s giant ice cream bar cooler on campus. Stoopid Leehom! Stoopid wanna-be Chinese try-hard! I’m going home to THE UNITED STATES, and you suck for even wanting to stay here for ten freakin’ years!
Ughh. Gross.
Later I got some Chinese medicine, slept, calmed down, and mentally apologized to Leehom.
And I thought about it some more. Why do ABCs like Leehom go to Greater China to make a living? It’s an interesting question.
One reason is that there really are unparalleled opportunities in East Asia for Asian people who want to go into the music and entertainment industries. While the focus of this blog is on Chinese Americans who reach renown in Greater China, there are also many Chinese Canadians (Henry Lau of Super Junior M, for example) (not to mention quite a few Japanese and Korean Americans/Canadians, in their respective mother countries) who cross the globe and enter one of the various auditions and contests held by one of the Chinese record companies and TV stations.
The likelihood that they’re picked up by one of these talent searchers is pretty considerable, especially in contrast with their prospects in Hollywood and American pop music where Asian representation is growing but still extremely small, unlike that of other American minorities such as African-Americans and Latinos, who are also of course much larger populations in the United States. [Check out the post on Coco Lee and the discussion of her “incomplete crossover” as well as the post on MC Jin and his reasons for starting a new career based in Hong Kong.]
Another major factor is the self-search. Just like how NY-born-and-raised J. Lo did her way cool going-back-to-my-Puerto-Rican-roots thing, these ABCs want to find their connection with the language, culture, and home of their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so forth. Interestingly, though not actually important, all of the ABCs covered here—Kaiser Kuo, Daniel Wu, MC Jin, Van Ness, Leehom, and Will Pan—happen to be second-generation Americans, i.e. the children of immigrants to the Land of Opportunity.
So then there is the other side of "Chinese American": people born and raised in Greater China who at some point go to the United States, as my own parents did. Many of the huaqiao or overseas Chinese covered in this blog are of a different generation from the younger ABCs; they came to the U.S. for opportunities, whether partially in exile / out of the political turmoil at home (Eileen Chang, Bruce Lee) or for the purpose of higher education (Bruce Lee, Ang Lee).
*Coco Lee is special in that her family spent just a few years in the U.S. before moving back to Hong Kong, enough for Coco to attend middle and high school in California. Meanwhile, Yo-Yo Ma’s parents had gone to France for their higher education and ended up later in the U.S., where the whole family would stay and where Yo-Yo would base himself and raise his own family. Whatever the circumstances, these people have all at some point experienced life in America and are straight-up Chinese Americans.
*There are also several covered in the blog who actually have recognition and substantial presence not just in Greater China but in both countries (and beyond)—Yo-Yo Ma as a prodigious classical musician, Ang Lee as a maker of both Chinese and American films, Bruce Lee as a kungfu star who began by establishing his fame in the U.S., and Coco Lee through her crossover efforts during the American pop era. Chinese people are especially proud of these high-profile people such as Ang Lee and Yo-Yo Ma whom they feel represent huaren and their achievements.
For all of these individuals who have realized their careers through both directions of border-crossing, there are shared challenges, and we will take a look at them in the eleven profiles of Hangin’ with the Huaren. We’ll see how each meijihuaren of fame has chosen to negotiate his or her identities as members of two (or more) countries and cultures, how their experience of living in both Greater China and the United States has shaped their approaches to and creations within their particular art forms, as well as their views of themselves, the world, and themselves within the world.
Each profile contains an overview of their background and accomplishments, with a weird special focus on their identity, relationship with the U.S./Greater China/home, and border-crossing decisions. Post tags sort them by home state/country/city and career area (movies, music, and writing).
Enjoy, and feel free to comment with your opinions, deep feelings, questions, information or links that you’d like to share, and most certainly corrections to any info that I might have incorrect!
This page explores the phenomenon of Chinese Americans reaching fame in Greater China, establishing a unique presence in Chinese popular music, film, television, and other manifestations of culture.
Welcome, and please leave comments sharing your knowledge, thoughts, burning hatreds, and secret loves.
