Miyagi? My dad was thirty-eight years old when we first saw that movie.
Miyagi karate movie#
It wasn’t until years later, long after we moved, that I would wonder who the hero of the movie was: Daniel or Mr. There wasn’t much traffic but still I had nightmares that a car would barrel down that hill and right into our living room. We lived in a working-class neighborhood and our house sat at the foot of a hilled street. We had loved it because the hero had triumphed. I remember this because it was a rare moment: the quiet enjoyment of the ice cream, the shared enjoyment of the movie. In the long hours of sunlight, we helped ourselves from the gallon buckets of bargain butter pecan that my mom sometimes got and brought our bowls out to the front stoop. My earliest political memory is hearing my dad and uncles talk about Vincent Chin.Īfter watching The Karate Kid, my family went home and had ice cream. The last image of The Karate Kid movie is Mr. Miyagi’s nurturing leads the way for Daniel to win the All-Valley karate tournament, defeating Johnny Lawrence. Miyagi, whose wife died in childbirth, are not just teacher and student: They’re father and son. Daniel, whose father died when he was young, and Mr. Miyagi turns out to be good at everything: He’s a bonsai expert, a mechanic, a healer. Miyagi soon becomes Daniel’s sensei, using mysterious techniques-“sand the floor,” “wax on, wax off”-that middle-aged Daniel will later draw on for his own students in Cobra Kai. At first, he’s just an eccentric old man his scenes are usually accompanied by pan-flute music that, even in the theater in 1984, seemed a bit comical-until he busts out karate skills to defend Daniel from a group of vicious bullies, led by Johnny Lawrence. They live in an apartment complex called The South Seas, where Mr. Daniel and his mom have just driven across the country, from New Jersey, for a fresh start. Every time I hear the words Reseda or Encino, I think of this movie. In The Karate Kid, Daniel LaRusso is a new kid in a rich high school in California.
We Asians were in this thing-racist America-together. Morita was Japanese and my family was Vietnamese but back then, that made no difference. Miyagi, played by Noriyuki “Pat” Morita, was even on the movie poster, his face in profile equal to Ralph Macchio’s. So of course we were going to see The Karate Kid, because it was about fighting and because it involved an actual Asian character. My dad never talked about fighting, but he loved Bruce Lee movies. I assumed he did, because he’d been in the South Vietnamese Army and, before that, a wild teenager in Saigon, fond of gambling.
Miyagi karate how to#
I have no idea if my dad knew how to fight. My earliest political memory is hearing my dad and uncles talk about Vincent Chin. My family had been in the United States less than eight years, among the first wave of Vietnamese refugees to be resettled in the very white, very conservative part of Michigan where I would grow up. Witnesses heard one of them say, “It’s because of you little motherfuckers that we’re out of work.” That was 1982. In Michigan, where anti-Japanese racism centered on the auto industry, Vincent Chin was beaten to death in Detroit by two white men. So my reaction was always shame, fear, a form of self-blame. I didn’t call it racist because I didn’t know it was. Back then, jokes about Asian people eating dogs and not speaking English ran through every sitcom. It was June 1984, not long after the last day of my fourth-grade school year. The Karate Kid is one of the few movies my family saw in an actual theater, at Studio 28 in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
But it left me feeling wrecked-like Daniel and Johnny, stuck in a past that can never be changed. Maybe Cobra Kai was supposed to be a low-stakes escape from pandemic life, something to watch while folding laundry. I wasn’t just catching up on The Karate Kid characters three decades later I was catching up on what I remembered of that era, including my long-ago 1980s self. But the moment I saw the middle-aged faces of Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence in Cobra Kai, I knew I had to watch every episode of that show. As an Asian American, I have a love-hate relationship with The Karate Kid.
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