Sandra Oh & Me: 30 Years of Asian Love

It was a world-busting year, 1989. 

The Berlin Wall fell. And, it was the year that would eventually propel Sandra Oh into an orbit all her own, dispatching me to circle her constellation.

What happened in 1989 sparked a couple of seminal Canadian films in 1994. Three decades later, I can see that Oh has been a beacon, like a sun illuminating a way for me. She is my support avatar.

The Wall fell in the fall of ’89. I watched it with my roommate on our second-hand crap TV in Ottawa, enthralled by the destruction of a massive obstacle that defined an era of anxiety and fear. I longed to be as wild and free as the young people dancing on the Wall.

That same year, Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid by Evelyn Lau was published. It was an explosive debut for an unknown young Chinese Canadian poet from Vancouver while also blasting away stereotypes of the submissive Asian girl. Lau’s autobiography tracks the two years she spent on the streets after leaving home at 14 when her parents forbade her to write. 

The book was turned into a 1994 CBC movie, The Diary of Evelyn Lau, featuring a brilliant, fresh talent: Sandra Oh. I can only recall the poster of a worried-looking Oh on the streets. I’d never seen a Canadian film that centred an Asian person, let alone a woman! Who was this face that seemed so familiar and yet strange?

By that time, the only Asians I saw on screen in Canada were the nurse in M*A*S*H, the American broadcaster Connie Chung as well as the Canadian journalist Adrienne Clarkson, the pathetic sex-crazed Long Duk Dong on Sixteen Candles, and Sulu on Star Trek. 

As immigrants from Malaysia, my mother cautioned my sisters and me to keep our heads down, do well in school, and pursue a safe, well-paid vocation. I had to work within a box crafted by my parents, wrapped in prejudices projected by Western society. I studied furiously and became an honours student.

The same year Oh appeared on TV, she was cast as Jade Li in the film Double Happiness, having met the director, Mina Shum, in the first movie. It’s a semi-autobiographical story of a Chinese girl yearning to act while under the repressive aegis of her traditional parents. The film soars with Oh inhabiting a sweet yet defiant young woman. At one point, heading off on yet another date with a Chinese man, with her mother dressing her up in pearls and a conservative dress, Oh, as Jade, opines: “I look like Connie Chung.”

Instead, Jade falls into a relationship with a white grad student. As she keeps punching at the edges of her existence, her father keeps forcing her back until the pivotal scene when Jade declares she needs to move out. Her father takes away her house key. Her mother fears she will end up on the streets: “Who knows what will happen to you?” 

Jade’s response: “I like not knowing.” (Yes!) 

Double Happiness clip via National Film Board of Canada

By the mid-90s, I had graduated from journalism at Carleton in Ottawa (Oh’s hometown – kind of, she’s from Nepean) and was working in the media. Remarkably, Oh had eschewed a scholarship to attend the same program and headed to Montreal on her own coin to attend the National Theatre School. However, she quit that to do the 1994 movies. 

Upon graduating with a journalism degree, I called my mother in Calgary from Ottawa.

“Where will you be getting your MBA?” she inquired. No congratulations. “I thought you were going to business school after this.”

I replied through angry tears: “I’m going to be a journalist, just watch me.”

In the 1990s, I was determined to prove myself. I ploughed into work, landing on the national news and achieving a journalistic notoriety in the capital. Eventually, I had a 20-year career in journalism.

Meanwhile, Oh had landed in Hollywood in 1996, portraying Rita Wu in Arli$$. Wu is a clever, gutsy assistant who is committed to her boss and her own high standards. As a woman in the male world of sports, she learned to play ball, so to speak. This pretty much sums up being a young Asian female reporter in the 90s, and perhaps still today.

During the 2000s, her career catapulted: first in 2004’s Sideways as the sexy, confident wine pourer Stephanie who has a fling with the buffoonish Jack and then as the acerbic Cristina Yang in Grey’s Anatomy.

For 10 seasons (2005-2014), she personified an unapologetic career woman who didn’t want kids and loudly proclaimed her surgical ambitions and her opinions. While Yang grated on me at first, I came to embrace her as the person I’ve always wanted to be: assertive, devoid of people pleasing, bracingly honest, and still compassionate. Some of her best lines are: 

“If you want to appease me, compliment my intelligence!”

“I choose medicine; I choose me.”

“He’s very dreamy, but he’s not the sun. You are.” (mic drop)

Grey’s Anatomy clip via ABC signature and Shondaland

Around the same time (2004), I quit my job and became a filmmaker. It took three years to finish my first documentary, an accomplishment I will relish to my dying day. And just like Yang, I let go of a relationship that was not quite right. 

In the last 15 years, some strong Asian female performers have become prominent: Lucy Liu, Margaret Cho, Awkwafina, Hong Chau, Ali Wong, and Michelle Yeoh. However, I keep coming back to Sandra. I can’t quit her.

She’s proven to be a formidable risk taker in her middle age, becoming Eve Polastri in the exceptionally complex, funny, and emotional Killing Eve. As a bored, middle-aged British agent, Oh’s character arc goes wide, deep, and whirly gig-like in four seasons. Her character’s sensual, dangerous dance with the assassin Villanelle forces Eve to confront her own psychological challenges, desires, and complex life choices.

The series is a socio-psychological female character study dressed up as a thriller; Oh revels in Eve as if at a feast. Through Eve, one can see that life is not about going forward; it’s about getting deeper and becoming truer to oneself.

At one point, Eve is told: “You have to find a new ordinary. Whatever happens next, you can choose.”

I quit again a couple of years before Killing Eve’s 2018 launch. I quit a life, a city, a country, and moved across the world to Berlin. I was a tired middle-aged journalist who didn’t know how to continue doing the same thing. Against better judgment and crippling fear, I took a leap, and like the mother in Double Happiness—I didn’t know what would happen. And similar to Oh in the 90s, I left security for risk.

As with her characters, claiming my own agency is like dancing on a crumbled wall. It’s been glorious, tough, and invigorating—as Eve Polastri would attest.

By the way, I live a couple of blocks from where the Berlin Wall used to stand. 

In Double Happiness, after Jade lands her first small acting job, she heads home to her bedroom and stands before a mirror, inflecting a southern drawl: 

“Congratulations on a job well done.”

Thank you, Sandra. You, too.

June Chua is a writer and journalist. Read more of her work in the upcoming Back Where I Came From: On Culture, Identity, and Home.