Rethinking your career identity with Oscar winner Ke Huy Quan

Ke Huy Quan (0:00)

I thought nobody would recognize me in film school. Stupid me, like how naive of me to think that I can go to film school in Cotneedle. And first day, I went to a sound class, and my sound teacher was talking about the brilliance of good sound design. And he was showing clips of Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones, and the Temple of Doom.

Adam Grant (0:22)

Oh, no.

Ke Huy Quan (0:23)

And I was in that clip. And when it was over, the teacher said, you know, Star Wars was ground breaking. Jaws was incredible. Temple of Doom, it didn't quite work. And the entire class broke out into laughter because they knew just sitting a few feet away is Short Round from Temple of Doom.

Adam Grant (0:43)

Hey, everyone. It's Adam Grant. Welcome back to ReThinking, my podcast with Ted on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people who explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

Ke Huy Quan is an Academy Award-winning actor whose first experience with fame was when he was just 12 years old. That's when Ke played Short Round in the Spielberg blockbuster Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. He traveled to Sri Lanka for filming and around the world for the press tour. And then the roles started flowing in, including the character of Data in the iconic 80s film The Goonies. It was surreal.

Just a few years earlier, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Ke and his family had barely escaped Vietnam by sea, along with thousands of other people.

Ke Huy Quan (1:32)

I went from being cargo on a ship to traveling first class and going on this incredible adventure with some of the coolest people on the planet.

Adam Grant (1:43)

But then his film career started to stall as Hollywood failed to create opportunities for people who looked like him. So in his 20s, Ke quit acting and pivoted, waiting for what exactly he didn't know.

Until something changed and he ended up playing Waymond Wang in the film for which he won his 2023 Oscar, Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Ke just published a powerful memoir, Never Say Die, and I was so excited to dig into his story and his lessons about resilience and rethinking.

Ke Huy Quan (2:16)

Adam, hey.

Adam Grant (2:17)

Oh my gosh.

Ke Huy Quan (2:18)

Hi, Ke.

Adam Grant (2:18)

What a warm welcome.

Ke Huy Quan (2:19)

Thank you for having me. This is really exciting.

Adam Grant (2:22)

Well, it's not every day that I get to talk to Short Round, Data and Waymond Wang all at once.

And as somebody who spends basically my whole career studying how to rethink things, you are a poster child for it. You have so many great rethinking moments throughout your life, and I want to talk about a lot of them, but we have to begin with your origin story, because just the way that you got to the US and became who you are is remarkable and almost unbelievable. So I would love for our audience just to get a little bit of a taste of that.

Ke Huy Quan (2:56)

Yes. I was born in a family of nine. My parents had nine children and we were comfortable living in Vietnam. And all of a sudden, this war came, created all this chaos, especially for the ethnically Chinese people that were living in Saigon at that time.

We were targeted because of the geopolitics between China and Vietnam. And so when North Vietnam won and took over, there were a lot of challenges for families like ours. And I could not imagine what my parents had to go through, the incredibly difficult decision that they had to make to get all of us out. And I remember I was only seven years old. I was asleep in the middle of the night when my dad woke me up, carried me and took me to a waiting car in an alley. And I had no idea what was going on. I thought it was all a dream. And I was in this car, there was a stranger with us.

And before I know it, we arrived at the beach and we were walking toward a fishing boat that was waiting for us. And when we got on and just as we were about to leave, we got caught. There were flashlights and police officers screaming, shouting, telling us to come back. And before I know it, I was in jail. And I was seven years old the first time I was in jail. Wow. And that was the first attempt out of Vietnam. We made a total of three, so I ended up going back to jail the second time. And the second time, I spent three months in jail.