IMDb · https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0702841/
His memoir opens on his refugee parents at the kitchen table, holding an envelope with his name on it, smiling in disbelief at money he had done nothing to earn.
He raises up the poor out of the dust. He lifts up the needy from the dunghill, to make them sit with princes, and inherit the throne of glory.
1 Samuel 2:8
Ke Huy Quan released his memoir "Never Say Die" on September 15, 2026, and he opens it in a kitchen. He was twelve. He walked in and found his parents standing at the table, his mother holding an envelope with his name printed across it, smiling in what he calls surprise and disbelief.
Inside was a residual check from Lucasfilm for playing Short Round in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom." It was for almost $100,000, a sum, he writes, "that didn't make any sense to me." His parents were refugees who had fled Vietnam with next to nothing. Almost no actor then got a share of a film's profits, and a child getting one on his first movie was unheard of.
He had earned none of it. The money simply arrived.
Long before any of this, another voice sang about this arrival. Hannah had been barren and mocked for it, and when God finally gave her a son, she handed him back to the temple. Then she sang. Her song rises from the bottom, the praise of someone who had lived there. The poor raised out of the dust and seated among princes is her picture of how God works. In verse 7 she puts it plainly: the LORD makes poor and makes rich, brings low and lifts up.
In 2023, forty years after that kitchen, Quan accepted an Academy Award for "Everything Everywhere All at Once." The distance from a refugee camp to that stage is the reversal Hannah sang. His memoir's title sounds like grit. The scene he chose to open with says something quieter: the first fortune of his life was one he could not earn or explain, handed to a boy who walked into a room.
Decades and one Oscar later, he still calls it a gift. That is what gratitude sounds like when it never forgets the dust.