Never Say Die by Ke Huy Quan [Book Review]

Ke Huy Quan went from Short Round to Oscar winner, with a nearly twenty-year gap in between. Never Say Die covers it all.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

It’s easy to tell someone never to give up when you already know the story ends with an Oscar.

It’s much harder when the phone isn’t ringing, the roles have dried up, and nothing guarantees the thing you still want will ever come back around.

That’s the part of Ke Huy Quan’s Never Say Die that got me.

I couldn’t put this book down, and I mean that in the very literal, slightly inconvenient sense. I kept promising myself one more chapter and ended up much farther in than planned.

Part of that is that Quan’s life reads like fiction, even though I already knew pieces of it; hearing his perspective made it all feel new. I grew up with Short Round and Data, and I watched his comeback in Everything Everywhere All at Once. But I didn’t know what happened in between.

I also didn’t expect it to hit me quite as personally as it did.

Before Hollywood

Quan was a child when his family fled Vietnam. The journey to Los Angeles included a refugee camp, and that history gives the book an emotional weight that has nothing to do with movies.

He writes honestly about being a refugee, about family, and about the complicated feelings that come with looking back at things you once wanted to distance yourself from. There’s no attempt to turn every painful experience into a tidy inspirational lesson. Sometimes things were hard, and he was ashamed, and sometimes he just didn’t know what came next.

Yes, Harrison Ford Taught Him to Swim

Quan was twelve when he went to an open call audition and somehow ended up as Short Round opposite Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Imagine having that childhood.

Ford taught him to swim. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas sent trucks full of toys for his birthday. He met Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) and Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), then made lifelong friends on the set of The Goonies as Data.

Those chapters are pure fun, especially if these movies were part of your own childhood. To us, they were blockbusters. To him, they were where he grew up.

For a while, his future looked obvious.

And then it wasn’t.

What Happens When the Roles Stop Coming?

Quan wanted to act, but Hollywood stopped giving him the chance.

As the roles disappeared, so did some of his confidence. He went to film school at USC and moved behind the camera, working on films including X-Men and Wong Kar-wai’s 2046.

But the dream never really went away.

That’s why this memoir works beyond Hollywood. Most of us will never run around a movie set with Harrison Ford or hold an Academy Award. But plenty of us know what it’s like to want something that keeps getting less likely, and to start considering moving on.

Quan lived with that for nearly twenty years.

The People Behind the Comeback

For a memoir about one very recognizable person, Never Say Die makes a lot of room for everyone else. Quan writes lovingly about his family, his friends like Jeff Cohen, his wife, and the people who believed in him along the way. I loved that.

The comeback is wonderful, obviously. But the people standing quietly behind it got me even more. In his Oscar speech, he thanked his wife, Echo, for telling him year after year that his time would come.

Sometimes you need somebody else to believe first.

Before the Music Swells

I loved this book. Quan is funny, open, and remarkably honest about how deeply rejection affected him. The Hollywood stories are great, but they’re only part of it.

What I keep thinking about is the long stretch before the comeback, when no music swells in the background, and nobody knows how it ends.

I absolutely recommend Never Say Die, especially if Ke Huy Quan’s movies have ever meant something to you.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grand Central Publishing for an advanced reader’s copy. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.