Simu Liu is getting real about his difficult childhood.
The 33-year-old Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings star got candid about his past in an interview with People.
Simu was raised by his paternal grandparents in China. When he was 4, his parents abruptly brought him to Canada. He said of how he felt with his grandparents compared to how he felt with his parents:
“With my grandparents, I felt completely safe. To me that’s what home is.
[With my parents] it was very clear to me early on that [they] wouldn’t be able to provide that environment.”
He shared that his parents’ expectations for him proved difficult to meet, and that when his grades started to slip to a B, there were a lot of verbal fights as well as beatings:
“I remember thinking, ‘I’ve got the worst parents in the world.’
I felt so along. Nobody could understand what I was enduring at home.”
He went on to share that many years later, when he entered into acting and landed his first main role as Jung Kim on Kim’s Convenience in 2017, he and his parents started to heal their past:
“We weren’t fighting, but at the same time we hadn’t collectively chosen to dive back into our trauma and how we were all individually affected by it.”
Simu also opened up about all the progress they’ve made since then:
“As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found empathy as to what they were going through at the time. We’ve come so far.
When we’re young, we think of parents as just monolithic, all-powerful beings that don’t change. It’s such an incredible thing watching our parents change and grow and mature in their own way.”
