‘Kung Fu’ star ready to show that ‘Asian women are not to be messed with’ in remake of classic US series
- With the killing in Atlanta of six Asian women last month, the new Kung Fu series is ‘timely’ says Olivia Liang
- Liang stars as martial artist Nicky Shen, who returns to the US to find her parents threatened by gangsters
The pilot script of Kung Fu was written more than a year ago, but its premiere, coming a month after six Asian women died in Atlanta-area spa shootings, couldn’t be more timely, says star Olivia Liang.
The CW series, premiering Wednesday, follows a young Chinese-American woman, Nicky Shen, as she returns home to San Francisco after three years at a remote monastery in China, only to find her family has moved on without her.
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‘Kung Fu’ star says new TV drama shows that ‘Asian women are not to be messed with‘
“She has to reconcile the new Nicky with the Nicky she left behind. She’s figuring out how to use the voice that she’s found back in a place where she felt like she didn’t have a voice,” Liang told the Daily News. “It’s an apology tour while not apologising for what she did.”
Nicky left the US for all the normal college-kid reasons: her parents didn’t understand her and she didn’t know what she was doing in life.
What she eventually finds in China isn’t normal: a merciless assassin who murders her Shaolin mentor Pei-Ling (Vanessa Kai).
And what she comes home to isn’t normal: her parents, Jin (Tzi Ma) and Mei-Li (Kheng Hua Tan), under the thumb of a mysterious gang called the Triad after borrowing money to keep their restaurant alive.
