Ma grew up in Staten Island, New York, during the Vietnam War, which was not a welcoming time for an adolescent who had immigrated from Hong Kong. Acting in school plays became his means of survival. “All of a sudden, you’re a local celebrity,” says Ma. “The drama club kind of saved my ass a little bit on the racism front…. The first school play I did, Annie Get Your Gun, I played Buffalo Bill. After that, it was like, ‘He played Buffalo Bill, how hard could it be to like this guy?’”
Like Wang, the director Alan Yang talks about Ma with something like reverence. “I can’t imagine what he’s gone through as an actor,” says the filmmaker, whose Netflix feature Tigertail in April was Ma’s first time atop a call sheet. “Think about when Tzi was 25 and trying to act in the ’80s. Think about how he’s been around all this time, getting chops, getting reps under his belt.”
Progress was slow for years, not just for Ma himself but for his fellow Asian American actors. “It’s always been that two-step tango, one step back, flavor of the month for the longest time. Finally I feel we’re on solid ground,” says Ma, adding that it isn’t just the business that has changed, but also the Asian American audience itself. “The community is understanding what we’re doing now. We always had this kind of paradox: ‘Yeah, we like these [entertainers], but my kid’s going to be a doctor.’ Now they’re more supportive and more vocal. I hear [nonindustry] friends saying, ‘The box office needs to be amazing the first weekend.’ They’re beginning to understand how representation changes the dialogue.”
The growing interest in Asian-centered stories, along with the rise in Asian American auteurs plumbing their own backgrounds in their work, has turned Ma into the go-to paternal muse. Wang’s semi-autobiographical family dramedy, The Farewell, earned the actor—already a respected fixture in Asian American indie cinema—a wider (and, yes, whiter) audience. His role as the beloved father who inspires a young woman to become a warrior in Mulan is his highest-profile role yet.
“Actors’ careers are made by the roles that they’re given, that are written for them,” says Wang. “The unfortunate thing for Asian American actors is so often, because people haven’t seen it, they don’t envision it. They’re like, ‘I’ve written this for Bill Murray, so we’re going to go look for somebody who looks like Bill Murray.’ Well, why not imagine Tzi?… His face is so expressive. He’s able to do so much with so little, and there’s humor in his eyes as well as pathos. I refer to him as the Asian Bill Murray, because he can make you laugh just by sitting there. Just because you haven’t seen him in a certain type of role in the past, doesn’t mean that you can’t be the one to create that for him. That’s the challenge still and the thing that we can push toward: Envisioning people of color who haven’t had roles that are as dynamic, and creating it for them.”