Asian-American actor tells of fight to find acceptance
Michael Tow recalls his struggle to fit in as a child, and how he found freedom in acting
Growing up as an Asian American and an aspiring actor was not easy for Michael Tow.
Boston, plagued by a cocaine epidemic and gang violence, was a rough place to be an adolescent in the 1980s and ’90s – especially a Chinese one. Although his family had been in the United States for generations – his paternal grandfather had been born in San Francisco in 1892 – this was no different for Tow. The racism was obvious, subtle and everything in between. I got into fights,” Tow says of the stress he and many other non-Caucasian children feel when growing up in Western countries.
The pressure he felt to fit in and to avoid being bullied meant he ended up denying his own cultural identity.
“I remember throwing away the lunches my family packed for me, some were my favourite dishes like salted fish and chicken fried rice. “Back then, I felt I had to hide my ethnicity to survive,” he recalls.
This feeling of not fitting in is the reason Tow fell in love with acting.
“My first acting experience was in grade two,” Tow says. “It felt like freedom to me. I always felt like an outsider trying to fit in and I never could really connect.
“In theatre, I didn’t have to worry about what to say, I could go into a fantasy world. I had a really good teacher who made me feel at home on stage.”
Tow dabbled in school theatre throughout middle school, before he decided to concentrate on sport. Still, during his years at university, he continued to dream of acting
“I would have dreams of being on stage and forgetting props, forgetting my lines and I’d wake up and wonder, ‘Why am I having that dream?’”
Tow became a financial planner after graduating but, when he was in his thirties, Massachusetts began providing film productions with tax incentives to attract filmmakers into the US state. That reignited his passion for acting.
“A lot of films came in and they needed people in the background. The first film I participated in was Martin Scorsese’s The Departed [in 2006],” Tow recalls.
“Then, auditions for small roles like a Chinese waiter, a Japanese businessman or a gangster started popping up. I eventually got my SAG [the Screen Actors Guild] card for a role in Brotherhood opposite [English actor] Jason Isaacs.”
What Tow did not know was that he was about to witness, firsthand, a long-overdue sea change in on-screen Asian representation within Hollywood.
Towards the end of the 2000s, Asian creatives like Daniel Kwan of the Daniels, Lee Sung-jin and Ali Wong began entering the industry as writers, producers and directors.
The fruit of that has been seen in the Daniels’ 2023 Oscar best picture winner Everything Everywhere All at Once and television series’ like Netflix’s Beef, in which Wong co-stars.
Tow landed his first lead role in Lucky Grandma, a 2019 film directed by Sasie Sealy – herself half-Chinese – about a chain-smoking, gambling grandma from New York’s Chinatown.
“You have to have more than one token Asian,” Tow says. “Only then you can see personalities.
“If you’re the only Asian there, then you’re stereotyped. You’re either the butt of a joke, the token face of diversity or the first to die, but when many of the top characters are Asian, audiences don’t see ethnicity any more, they start seeing the characters’ personalities.”
He points to the irony of a scene he shares with Bradley Cooper in the 2015 film Joy, and a conversation the pair had about it on set.
“We were talking about our families and he said that his family came to the US from Europe in 1938. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a great guy but it occurred to me that he was the leading man in American Sniper and here I am playing a foreigner with an accent when my family came to America 40 years before his!”
In one of Tow’s most prominent roles to date, he plays Joe Yeung in Apple TV+ crime drama City on Fire, the father of a university student who was shot in Central Park in New York on the Fourth of July.
City on Fire, which began airing on May 12, is the first television series in which Tow has been part of the main cast.
Cruelly, just as Hollywood finally starts to cast Asians as nuanced characters with their own complexities and pivotal life events, Tow and his family experienced their own loss two months before filming – one very similar to the one his character in City on Fire suffers.
“My eldest daughter unexpectedly passed away last September. She was a sophomore [a second-year student] at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The scenes in hospital in City on Fire happened to me in real life.”
If you’re the only Asian [in the film], then you’re stereotyped
MICHAEL TOW