Harry at Hyphen asks who you want to play the new “Kung Fu” guy in an upcoming film version.

I’m annoyed that he didn’t bother to mention that the Caine character in the series is hapa. Although I wasn’t allowed to watch much tv as a kid, every time I came across “Kung Fu” I always watched it.

Caine was the first hapa I ever heard of, besides my sister and me, and getting to watch him on tv was really, really important. I completely accepted David Carradine as Caine, and thought the actor was hapa until I came to San Francisco in the late nineties and got caught up in Asian American identity politics.

In that scene, Carradine playing an Asian is considered an outrage—just one among many, like Charlie Chan being played by white actors. But secretly, I never really had as much of a problem with white actors playing hapa characters as I did with white actors playing “full” Asian characters. There just weren’t that many hapa actors back then.

(Of course Bruce Lee was hapa, too—didja know that?—and would have been a, literally, kickass Caine. But we all know that already. But Jennifer Jones as the Eurasian doc in “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” did justice to the best hapa-girl line in Hollywood history.)

Basically, it would have annoyed me just as much to have a “full” Asian actor in whiteface playing a hapa*, is what I’m saying.

The character is hapa. And, even in this day and age, how many hapa characters are there out there, much less hapa men on film? I want, finally, a hapa guy to play Caine … preferably a half-Chinese hapa guy. Is Russell Wong too old? Keanu definitely is, but how cool would that be anyway? Where’s the younger generation of hot, kung-fu-fightin’ hapa mens?

*Update: I forgot to mention that when I was in Hong Kong as a kid in the 70’s I did see another Eurasian character … in a kung fu movie, of course. He was half of a pair of kung fu students who–what else?–have to avenge the death of their master. Even though Hong Kong was teeming with Eurasians in 1978 or whatever, they had a “full” Chinese actor with his hair bleached orange playing this character. Yes, Virginia, there’s whiteface too. And yes, while I was thrilled to see a hapa character, I was also annoyed that the actor was so obvy not hapa … and also orange-haired.