Ke Huy Quan’s first memoir is about more than getting another acting job. Never Say Die follows the child who escaped Vietnam, became a movie star at 12, struggled to find roles as he grew up, and eventually returned as Waymond Wang in Everything Everywhere All at Once.

The book was published September 15 by Grand Central Publishing. Quan has been discussing it in interviews, including his September 22 visit to Jimmy Kimmel Live! Watch that conversation above for his recollections of The Goonies, Harrison Ford and being cast in the film that brought him an Oscar.

Those familiar movies make an easy introduction. His September 15 conversation with Adam Grant on TED’s ReThinking goes further back, to an experience he had long before a camera crew knew his name.

The childhood before Short Round

Quan told Grant that his family made three attempts to leave Vietnam. He remembered being seven during the first, and being jailed after the boat was stopped. On the eventual departure, he came to understand how the people aboard were being treated:

“We were cargo.”

He also described writing the memoir as a way of revisiting memories he had not fully understood as a child. He approached his own life as he would a film’s lead character, asking why that person felt and behaved as he did. That is a different account from simply listing the movies in which audiences remember him.

For fans who first met him as Short Round or Data, it changes where the story begins. Those roles came after his family had already faced the task of leaving home and starting again. Hollywood was an unexpected next chapter, not something he had grown up preparing to enter.

Ke Huy Quan speaks with Ginger Zee and Lara Spencer, with Never Say Die displayed beside them.
Quan brings Never Say Die to Good Morning America.

The years that a comeback headline skips

Grand Central’s description follows Quan from Los Angeles’ Chinatown to an open audition for a Steven Spielberg film. It also includes memories of Harrison Ford teaching him to swim and birthday gifts from Spielberg and George Lucas. The early movie years contain the sort of personal details fans hope a memoir will tell.

The same publisher’s account covers a much longer stretch away from leading roles: film school, work as an action choreographer and assistant director, and time working with Wong Kar-wai. Quan graduated from USC in 1999. He had not stopped working with movies just because audiences were seeing less of him on screen.

There is an important difference between those two ideas. An actor can lose opportunities to perform while still learning how sets, action scenes and productions work. A short summary of an Oscar return can skip that experience entirely; a book has room to spend time with it.

Never Say Die memoir cover featuring an illustrated portrait of Ke Huy Quan.
Never Say Die was published September 15 by Grand Central Publishing.

Why Waymond matters to this story

Everything Everywhere All at Once was released in 2022, with Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert writing and directing. Quan plays Waymond, husband to Michelle Yeoh’s Evelyn, alongside Stephanie Hsu as their daughter Joy. The family is part of a multiverse adventure, but the relationships give viewers recognizable people to follow amid the different realities.

Who’s who in Everything Everywhere All at Once

More cast

The Academy awarded Quan the supporting-actor Oscar on March 12, 2023. Yeoh won leading actress, Jamie Lee Curtis won supporting actress, and the film won Best Picture, directing, original screenplay and editing. Quan’s win was one part of a seven-award night for the film, not a new award announced during this book tour.

Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Michelle Yeoh and James Hong appear together at the tax office in Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Quan plays Waymond alongside Michelle Yeoh’s Evelyn and Stephanie Hsu’s Joy.

If Waymond is the role you are returning to, the Everything Everywhere All at Once film page has the character names and film details. You do not need to treat the memoir as a sequel to the movie: it is Quan’s account of his own life, with the production among the experiences it covers.

What readers can expect

Never Say Die is a 256-page memoir, rather than a collection of film trivia or an acting manual. Its title will be familiar to Goonies fans, while its subject reaches well beyond that childhood role.

The recent interviews are useful alongside it because you can hear Quan recount parts of that history in his own voice. The Kimmel conversation above focuses on recognizable movie experiences; the TED conversation also addresses the years before and between them. Together, they offer a fuller introduction to the person behind a comeback that took decades.