'Shang-Chi' doesn't resist racist tropes. It just repackages them.

My first instinct is to apologize. It's how I was raised: to not make a fuss, to avoid attracting attention, to be humble to the point of self-loathing, and should I fail to honor any one of these things, to apologize genuinely and abjectly.

So, I'm very sorry about not being grateful for "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings" in the way that I, as a Chinese American born in the United States, am supposed to be grateful for it - that is, as a herald of a new era in Asian representation in American cinema.

Interviewed for the BBC in an article titled, "Why Asian superhero Shang-Chi could truly change the world," British East-Asian actor and writer Daniel York Loh called the movie "a brilliant thing for young East Asian kids." "For Asian Americans, 'Shang-Chi' is our 'Black Panther' or 'Wonder Woman,'" declared Joey Morona, writing for Cleveland.com: "The impact of that is immeasurable." Who am I to throw water on that kind of exultation? Especially when the film's star, Simu Liu, an outspoken advocate for Asians living in Canada and the United States, says things like: "Our story is the way it is because it was told through an Asian lens, and that's why it is such a celebration of Asianness, of our culture, of our language, and so much."

If "Shang-Chi" breaks any ground, though, it won't be for the quality and nuance of how it represents Asians or Asian Americans, but for the simple fact of that representation. The movie is an Orientalist fantasia that presents the same old tropes in slightly updated, somewhat self-aware, very expensive packaging.

That project was vexed from the start: The Shang-Chi property has its origins as an openly racist money grab, centering villain Fu Manchu (described by novelist Sax Rohmer as the "yellow peril incarnate") and seeking to capitalize on a brief Kung Fu mania in the 1970s in the United States. In Time, Eliana Dockterman called the filmmakers' efforts to redeem those origins a success: "They pulled the most compelling aspect of the original Shang-Chi comic - the conflict between father and son - but humanized both the hero and the villain, rather than othering them as the comics had done." Because what could be less "othering" than a 10,000-year-old father imbued with magic-ring power?

The movie follows a typical superhero arc: Shaun, a San Francisco valet, journeys to his childhood home to claim his birthright of quaint gobbledygook and his identity as Shang-Chi. That homeland fits neatly into Hollywood's standard portrayal of Asia as static, unchanging and inflexible in contrast to the West's movement, progressiveness and dynamism. No matter its hyper-modern metropoli or flourishing, border-crossing media cultures, it's considered a place apart, removed from our moment. Asia is the home of backward mystics or obscure organized crime triads; Asians are thus equally patronized and feared. These two tropes form the plot of "Shang-Chi": Shaun's father, played by Hong Kong legend Tony Leung, is no longer named Fu Manchu - but he's both an immortal being and the head of a mysterious, violent organization and plans to go to war against the inhabitants of a Brigadoon-like ancient village in China.

That village is set-decorated with exotic cliches: recklessly and ignorantly depicted mythological creatures, guys with long beards. Consider the film's animal sidekick, a six-legged, winged, faceless creature that appears to be a Chinese cryptid called dijiang. Catalogued in "The Classic of Mountains and Seas," a classic of Chinese literature dating from the 4th century, the dijiang is an agent of chaos. "Shang-Chi" shrinks it into an adorably anthropomorphized plot device and dubs it "Morris," so it can guide our heroes through an ever-shifting forest maze. That'd be like hiring Mr. Magoo as a tour guide. The dijiang is just ethnic window-dressing, sloppily appropriated along with dragons and a herd of do-nothing xiezhi - mythical creatures of great intellect and empathy, used here as the punchline for an Englishman's joke. The movie also treats us to a rehash of the trashy rendering of "qi" that showed up in the recent "Mulan" remake, turning a philosophical concept about the body's energy into a glowing, transferrable "soul ball."

None of this, of course, plays back in New York City, when, at the end of the movie, Shaun and his best friend Katy (Awkwafina) try to tell their skeptical "modern" friends about how they saved the world. Nor should it: When you're a White superhero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you get to have an origin story that doesn't involve ancient Chinese secrets.

The scenes set in the United States are less fantastical but hardly more imaginative. Each time the script tries to knock down some well-worn stereotype - for example, that all Asian Americans are academically exceptional and can speak their ancestors' tongues fluently - it undercuts itself. Shaun and Katy's friends ride them for their perceived underachievement - before immediately clarifying that Katy has graduated "with honors from Berkeley" and Shaun speaks "at least four languages." At the beginning of the movie, Katy establishes that her Chinese "sucks" - as is true for many American-born Chinese - but by the end, she's somehow able to follow obscure directions in a formal, even courtly, Mandarin. Katy, seeing a young woman working on a research paper on their bus commute, laments that this is the daughter her mother wished "came out of her vagina" - a line that feels like a comic actress's ad-lib, but clashes with what we know about her character's educational background. (What "dragon mother," after all, would complain about those credentials?) Far from being a great leap forward, "Shang Chi's" commitment to stereotypes feels oddly hostile toward Asian Americans.

One scene in the movie encapsulates the frustration I felt watching it: Shang-Chi almost has something powerful to say about prejudices and the damage they do. A gang of assassins accost Shaun and Katy on the bus. "Look at him," she says, exasperated, defending her ordinary American friend. "Does he look like he can fight?" This line, again, feels like a knowing jab at a common prejudice. For most Americans, someone who looks like Simu Liu does look like he can fight. But once it's revealed that Shaun is exactly the stereotype she's deflating - he is a master of a polyglot, acrobatic, Jackie Chan-style of martial art - she joins the audience in moving directly to presuming he has a secret identity. Katy asks her friend of 10 years not how or when he learned to fight, but instead: "Who are you?"

That moment is more poignant than the script perhaps intends. For Asians in the diaspora, it's the most charged, and most painful, question we address in our lives. You don't ask an Asian American who they "really" are unless you're prepared to work through the intimate trauma of it. The only thing I've been asked more often than to say something in Chinese or to demonstrate a karate move is, "Where are you really from?" It is the question that implies our perpetual foreignness. But it's also a question that we - unable to assimilate completely, unmoored from our parents' culture and often our parents themselves - wrestle with internally. "Shang-Chi" has answers, and they are a series of dated and racist tropes.

The first Marvel Cinematic Universe film with an Asian lead - I have been told that this is a "watershed moment." But the phrase only makes me think of other watershed moments for which I have not been grateful. In 2005, there was "Memoirs of a Geisha" - which cast Chinese actresses as World War II-era Japanese geisha. Just last year, Disney made another product made "just for me," their live-action "Mulan" - which had no Asians on its creative team and hired voice coaches to teach legendary Chinese actors to "properly" pronounce, in the Disney brand fashion, the name of one of China's most beloved folk heroes. I prefer Louis Leterrier's 2005 film "Danny the Dog," (released as "Unleashed" in North America), in which Jet Li is led around by a dog's leash and collar, playing a White Guy's literal desexualized attack dog. I love it because it is the most honest depiction that I have ever seen of how the West views Asians.

Our inclusion in this comic book saga, banking hundreds of millions with each installment is, for many, enough. It's not enough for me. I'm sorry. I'm not grateful for Shang Chi, because I'm not grateful for scraps from the table anymore.

I want a seat at the table.

I want the table.

Walter Chaw is senior critic and editor for FilmFreakCentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill will be published by Matt Zoller Seitz Press in Spring of 2022.