A 12-year-old refugee sits outside his Los Angeles school on a Saturday, doing English lessons with his little brother. A line of kids forms nearby. It's an open audition for a Steven Spielberg movie. His brother tries out and freezes. Ke coaches him from the side with big faces and bigger gestures. The casting people start watching him instead. That's how Ke Huy Quan became Short Round, as he tells it in his memoir Never Say Die. Joanne Kaufman reviews it in the Journal's Fall Books section, paired with Christopher Lloyd's In My Own Time. Both are stories about a second act.
Quan's first act wasn't Hollywood. He was 7 in 1977 when he, a brother and his father were jailed after a failed escape from Vietnam, the memoir says. His mother got out to Malaysia with three of the children. His father was caught on a second try, then finally got them all out. In late 1979, after a rough sea crossing to Hong Kong and time in a refugee camp, they landed in Los Angeles. The family was whole again after two years apart.
The Goonies came in 1985. Then the parts stopped. In his late teens he had “not even a rumor of a job,” he writes. So he built a second trade, designing action scenes for film and TV. At almost 50 he decided to act again. He won an Academy Award for Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). The book, the reviewer notes, is as much about being a good son as about film sets.
The script in the wastebasket
Christopher Lloyd's childhood had money and little else. His grandfather helped found Texaco, and he grew up lonely on a 400-acre estate in New Canaan, Connecticut. His father was distant. His mother was an unhappy musician. Nannies raised him. Fresh off One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), he signed with a Hollywood agent and ruled out television. Then Taxi asked him to play a wedding officiant for one episode in 1978. Something told him to say yes. He stayed, and won Emmys in 1982 and 1983 as Jim Ignatowski. He had long doubted his career would last, the reviewer writes. That ended the doubt.
Later a script arrived. He flipped through it and threw it in the wastebasket. A friend told him off, and he went back for it. It was Back to the Future. The 1985 film became one of the biggest of its decade. He's candid about years of substance abuse and says he's sober now. The reviewer finds his thoughts on craft thin and his gratitude real.
Our read
This is Career planning, with Cash Flow (M5) underneath. Careers have droughts. Quan's ran from his late teens to almost 50. Luck didn't carry him through it. A second skill inside his own industry did, one that paid while the phone didn't ring. Second acts that work tend to have both pieces, a trade to fall back on and enough cash to say no to bad choices. Lloyd adds the other half. A 400-acre childhood bought him neither direction nor ease. Money is not a plan. And the thing he swore off, television, is the thing that made him.
Build the second skill before you need it. Keep a cash reserve sized for a long quiet stretch. And leave room for the small yes that doesn't fit the plan. We review the career side of a plan as closely as the portfolio side. The time to do it is while the work is still coming in. You check the roof in dry weather.