He told the audience that he had almost given up on his dreams. He urged them to keep their dreams alive.
The speech was widely quoted, widely shared, and widely described as one of the more emotionally genuine acceptance speeches in recent Oscar memory. The line about the boat, the refugee camp, and Hollywood’s biggest stage is a compression of a biography that spans four countries, four decades, and multiple complete reinventions of a career. It lands with the force it does because every element in it is true, and because the distance between “a boat off the coast of Vietnam” and “the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles” is one that most people, hearing about it, can feel in their chests without needing it explained.
## Who Was There With Him
Two relationships Quan mentioned in his speech deserve some context, because they represent continuity lines across his career that the bare facts of the biography don’t fully capture.
Jeff Cohen played Chunk in *The Goonies* — the overweight, affable member of the Goonies gang whose truffle shuffle was one of the film’s best-known gags. Cohen and Quan were children together on that production in 1985. After his own acting career ended, Cohen went to law school and became an entertainment attorney, founding the firm Cohen & Gardner. He became, in that professional capacity, the person who negotiated the contract for Ke Huy Quan’s appearance in *Everything Everywhere All at Once*. The producer, reportedly, was somewhat taken aback by finding himself negotiating with Chunk and Data for his movie.