In his teens and early twenties, the phone calls became less frequent and the roles that came in were smaller. When parts did arrive, they were often what he has described as stereotyped — the kind of limited, caricatured representations of Asian men that Hollywood had historically produced because they were what Hollywood imagined when it imagined Asian men at all. The action star trajectory he wanted — he had studied taekwondo for years, earned his black belt, could genuinely fight — was not available to him. “Hollywood was not hiring actors like me to be an action star at that time,” he told an NPR interviewer decades later. This was not a personal failure. It was a structural condition.
The casting norms of American film and television in the late 1980s and 1990s were not subtle in their limitations. Asian actors, with rare exceptions, were not leads in Hollywood films. They were supporting characters, stereotypes, comic relief, or villains. The rare exceptions — Bruce Lee’s brief and luminous career, the success of Jackie Chan in American releases — demonstrated that the limitation was not about audience appetite but about studio assumptions. When the right material appeared, American audiences would watch Asian actors in starring roles. The studios, for most of this period, chose not to test the theory.
Quan appeared in *Head of the Class*, the ABC sitcom, in a recurring role. He had a small part in *Encino Man* (1992). These were credits, but they were a significant step down from the scale and visibility of his childhood films, and the trajectory was not encouraging.