He described his journey as starting on a boat. He did not elaborate on the boat — he did not turn it into spectacle or make its specific dangers into the emotional climax of the speech. He named it as the beginning and moved forward. He mentioned the refugee camp. He named the American Dream by name, without irony, as the thing the speech was about: a person who arrived in this country in one condition and stood at this podium in another condition, and the word for that arc in the American civic vocabulary is the American Dream.
He thanked the people who had made the return to acting possible: his wife Echo, who had encouraged him for twenty years; Jeff Cohen, his *Goonies* co-star, now his entertainment lawyer, who negotiated the *Everything Everywhere All at Once* contract; his brother David; the production company A24; the Daniels; Michelle Yeoh; Jamie Lee Curtis.
The specific thanks to Jeff Cohen is worth noting because of what it documents: the person who played Chunk in *The Goonies* in 1985, who sat next to Data in the photograph on the promotional poster, became the person who negotiated the legal agreement that put Quan in the film that won him the Oscar. The relationship between the two of them — maintained across forty years, through the period when Quan was not acting and Cohen had become a lawyer — is the kind of specific biographical detail that a speech can convey in a single sentence and that takes much longer to actually understand.