The character of Data is defined by his love of gadgets — devices he has built himself, which he carries in pockets and bags and which frequently malfunction or work in unexpected ways. The joke of Data is that the gadgets are extravagant and impractical and that Data is intensely proud of them. The heart of Data is that the gadgets, however impractical, sometimes work exactly when the group needs them to.
The film was released in 1985, when Ke Huy Quan was fourteen. He had been playing Short Round for a year. He was in the middle of what would prove to be the most visible period of his career for the next three and a half decades. The character he played — ingenious, capable, proud of his own invention — is not a bad description of the person he would prove to be.
The person who watched *Crazy Rich Asians* three times and let himself feel what it made him feel was being ingenious about his own situation: he identified a signal in the culture that told him something had changed, and he responded to it before the change had fully consolidated. The self-tape audition, the acting coach, the voice coach, the body movement coach, the animals on the wall — these were the gadgets of his return, built with care and carried into the room with the specific hope that they would work when he needed them to.
They worked.
The boy who was Data — who was defined by his inventiveness and his pride in what he had made and his willingness to trust his own devices — grew into a man who applied the same approach to his own career and his own life. The gadget, this time, was decades of accumulated skill and commitment, pulled out at exactly the right moment and deployed in exactly the right film.