THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020 17
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LIKEWAT E R
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ast week, just before the release of
“Mulan,” Disney’s live-action re-
make of its 1998 animated feature about
a girl warrior who saves imperial China
from invading avengers, Jason Scott Lee,
who plays the chief avenger, was relax-
ing at home, in Hawaii. His “Mulan”
character, Böri Khan, has flowing locks,
a scarred face, eyeliner, and a furious ex-
pression; he’s often seen thundering
across a dusty plain, screaming. Lee him-
self has a more affable vibe. That day,
he was clean-shaven, in a teal-blue
T-shirt and a baseball cap with sun-
glasses on the brim; his living room has
a colorful Tibetan thangka hanging, a
green wall, and an orange couch. “It
looks like Pee-wee Herman’s house,”
Lee said, cheerfully. Occasionally, a tiny
girl in a pink shirt that said “Shh! I need
my beauty rest” ran in to cuddle.
In the nineties, “Mulan,” full of sweep-
ing vistas and inspiring songs, was a
breakthrough of sorts: a mainstream
American movie fuelled by girl power
and focussed entirely on Asian charac-
ters, even if one, voiced by Eddie Mur-
phy, was a wisecracking dragon named
Mushu. In the new movie, directed by
Niki Caro, Mulan (Liu Yifei) has a fe-
male enemy-warrior-mentor (Gong Li)
who says things like “Stronger together”
and can turn into a flock of birds. Lee’s
character has evolved, too. “In contrast
to the animation, where the bad guy was
a big, hulking monster, we tried to make
him very sinewy, sharp, cutting, with a
purpose,” Lee said. Caro (“Whale Rider”)
is from New Zealand, where much of
“Mulan” was filmed, and for inspiration
she sent Lee to a master of the Maori
warrior dance, the haka. “It turned out
he was an old friend of mine,” Lee said.
Charles Howard, the owner of Call-a-
Head and the city’s porta-potty king,
armed sales reps with rolls of compa-
ny-branded toilet paper. In Bridgeport,
Connecticut, Timothy Butler, the owner
of A Royal Flush, asked his welder to
hastily construct a large number of
hand-sanitizer units. Breuer thought it
better to invest in a trailer unit that would
hold its value after the crisis passed.
Breuer volunteers as a driver for
Hatzalah, a Hasidic-run ambulance ser-
vice. All morning in his office, a hand-
held radio relayed distress calls from dis-
patchers, each one the same: difficulty
breathing, faintness. In the spring, he
responded to more than three hundred
E.M.S. calls, delivered kosher meals to
hospitalized Hasidim, and, at Passover,
supplied emergency wards with eight
hundred pounds of matzo.
“Everything is just a huge blur for
me,” he said the other day, looking back
at that frantic period. A good friend had
died, but somehow, despite hundreds of
house calls, Breuer had stayed healthy.
As had his business. By August, the num-
ber of COVID cases had been reduced to
a trickle, but the clamor for sanitary
hands and clean toilets kept demand up
by more than forty per cent. Breuer added
forty shower trailers, three hundred pot-
ties, and a hundred sinks to his inven-
tory. He bought a big place in Passaic
County, New Jersey, as his new head-
quarters. “The market is as hot as it can
get,” he said over his car phone, head-
ing back to the office. “The stage has
been set to have a very, very busy 2021.”
—David Gauvey Herbert
“I have a lot of Maori ties. He got me
immersed in the land and what the haka
were about.” Like the Maori, and the
Hawaiians, Böri Khan knows something
about imperialist land grabs: that’s what
he’s trying to avenge.
Lee, fifty-three, and his family live on
a twenty-five-acre mountaintop farm; he
bought the property two decades ago,
after a cousin alerted him to it. “Hawaiians
aren’t given land very readily, so we have
to buy it back,” he said, smiling. He grew
up on Oahu, in a family of seven; his par-
ents are of Cantonese and Hawaiian de-
scent. As a kid, he went on, “going to the
movie theatre was always a special luxury,
not an everyday or even a monthly occur-
rence.” Asian-Americans in prominent
roles were rare, with a key exception: the
kung-fu master Bruce Lee. “He was a
God,” Lee said. “He just jumped off the
screen.” Later, in his own career, oppor-
tunities were limited: bit parts on “Mat-
lock” and “The A-Team,” after-school
specials. Then, in 1992, producers asked
him to star in a bio-pic—of Bruce Lee.
“I was shocked,” Lee said. “I didn’t
even want to attempt it.” He also didn’t
do martial arts. But he learned, and in
“Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story,” from
1993, he flickers between easy, enthusiastic
grace and oiled-up action-movie inten-
sity. Other big roles followed: Mowgli,
“So they married, and the prince and the princess lived
happily ever after ... and now, a pop math quiz.”
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