The Bodyguard was a romantic thriller I loved, even though I usually couldn’t stand romance movies (and still can’t). Something about Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner together — the voice, the stoicism, the tension of a love that wasn’t supposed to happen — just pulled me in. I wanted my own copy so badly that my dad actually teamed up with our neighbor, who had entertainment‑industry connections, to get me a screener. It felt illicit and magical at the same time, like he’d bent the rules just enough to make my birthday that year feel extraordinary.

One year he even bought me Save the Last Dance, along with Road Trip. I’d had a crush on Breckin Meyer since Clueless and The Craft, and something about Julia Stiles’ character hit me hard; she’d just lost her mother, and the film came out the year after mine passed away.

Movies had always been our connection — Bruce Lee marathons, those badly dubbed martial‑arts movies that played every Sunday afternoon, anything with Jackie Chan, Rush Hour on repeat, Bruce Willis in Die Hard, Chuck Norris, Sylvester Stallone, Steven Seagal. That was our language.

When I found out that Bruce Lee was one of Mao Zedong’s favorites, I couldn’t contain my excitement. It felt like two pieces of my world — the martial‑arts movies I grew up watching with my dad and the political philosophy I’d been studying — suddenly snapped together.

When my mom was alive, she was the one who bought me Disney movies — Space Jam, 101 Dalmatians, The Fox and the Hound, Fantasia 2000. I still have the whole stack of VHS tapes she picked out for me, boxed up in the basement like a little archive of my childhood.