Monk Xing Hao walks along a boardwalk in Texas. He points excitedly at the tall prairie grass, shouting, “This gives you a great sense of the American West!”. The following scene positions Monk Xing Hao and Monk De Shan in front of the Houston Space Center. They practice Shaolin kung fu, wearing their traditional monks clothing while a rocketship looms in the distance. The narrator says, ”Like many pioneers of the Old West, Monks Xing Hao and De Shan have come to look for gold. They are Kung Fu brothers with a common goal of making a Kung Fu homestead in Texas”.

This sequence of images was fascinating to me. The immigrant journey of the two monks is told through the narrative of the Great Frontier, while being juxtaposed over the image of the rocket ship. Looking back at Orientals, one can see why invoking the Frontier narrative is particularly jarring, “God’s Free Soil did not have space for the Chinese, whose presence disrupted the mission into the wilderness” (Lee 50). The Chinese were seen as a pollutant, interrupting the Eden of the West and white man’s advancement into the “wilderness”. Shaolin Ulysses is recalling that same narrative, but putting the Chinese monks in the position of white frontiersmen. An initial reading suggests that the background image of the rocket speaks to the monks’ cultural displacement — their traditional martial arts are at odds with the technologically advanced American culture. It’s possible that this was the director’s intent, yet another reading lies beneath the surface. NASA often refers to outer space as the “New Frontier”, or “Last Frontier”, calling forth the same narratives the narrator uses to describe the monk’s experience. The rocket serves as a poignant symbol for American imperialism, where even the “Great Frontier” of space is not free from colonialism.