Passive? Submissive? Ha! Jeff Yang talks to two hard-hitting Asian American femmes: pro boxer Dee Hamaguchi and actor (and black belt) Brenda Song, star of the new Disney Channel original movie, "Wendy Wu, Homecoming Warrior."

There are a lot of silly stereotypes out there, but none seems quite so quaint and outdated as the one that casts Asian women as shy, passive, silent and submissive. I say this as a red-blooded Asian American male who has lived 38 years on this planet, surrounded by women who exhibit the tensile strength of drop-forged magnesium steel. Soft and polite on the outside they may be, but the Asian women of my experience are tougher — and deadlier, when crossed — than their male counterparts, myself included. Maybe myself especially.

My younger sister Christine is an emergency room doctor who glides with apparent ease through 18-hour days full of spurting vessels and shattered limbs and, yeah, annoying hypochondriacs and kids with sniffles. She’s the type who’ll innocently tell humorous anecdotes about maggot-infested wounds while you’re eating a tasty bowl of pasta marinara. Mmm.

My wife Heather is a physician assistant in cardiothoracic surgery. She cracks chests and harvests veins for a living, so you can imagine the fun mealtime conversations when my sister’s family comes over for dinner. She’s a runner, a diver, a kayaker — whose idea of a fun vacation involves going somewhere she can’t pronounce to do and eat things that turn people pale when she tells them about it afterward. You’d think motherhood would have mellowed her — but, you know, not so much. We still dock our son with his grandparents so we can go for a week of Heather-style travel each year — and that’s only until he’s old enough to experience the joys of sweat and adrenaline for himself.

Both Chris and Heather shudder at the idea of crossing my mom. Enough said.

So let’s just say I don’t need a lot of additional evidence that Asian women kick ass. Nevertheless, this past Father’s Day weekend more proof came, in duplicate.

Showdown at the OK Corral

As the Sunday main event began at Remington Park racetrack in Oklahoma City, the stands around the outdoor ring were lightly filled. Maybe a couple of hundred boxing connoisseurs remained for the afternoon’s much-anticipated title match, with the bulk of the day’s audience having already left for other Father’s Day activities or fled for cooler climes — the promoters had neglected to erect a canopy over the ring, and the Oklahoma sun was beating down with searing intensity.

Title fights go a minimum of eight rounds, twice as long as standard matches, so the featured boxers were facing the prospect of slugging it out under dangerous conditions of heat and humidity. They were drenched with sweat even before stepping between the ropes.

Still, neither gave a thought to backing out: The prize before them was the vacant Women’s International Boxing Association’s Mini-Flyweight Intercontinental Belt. Whichever boxer outpointed or outpunched the other would walk away a champion.

The two evenly matched warriors sized each other up. They’d faced each other before — each knew the other’s strengths and vulnerabilities, and each knew victory was within reach. The bell rang. Dee Hamaguchi and Stephanie Dobbs floated lightly to the center of the ring, eyes determined, gloves up, ready to fight.

A day later, Hamaguchi is bruised and exhausted but satisfied. The match went the full eight rounds and was scored a majority draw. Neither woman won — the belt remains open — but the fight was a hard-fought battle that proved to judges and fans alike that both contenders were worthy of the championship.

"It was close all the way," says Hamaguchi. "Maybe she was making a little more contact, but I was hitting her harder. I felt that after the first five rounds she was starting to peter out — I could see it in her legs. She was wobbling. If I’d had a couple more rounds, I could have won."

As it is, Hamaguchi is nursing a goose egg on the left side of her forehead — "I don’t even know when it happened — I didn’t feel it then, but it hurts now. It’s a kind of mottled plum color" — and thinking ahead to her next chance to get back in the ring. Over her six-year pro boxing career, Hamaguchi has amassed a 1-7-3 record — the one win being against her June 18 title opponent Stephanie Dobbs, back in 2003.

Though it doesn’t show up in the numbers, Hamaguchi has played a critical role in the sport; it was her steadfast determination as an aspiring amateur back in 1994 that first put women’s boxing on the map. At the time, Hamaguchi — an established competitor on the international judo circuit who would go on to win the U.S. National Judo Championships in 1998 — was exploring boxing as another outlet for her competitive drive.

"I’d never heard of a female boxer before," she says. "So I talked to a friend of mine, an elderly gentleman who’d been an amateur boxer back in the ’40s. I said, ’Hey, I trust your opinion. Do you think I can learn how to box?’ And he just looked at me and said, ’Of course.’ There wasn’t a hint of hesitation in his voice. I think if there’d been any doubt, I would have given up on the idea."

She immediately took up lessons at a gym on 125th Street in Harlem and quickly realized that it was nothing like the formalized sport of judo. "It’s the most physically demanding thing I’ve ever tried," she says. "And that’s just the workout. Once you get into the ring, it goes to a whole ’nother level. Some people, no matter what they do, they just can’t take a punch — they cut or bleed, they have a glass chin. It’s a genetic thing. I guess I’m lucky. I don’t bruise very easily."

Once Hamaguchi started sparring, she was hooked. She trained obsessively, honing her skills and instincts. Her goals were simple: She intended to compete in the most storied competition in U.S. amateur boxing, the Golden Gloves. Unfortunately, she was informed by her trainer that the Gloves were for men only.

An article in the New York Daily News, longtime sponsor of the event, described what happened next: "It had never happened in the 68 years of the country’s oldest and largest amateur boxing competition. Last year an application was submitted with the name D. Hamaguchi. Nobody knew D. was Dee, and that Dee was a woman from Harlem."

Because of an administrative foul-up, Hamaguchi didn’t end up competing that year, but she — and a handful of other women — were allowed to fight in the following year’s Gloves. It would be the stuff of Academy Award-winning movies to say she went on to win the tournament. That didn’t happen, as Hamaguchi ended up getting beaten in the first fight of the tournament by lefty Jill Matthews, who would go on to win two titles as women’s junior flyweight world champion.

"It was my first real fight, and she stopped me in one round," remembers Hamaguchi. "I was devastated. Humiliated. There were hundreds of cameras and reporters there, and after all my effort to get into the Gloves — bang! — I was out of the competition. I was crushed."

But the true test of toughness isn’t winning, it’s losing. It’s going down and getting back up again. And though her amateur career had ended after a single short round, Hamaguchi had no intention of calling it quits. She announced her decision to turn professional, and began her fight career in October 2000, fighting Gracie Joe Roca to a four-round draw in Yonkers, N.Y.

"The difference between sparring and fighting is incredible," says Hamaguchi. "Time passes differently, your perception gets twisted, your adrenaline is pumping. It’s like a bizarre surrealist movie. It’s hard to get a grip on what’s going on until you’ve done it a few times. You have to live through that crazy, scary chaos a few times, and then you start to see what’s going on. It’s not instinctive at first at all."

But it is addictive. Hamaguchi, who supports her boxing career with a full-time high-school teaching job, is not about to stop now. At the age of 41, she believes she can keep fighting for at least a few more years.

"I love to fight," she says. "When I stop, I want it to be on my own terms, to be after doing something that I can be satisfied with. I’d love to go out with a title — it’s so hard because those kinds of opportunity rarely happen. I might have to be satisfied with just winning a really great fight. But after this match, I know I can go on a little bit longer. It’s not over. Not by a long shot. You’re never a loser so long as you’re still in the game."

Kicking Into High Gear

As Hamaguchi was boarding a plane to Oklahoma City to fight for a championship, another young scrapper was watching the results of months of hard work unspool for the very first time.

Brenda Song — who plays comically spoiled rich girl "London Tipton" on the popular Disney Channel TV series "The Suite Life of Zack and Cody" — had spent the past four months on a frenetic schedule, flying back and forth between L.A. and New Zealand, juggling the shooting demands of "Suite Life" and round-the-clock preparation and production for the project that many saw as her first real showcase opportunity, the Disney Channel Original Movie "Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior."

The movie features Song as the bright and sassy leader of her high school’s cool-kids set, pitted against dual nemeses — her blond competition for homecoming queen, and the ancient demon known as Yan Lo, whose eternal evil can be stopped only by descendants of a line of female martial arts heroes, the Yin Warriors. Informed by a hunky young Shaolin monk ("The Last Samurai"’s Shin Koyamada) that she’s the latest and last of the Yin Warriors, Wendy Wu is forced to choose between her dreams of teen-queen glory and saving mankind from the ultimate apocalypse. (It’s not as easy a decision as you might think.)

The role was a novel experience for Sacramento-native Song, but not for the reason you’d guess. "That whole ’popular crowd’ thing, I never was a part of that when I was in school," laughs Song, a self-proclaimed "total dork." "I got the role, and I was like, ’OK, homecoming queens — so how do they act?’"

The martial arts aspect of the film, on the other hand, was almost second nature: Song is a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, having trained in the fighting discipline since the age of 8. "I actually originally wanted to take ballet, but my brother was doing Tae Kwon Do, and things were just so crazy back then that my dad was just like, ’I don’t want to be driving you guys to two places — just go along with your brother.’ And I ended up loving it. My brother quit, but I did it six days a week for the next 10 years."

Of course, the kung fu-inspired action seen in "Wendy Wu" is tremendously different in feel and form from Tae Kwon Do. But Song’s training wasn’t just about learning how to punch and kick — it was about getting used to grueling physical and mental training, and developing the discipline to accomplish difficult goals. Song remembers how, in her test for black belt, she had to sit meditating with a cup of cold water on her head for hours.

"That’s something I really connected with in the character of Wendy, this idea that if you have a goal you want, you need to hold onto it tightly," she says. "Whether that goal is getting a black belt, being homecoming queen or saving the world, you have to put in that effort, and never quit."

That powerful drive, that sense of motivation is a character trait that Song has shown since she was in kindergarten. "When I was 5 years old, my mom and grandmom and I were walking in a mall in Sacramento, and this modeling school was doing a search," she remembers. "The school’s owner saw me and said, ’Hey, do you want to come up here?’ My mom had no idea what he was talking about and didn’t want me to do it. But I wanted to go. And because I’d been sick that week — I dislike medicine with a passion: You have to get three people holding me down for me to take it, and I’ll still spit it out — I told my mom and grandmom that if they let me go to the school, I’d take my medicine. And when we got home, I did. So what could they do? They promised! That was the deal!"

At the time, Song’s family was struggling financially. The cost of the school was $500 a week, much more than they could easily afford. But Song’s parents knew how much their young daughter loved to perform — "Our family is Hmong, and so I’d always dress up in our ceremonial costumes and make my grandpa videotape me — I just loved entertaining people" — and so with parents, grandparents, great-aunts and other relatives digging into their savings, they came up with the funds to give Brenda her chance at breaking into the world of showbiz.

Her talent and personality soon won her regular commercial work for brands like Little Caesar’s Pizza. ("That was my first TV shoot, up in San Francisco! I remember they had me doing the ’Running Man’ on camera.") Then came the opportunity to try out for her first real acting gig. The only sticking point was that the job would require her to move down to Los Angeles. She got the part, and she and her mother moved to L.A., with her father and two younger brothers commuting from Sacramento every weekend to see them. Two years later, Song’s growing success led the family to move to L.A. for good.

"That was really difficult, because the Hmong community is so small, and a lot of people we knew just didn’t understand why my parents were letting me do this," she says. "They would say, ’Oh, it’s so far-fetched, everyone wants to be a movie star, you should just grow up, get married, be a housewife.’ But you know, I just said, ’I want to work and help out my family — it’s a job, I’m earning money.’ And my grandparents and parents believed in me. They stood by me."

While her whole family has rallied around her dreams, Song readily says that the single strongest pillar in her life has been her mother. "She’s always been the cornerstone of my life, that person I can laugh with and cry with, the person who’s gotten me through all the hard times and told me I should follow my dreams," she says.

"And we’ve had a really rough year. My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer and has been undergoing chemotherapy. She actually had her last treatment the day before we went to New Zealand for ’Wendy Wu,’ and she didn’t let anyone know for one second that she was sick."

It’s her mom’s example that inspired Song to bear down and smile through the punishing regimen required to make "Wendy Wu." "Shin [Koyamada] and I did kung fu training for three months before the shoot," says Song. "We were doing most of our own fight scenes, so it was 12-hour days, hanging from harnesses so we could do these flying, spinning kicks in the air. Shin and I had bruises all over just from the harnesses — it’s excruciating when you’re hooked up for long periods of time: You’re being crushed by your own weight, you can’t breathe, you’re in all this pain and you still have to stay calm and focused and deliver your lines."

What made it worse was that in one of her early wirework practice sessions Song tore a ligament in the back of one knee, putting her in a wheelchair until two weeks before the movie went into production. "Let’s just say that it all makes me really respect action stars like Jackie Chan," she says. "When [action director] Koichi [Sakamoto] told us the kinds of things that he wanted us to do, I was like, ’Are you kidding? Only martial arts experts can do that!’ And he just smiled and said, ’Well, you guys are martial arts experts.’"

The proof of Song and Koyamada’s hard work is in the results: Given the film’s made-for-cable budget, rapid-fire creation — major production lasted just 24 days — and youth-oriented ambitions, the stunts and special effects are remarkably convincing. So much so that the movie begins with a rare thing for a Disney Channel movie: a parental-guidance warning that the film contains fight sequences that might freak out young kids.

Despite its PG rating, "Wendy Wu" reeled in hearty numbers: 5.7 million viewers for its premiere broadcast on June 16, crushing its basic-cable competition and making it the day’s most-watched program among kids aged 6 to 9 and Disney Channel’s core tween audience, aged 9 to 14. While it fell short of the eye-popping numbers for Disney’s juggernaut-like song-and-angst fest, "High School Musical" (seen by an estimated 28.3 million unique viewers since its premiere in January), it still ranks among the most popular Disney originals in history.

In fact, once it completes its multiple encore airings and enters afterlife on home video, it may well end up being one of the most-watched movies of any kind featuring a largely Asian American cast. It’s not perfect — the dialogue gets especially clumsy when the film tries to make its points about celebrating Asian heritage and culture. But it does demonstrate that an English-speaking, contemporary Asian American family can work in a sitcom context, complete with goofy dad, long-suffering mom, wise and sassy grandma and annoying kid brother. And it also features some interesting chemistry between Koyamada’s Shaolin monk and Song’s reformed homecoming queen wannabe — leaving open the issue by movie’s end of whether he just might be questioning his monastic vows, now that he’s met the butt-kicking Asian American babe of his reincarnated dreams.

And for those who might dismiss the movie as a "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" clone for the tween-beat set, it’s also worth remembering that Sarah Michelle Gellar has ended up graduating to boffo box-office success in films like "The Grudge," while tween queens like Song’s one-time co-star Lindsay Lohan and Disney veterans Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera now dominate our popular culture. It seems likely that Song’s path will take her to similar stratospheric heights — with the difference that her head is on straight, her heart is in the right place and her family’s got her back, preventing her from straying into tabloid folly.

"My brothers Timmy and Nathan are the two most protective guys ever," laughs Song. "When boys come up to me, it doesn’t matter if they’re asking for autographs or my number — they act the same way, ’Step back from my sister.’"

I get where they’re coming from. Asian American women like Song and Hamaguchi may have no trouble taking care of themselves, but guys still have their instincts and pride, you know? It’s nice to know we males still have a role in a world of dynamic divas and tough-girl goddesses. Even if it’s just crowd control.