Ke Huy Quan was a kid actor who had no idea what a residual was. Then one afternoon he walked into his kitchen and found his parents standing over an envelope with his name on it.

That's the scene he lays out in his new memoir, "Never Say Die," out this week. Inside the envelope, per an excerpt shared via Entertainment Weekly and picked up by Variety and Just Jared, was a check from Lucasfilm worth almost $100,000. It arrived after "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom," the 1984 film in which Quan played Short Round opposite Harrison Ford.

The sources differ slightly on how old he was when the film shot, Variety says 12, Just Jared says 13, but neither disputes the substance of the story: a first-time child actor landed a profit share that, by his own account, almost nobody in his position got.

"They were both smiling, the kind of smile that comes from surprise and disbelief mixed together," Quan writes of his parents. "It was a check from Lucasfilm. It was for almost $100,000, an amount that didn't make any sense to me."

He's blunt about how unusual that was. "Back then, almost no actors got a piece of a movie's profits," he writes. "Even today, only the biggest stars do." He points out that "Temple of Doom" wasn't some throwaway project, it was the sequel to a film everyone already knew was a hit, which made the studio's decision to cut a kid actor in on the profits even more unusual in his telling.

Quan doesn't specify the exact year the check landed. Just Jared, running the numbers on a rough 1985 timeline, pegs the modern equivalent at somewhere around $311,000. Whatever the precise figure, Quan's own line on it is simple: "That small share was life-changing for my family."

The memoir tracks a life that's had more than one hard turn. Quan and his family fled Vietnam and spent time in refugee camps before he landed in Hollywood, first as Short Round, then a year later as Data in Richard Donner's "The Goonies." After that, decades passed with barely any acting work. Then came 2023, and "Everything Everywhere All at Once," and the best supporting actor Oscar that turned him back into one of the most talked-about names in the business.

"Never Say Die" arrived in stores Tuesday, tracing that whole arc, from a refugee kid holding a check he couldn't quite process to a stage in Los Angeles holding an Academy Award. The book is out now. What isn't clear yet is whether Quan plans any press tour stops or readings tied to the release, details that publishers typically confirm closer to a title's second week on shelves.