I actually watched this movie a few weeks ago, but I haven't sat down to articulate my thoughts on it since then.
As standalone MCU movies go, I didn't quite consider it to be Black Panther-level good, but it was still decent enough.
There were a few moments that stood out to me, though. In non-sequential order those were:
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I felt that the reference to Mandarin oranges did not quite land properly for me.
While there are certainly issues to unpack regarding the fake "Mandarin" persona, it might have been better to refer to the old Western perceptions of the "mandarins" of Qing Dynasty China that manifested in caricatures like Fu Manchu in the first instance. (For example, the concept of referring to "Mandarin Chinese" is based on the version of Chinese spoken by the Qing aristocracy, as opposed to the likes of Hokkien or Cantonese.)
Actually, the concept of treating Mandarin as being more "correct" than other varieties of Chinese is an ongoing issue in different parts of the Chinese-speaking world. In the PRC mainland, there is a strong assimilationist effort to promote Mandarin over regional languages and dialects. In Singapore, the government has pursued a "speak Mandarin" policy, though most of the "old" Chinese communities there are from the south-eastern maritime provinces (as opposed to the northern provinces where Mandarin is more likely to be spoken natively, and from where many of the "new" Chinese in South-East Asia have migrated). In contrast, Taiwan in the era of democratization has attempted to raise the official profiles of Hokkien and Hakka, as well as the various Austronesian languages spoken by the various Taiwanese aboriginal peoples.
For that matter, there is the broader issue of who gets to be the gatekeepers of "Chineseness". During Han Chinese dynasties such as the Ming, there was a stronger sense of official Han chauvinism: the viewpoint that the Han were the only "proper" Chinese, and that China's non-Han peoples were various types of barbarians. (One ongoing debate was whether or not said barbarians were to be set permanently apart from "huaxia" culture, or if they could be successfully absorbed into Han Chinese society.) In contrast, "conquest" dynasties like the Qing supported a broader view, in that there were a variety of "Chinese peoples" (to include the Han, Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans, and others). Although, in enforcing the queue on its Han subjects, one could argue that the Manchus of the Qing Dynasty were undercutting their own argument - but then, for good or ill, they saw the queue as a matter of loyalty rather than of ethnicity.
Which is more than I would have expected to be unpacked in the movie itself. But in the sense of how Wenwu treated Katy during the dinner table conversation, there could have been a little more to it than simply disdaining her as a Chinese-American as opposed to what he sees as a "proper" Chinese person.
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Also, I noticed that one of the mythological creatures shown in Ta Lo was a huli jing, or nine-tailed fox.
The Korean name for such a creature is a kumiho - and it so happens that over on Earth-616, one of Shang-Chi's colleagues in the (new) Agents of ATLAS, Ami Han (or White Fox), is such a being. Well, technically she's a half-kumiho on her mother's side, but still.
So, I wonder if there might be a way to leverage the existence of the huli jing in the MCU as a way of introducing White Fox as a character at some later point - say, by having had one group of this species migrate to the Korean peninsula in the distant past - and thus adding to the number of characters who could one day team up as Earth-199999's (new) Agents of ATLAS.
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Speaking of the (new) Agents of ATLAS, perhaps another member of the Earth-616 team could have been name-dropped during one of the various karaoke sessions...
