Chinese Americans

"With books or film I want to commemorate our youth and the sacrifices they made. No matter how bitter the time was, there is always something beautiful. I want to satisfy my nostalgia and hope [my work] is touching enough to move audiences who may not have the same experiences."

"Good stories will keep haunting me for years. They will mature and want to be born. I can't help it."

"There are still many problems that aren't answered in China. As a writer, I have to keep searching for truth. The Chinese government still neglects many mistakes that were made during the Cultural Revolution and covering the facts. We need to revisit the old wounds."

"I don't see myself in the circle of Asian-American writers. My English is only that of a 15-year-old. I don't feel confident enough to write about contemporary America. China has been the subject of my writings, no matter where I am. However, I'm not completely Chinese - more an outsider of China's affairs. I have the right to speak on the subjects that I lived through"

"I was disillusioned with the communists after they shot the students at the square. But now I'm disgusted with this country [US], as well. I thought the US was such a free land. I don't know where else I should go to now. I was just naturalised."

"In middle school, I really longed to have a connection with my birth mom, and so I moved to Taiwan for four years and learned a whole new language and culture."

"You know, I am one of those people where there wasn’t a moment growing up that I knew I wanted to be an actor—the truth was that I didn't know what I wanted to be at all. I wasn’t great at anything, I wasn’t an all-star athlete, great at playing the piano or the smartest kid in school but I liked creative things and watching Disney movies."

"As an Asian American, when you go to Asia, you sometimes feel like a foreigner even though you look like everyone else. I felt like the American coming in; my look was different, my feel was different."

"The world will always have something against you, no matter how you look. I surround myself with people that hopefully as a group are doing good work for the culture. The reason I like to play different characters is that for so long Asian American actors have been in this stereotypical box."

"Some of us don't want to admit to it, but we are a lot like our parents. The way that we are in our own personal relationships is very similar to how we grew up. And whether that's positive and negative, it's definitely something to be aware of."

"I wore my hair in those space buns for my audition, and the only reason why I did it was because I wanted to be someone totally different from who I am as a person."

"I love the idea of being American-Taiwanese. It's very specific to people who feel like they're from two different cultures. Because being American is something that we should be proud of. It's not something that needs to be defined in a certain way. This is our culture, too."

"Focus on the work because, personally, that brings me through the toughest day — that I’m focusing on the work at hand instead of [all] of these things that are bombarding me. The chatter in your mind is strong. So, you need to be stronger."

"I hope the quantities go up. Right now, there's still very few in my mind. I think that since Asian America is a multicultural, multi-ethnic society, we need as many voices that we can get out there to represent all of us. Because we cannot speak for everyone, we need more voices. We need diverse voices, we need mixes; we need many more diversity in the same screen. All of these things are things that are on the agenda, and I'm ticking them off one by one. That's how it goes."

"I’ve studied martial arts for a long time. I started when I was eight years old, so I’m not unfamiliar. I’ve done fights before on other shows. You’ve seen me probably, if you’ve seen other shows that I’ve done in film and television, I’ve had my chance for some action. But the young ones are good, let them take over. They can carry the heavy weight. I’ll be happy to do the talking by now."

"Carefully. I think particularly for actors of color, we have an added responsibility. I think under normal circumstances, if the playing field was equal, then you just do. You do whatever comes your way and you do the best job you can. For us, it’s a little bit different, I think. I think we need to exercise and develop our sense of good taste. I think we need to see characters that are three- dimensional because Hollywood has not done such a good job in the past on how to represent us. So we need to untie a lot of those expectations that are something that is not exactly representative of who we are. So that is something that we need to be cognitive of."

"What I appreciate the most my job is working with so many talented people with a single focus to make the best film or TV show possible."

"We have to continue to tell our stories. And if we change one mind, it’s one mind that we changed and I’m happy with that."

"So whatever decision you make, you're going to be able to find stories or signs to say 'I did the right thing,' because we have to believe we did the right thing in order to survive."

"I think people have this romanticism of the homeland, and that’s just not the reality for me. Every time I go back to China, I feel more American than ever, so it’s this question of, ‘Well, where is home?’ We’re always searching for it and never fully fitting in."

"It’s so much easier to tell a fish-out-of-water story when the person is blond and blue-eyed going to an Asian country, for example. But what is it like when you look the same as those people, and you’re expected to fit in? How do you put that interiority on screen?"

"People are always asking me about the importance of representation and identity in relation to making The Farewell and of course those things are really important to me – thinking about my identity and exploring my identity in the west. But I would love it if men – white men – were also asked the same questions as me. They should be asked these questions so they can be more conscientious about how they’re representing people, how they’re not representing people, and aware of their own blind spots."

"In my family, and especially when I go back to China, it's always like, prepare your stomach, because it's the way that they express love."

"Sometimes America is so great because it brings all of us together, but sometimes it can be so limiting because it puts labels on things."

"Americans always talk about family love being unconditional, and I realized that I didn't feel that way."

"We all have different aspects of ourselves, and who we are to different people in our lives, at different stages of our lives."

"There have been moments where I laughed at my own family's culture, though it's hard to separate out whether something funny is cultural, or just my grandma specifically."

"There's so little representation of people who look like me behind the camera that it makes you want to say yes to any opportunity out of desperation. It puts you in a situation where you can't make your best work. Diversity for cheap."

"I can't speak for everybody, and I don't want to say it for an entire culture, but for me, coming from an immigrant family, it's very difficult to go find your voice, which requires a lot of failure."

"The questions I want to ask will revolve around humans, connection, relationships, family, and stories - what are the stories we tell ourselves and each other?"

"I can’t imagine what the adjustment was like for my parents settling down in a completely foreign land without an Asian community to offer support. They are braver than I could ever be. We had a small Chinese restaurant — one of two in the town. So there was one other Chinese American family, but they didn’t have kids my age. I was the only Chinese American student in my school system. I definitely had to deal with challenges and racism throughout my upbringing, but I wouldn’t change anything because those experiences shaped who I am today. There was also a lot of kindness in our little town. I spent lots of time with my friends and their welcoming families."

"As a journalist, you have to always have your purpose, and the reason why you are doing what you do, in your mind at all times. And so I'm constantly thinking about the fact that we're in a deadly pandemic, and people need answers, they need the truth about what the administration is doing. So that's what I really focused on and tried to allow that to drive me and not allow the distractions to get in the way."

"I think the entire time, because even though you learn how to adapt, and you become part of different friend groups and the community in some ways, just being so different from everyone else, I always felt that. And I mean, I'm not going to sugarcoat it. There were definitely times in my life throughout my childhood and growing up in West Virginia, where the other kids made sure that I felt different, and told me to go back to where I came from, and asked me if I could see because my eyes were so small. And I think that stems from a lack of education about different cultures. And also kids can be racist and bullies. And unfortunately, that's true no matter where you are in the world."

"I have not experienced another incident in person, but I get messages on social media every day that include racist language and bullying. I think the best thing we can do is provide facts. The fact is the virus does not discriminate against any group of people, and Asian Americans are not more likely to spread it. It’s also important to report on hate crimes, assaults, and attacks against members of the APA community so they are not normalized."

"I gravitate toward language that radiates a certain energy for me."

"I try to distance myself from systems of literary production and strains of thought that place primacy on publishing and publishing quickly. Ironically, one way to keep myself going is to surrender completely to the fear that I won’t write again, and try to access some recessed zone where any need or ambition to write poems, or to write for others’ eyes, falls away. Once I’ve been emptied of those needs, I find I can allow myself to be filled once more. Reading invigorating work, putting myself in the presence of formidable voices and minds, or submerging myself in slow films usually helps, too."

"Speaking and writing in English carried with it the anxiety of being betrayed by one’s usage mistakes and lack of fluency; this was no doubt reinforced by the linking of academic success to facility with speech and writing. At the same time that I began learning English, my Mandarin slowed in development, because I wasn’t using it outside of the domestic sphere. To this day, even though I enrolled in a year of intensive Mandarin study in college, my Mandarin is quite stunted. I’ve lost most of the ability to read and write in it, sadly."

"My initial impulse is to say that the poems aren’t “about” me, but that response plays into the faulty assumption that poems whose primary aim might be self-disclosure or testimony are somehow less aesthetically rigorous or energizing. I don’t buy that, really. At the same time, the “I” in these poems, while they might share autobiographical details with the person that wrote them, aren’t “about” me insofar as the speakers are fashioned, dramatized, contextually bound. I invoke them and write into them to better serve the poems and their modes, registers, and textures. Many of the poems take up self-interrogation, but I’m not interested in getting the plot details exactly right. The self is a fiction."

"Reading is migratory, an act of transport, from one life to another, one mind to another. Just like geographic travel, reading involves estrangement that comes with the process of dislocating from a familiar context. I gather energy from this kind of movement, this estranging and unsettling, and I welcome it precisely because it’s conducive to examination, interrogation, reordering. Travel, imaginative or physical, can sharpen perception and force a measuring of distance and difference."

"Buddhist philosophy made so much sense to me when I encountered it. It also upended so much of my thinking — about the self, about suffering, about the mental barriers I’d drawn up my whole life. I can’t understate the freedom that comes — at any age, but especially at that young age — with understanding there is no need to chase after anything, that one innately contains a vast understanding and wisdom. The freedom and balm of knowing that the root of so much suffering is also an illusion: You are not separate from any other thing."

"I consider myself a Buddhist practitioner, but still a beginner, even though I’ve been meditating on and off for many years now. When I was growing up, no one in my household was religious. I’d always been curious about religion, probably because it was bound up for me with questions about how to live as a person when you’re granted such a brief stretch of time. I remember picking up a Buddhist book during my senior year of high school, when it was dawning on me that I would soon experience a new level of autonomy."

"I’m interested in teasing out the moral complications in travel, but I’m not claiming any moral authority on the subject. Traveling, and the estrangement that comes with it — both physical and mental — can be deeply meaningful in many regards. That’s certainly been true for me. Being unsettled and departing from the familiar encourages a certain kind of attention and awakening of curiosity that helps us reach outside of our own skins, and in doing so, makes us consider not only what is unfamiliar to us in our surroundings, but what is unfamiliar to us in ourselves."

"I feel so fortunate to have gotten into the whole voiceover world; it’s been my bread and butter. They’re the nicest people on the planet—there are no huge, raging egos in that world, for whatever reason. And I was able to work all through my pregnancies, practically up to the time my water broke. It’s just been a joy. I had these voices in my head from growing up with immigrant parents and listening to them talk. Then just goofing around and playing around with different things, finding out what you could do with your voice. When people ask me for advice I always say, just have a lot of different tools in your bag and come up with a lot of different characters and really know them inside and out."

"From the time I was little, I always felt like an outsider. I always felt nervous and uncomfortable with myself."

"What I've realized is that, especially in Los Angeles, a lot of people are on some kind of path, even if they're not completely conscious of it. I've sort of always been on a path to find more peace, more security within myself. I've always felt like I needed something to help me feel better."

"If I was blond and tall, then I would have had 10 times the competition. I auditioned steadily and performed for everyone who would hire me. Now I am in a position to pick and choose my roles."

"You need to have that sensibility to say "here's what I like, here's what I don't like" and take it as an actor and go "okay I'm going to change." If you want me to make an adjustment, that my job."

"She was everything that I imagined her to be when I was a young girl growing up, idolizing her, she's elegant, and beautiful, and just incredibly generous."

"People always criticize. If they want to, they will find something to criticize. Hey, we all criticize. You like a film or you don’t. It’s up to you. You can’t stop that anyway. That’s part of human nature"

"a lot of actors, we create a backstory of our own in our heads and we often relate it to our intimates in the film, say my husband. But it just depends on how actors want to work."