Steven Yeun

"Here’s what an Asian person looks like to a majority white audience…But if you go to Korea, the characters are just humans because they’re not thinking about it like that. That’s something that I was made aware of [with Burning], which was really wonderful for me to know. I didn’t have to represent all Asians. I could just represent myself."

"These days I feel my otherness in every situation…If I go to Korea, there are reminders that I’m not fully Korean. I can speak it – and I look it there – but there are cultural and historical things that I don’t have because I wasn’t necessarily raised there. They really form the identity of being Korean and I’m missing parts of those…a man with no country…That’s the kind of place I’m operating from."

"Let's not mess with your Americana that's kind of embedded into your body. The food that you've eaten, the choices that you've made, the way that you think - don't alter those things. Instead, just - let's work on the language so that you can be unequivocally Korean. But let's leave these mysterious Western encodings in your body alone. And I think that created its inherent kind of, like, dissonance with that character where you don't know who or what and where he's from."

"You know, the concept of even an Asian-American person and a man has morphed and changed even in the last decade by a lot. You know, there's moments where people were super psyched that an Asian man was in a relationship with a white woman. And that was, like, a big point of victory for a moment…"