Korean Americans

"It's so important to work with material you can really mold and milk and create and evolve."

"We’re trying to change the conversation and redefine this issue so that the focus is on the North Korean people and not just the politics. At the level of high politics, this issue is a stalemate and we didn’t feel there was hope for progress."

"It is these people -- the officer who brought me his coat, the guard who offered me a boiled egg, these female guards who asked me about dating life in the US -- they are the ones that I remember of North Korea: humans just like us. North Koreans and I were not ambassadors of our countries, but I believe that we were representing the human race. Now I'm back home and back to my life. The memory of these people has blurred as time has passed. And I'm in this place where I read and hear about North Korea provoking the US. I realized how easy it is to see them as an enemy again. But I have to keep reminding myself that when I was over there, I was able to see humanity over hatred in my enemy's eyes."

"I think there has to be a mutual respect. If there is maturity, it should become apparent to them that you are happy doing it and this is what you want to do. As a second generation, we have all these resources: Do we do what we want or follow passion?"

"One of the things my editor and I did fight about…is the idea of how much a reader can take. To me you get nowhere second guessing how much can a reader stand and how much can she not. What a reader can always tell is when you are holding back for fear of offending them. I wanted there to be something too much about the violence in the book, but I also wanted there to be an exaggeration of everything, an exaggeration of love, of empathy, of pity, of horror. I wanted everything turned up a little too high…"

"Part of this book is an homage to the way my friends and I live: lives without children, without marriage, lives you rarely see depicted in popular art, unless as a punch line or a tragedy, lives not considered by many to be full, legitimate adulthood. And yet when I was growing up, my parents always had a diversity of friends, some of whom lived different kinds of lives themselves…And they had many friends who had chosen this other path of adulthood, who weren’t married, who didn’t have children, whose lives didn’t resemble their own. So this sort of life never seemed like anything less-than to me. The loneliness of living the life I do comes from the fact that so many people do think it’s a lesser existence, a purgatory of true adulthood."

"…I know plenty of people who have been at the helm of various creative galleries, or production companies, and have never felt the need to behave poorly. It’s just a lazy justification. And as someone who has managed to go 25 years without conflating sex with power, or bullying my colleagues, I find it particularly offensive."

"In some ways. I do want to do something very different with each book…I think this book is linked to the first but approaches it in a completely different way. The first book was much chillier, more remote. And intentionally so. I don’t think it was a book that anyone loved and I didn’t love it either. It was not a book that was meant to inspire love in the way that I think this one is."

"I’ve spent my life trying to figure out what Asian-ness means…but you know, I really gotta figure out what whiteness means. We all have to figure out what it means, apparently, for our survival."

"I don’t have [sic] problem with it. It depends on how you do it. People say, “Why do you have to play Connie Chung?” I also play John McCain, which is fucked up because Asians captured him. Why does a black guy have to play Bill Cosby? I’ve done characters with thick accents and ones without. When me and Ken [Jeong] did Pineapple Express they wanted accents. I wasn’t going to say no—we were [playing] Asian assassins. In Harold And Kumar, I didn’t need one; it didn’t call for it. I’m a team player."

"A lot of people that are in the disease of drinking and using can be caught up on the denial aspect of it. I don’t have a problem with that. I am very sensitive. I can just feel when things are getting out of control and I go, ‘Oh, you have to deal with this. Because you can die.’ I’ve always sort of had that."

"…If you start thinking about representation too much—and you think about what movie should exist for an Asian-American person, and for an Asian-American male, or what you would like to see an Asian-American male doing on TV or in movies, even though that’s a legitimate thing to think about—it clouds my ability to go, “Oh, that’s just a fun thing. I’d like to throw myself into that situation”..."

"People invite me to a party and go, ‘Run around naked and do cocaine and, like, hump people.’ And I’m going, ‘Nah ... I’ll just stand in the corner.’ I’m one of those people that will walk into a bar, and if I wasn’t a comic—because some people know who I am—I would just blend in. But I think people just think I am crazy because they see me doing stand-up, but I am generally not. I am very sad. I’m one of those guys that lights candles and listens to Rachmaninoff..."

"On a political level, I just found that I was more excited by what my skill-set could bring to film and television. Asian [American] theater has stretched the boundaries a little bit, but at the time, [it] was much more involved in what I thought was an older form of expression. It was much more about identity plays, explaining who we were as Asian Americans through dramas. And that didn't interest me as much. I was interested in people who weren't going to theater, and reaching them. That always excited me more, and to this day, theater, though on a formal level is the ideal place for an actor, on some political level, I find it frustrating that theatergoers are mostly rich -- maybe that's unfair -- mostly white…"

"I’ve always said that it really bothers me that so much of Asian representation in cinema has been people running away from their Asian-ness to find love elsewhere…"

"It doesn’t get any less scary. All that happens is that you have less life left. It helps if you do your falling early, and it really helps if you do your reaching early."

"Taking time to color in the people around your main characters truly does a lot of heavy lifting for you in terms of subtext and context because tiny misunderstandings and micro-aggressions or avoidance speaks volumes without requiring so much exposition…"

"The thing about sexual assault and the narrative that gets played out so often is that it’s a deadlock. It’s what one person said vs. what another person said. It’s just that my personal experience as a survivor is incredibly muddied. I was very young and had such a crush on the person. I willingly obliged so many preambles to The Moment. I felt incredibly complicit. My self-gaslighting was so sustained and calcified that I wasn’t entirely sure if it “counted.” At the time it wasn’t something I would ever have felt secure declaring as assault if the burden of proof lay with me recounting everything about my intentions vs. the other person’s. We talk about consent and it’s important to define, but it’s never this hard and fast yes/no pact that’s then committed to the stenographer…"

"Sometimes there’s nothing better in the world than talking to another creative person about where you are, because you may feel like you’re floating in outer space a lot of the time."

"I think that there's every reason for a young woman to feel very strongly that allying herself with a powerful man, regardless of how she has to do it, might be her path forward — might sometimes be her only path forward. And forming that alliance may be a decision she makes when she is less experienced, and a decision that she is able to recognize for how compromised it was later in life, but we still have to recognize that there's this whole baked-in social and cultural structure that's pointing her toward that decision. Just identifying all the "bad men" and putting them into a time-out isn't really going to address the ways in which sexism is baked into our society."

"The voice tends to come first and then everything else follows. It’s never worked for me to think, here’s a character and they should have this kind of voice, let me try to force that. If I can’t tap into a character’s voice, I can’t really write the character…"

"I was also interested in what it’s like to experience in a really vivid and authentic-seeming way agency and choice in a circumstance that you might later in your life view completely differently, because as much as you were experiencing agency and choice, you were actually in a radically disempowered situation you weren’t even experienced enough to recognize. That’s why I think consent is such a complicated issue."

"I think the “disfigurement” that Japan inflicted was less the idea of disfigurement, and more the idea of mystery. I’ve managed to finish all that I’ve written because there’s always a mystery at the heart of it which keeps me interested. I think that’s why Japan was interesting, and it seems to me, still, like a strange mystery."

"I think most Asian American writers, especially younger ones, are tired of the standard stories about discrimination and assimilation, or those set in the ancient hinterlands of our countries of ethnic origin. Those stories are no longer pertinent or urgent to most of us. Although we have not yet entered into a post-racial era, and although bigotry still rages on, it’s not something that people want to explore or dramatize in every single book or story…"

"A lot of this had to do with resenting the suggestion when I was starting out as a writer that I should write about the Asian American experience and have Asian American characters. I thought the suggestion was, in and of itself, racist, that I was being told I shouldn’t step out of the ethnic literature box, that I should know my place. But I didn’t want to be labeled as an ethnic writer, and I wasn’t interested in writing about being an immigrant or setting stories in Old Asia. I had no connections to those stories. They weren’t my stories. So essentially my reaction to those suggestions was, Fuck you…"

"I’d like to see us get to the point where Asian American authors can have Asian American characters and a big deal isn’t made about it, or at least so it’s not the first thing mentioned…"

"I feel queasy about the idea of having non-Asians taking center stage in one of my books. I would feel guilty about it, as if I were trying to deny my ethnic heritage, even though this is precisely what I am suggesting we should be free to do."

"I think that when you’re a teen, you can be overwhelmed with change. You’re expected to be ready for adulthood, to know what you want to do with the rest of your life, to have mature relationships. But it’s only been like 2.5 years since you had braces, or got your period, or stopped playing with Barbies! So I think it’s easy to retreat into apathy and fear and to not try. Because trying means you can fail and be embarrassed—and those are two things that are literally the worst when you’re in high school…"

"There are so many stories to tell — we’re just as varied in experiences as white men, and it doesn’t look like people are sick of those stories yet. And I’m lucky enough to be in a position to tell these stories and share them."

"I don’t think California is perfect by any means. I’m sure there are a lot of people being oppressed here and not getting a fair shake. But I just feel like maybe it’s the weather, maybe it’s the location on the coast with access to all of Asia coming in and the strong immigrant communities here, that makes it different…I feel like in the East Coast, that’s still a thing in certain classes. That said, there are a lot of wealthy people here in California. There’s definitely segregation and classes in Los Angeles…"

"The character doesn’t have to be exactly like them, but as an author you have to give something to the reader that shows the vulnerability and where the character’s coming from…You can have characters do awful things, but you make them relatable or have some kind of backstory that makes their actions, even if it’s not excusable, understandable…"

"I like working with identities and stories outside of my own experience, so it’s kind of just a necessity…"

"Part of my heritage being Korean, it's going to be interesting going to Korea and answering these questions dealing with North and South Korea. It's difficult to deal with at times, this expectation. Being Asian, every single Asian person in the world expects you to represent them, you know?"

"In my opinion, as far as action is concerned, and physical action, the punches and kicks, they don’t really matter. Even shooting a gun. It all depends on, for me, what your intention is, what you put behind it and how it serves the film…"

"I mean there’s something magical about filmmaking and people that work within film. It’s the most beautiful thing, because so many people are coming together and they just think about a common goal. It’s almost similar to the military, but all of a sudden you’ll be in there and you’re about to do something and everybody is thinking about the next person. It’s not always the case, but the films that I’ve worked on it’s been that way, and it’s amazing. It makes you want to work harder…"

"I love these characters that have a duality to them. I wanted to be Han Solo not Luke Skywalker. It’s more realistic for me, nobody is that square, especially in today’s world. We all have two sides to us, and that’s what makes us human. I love the movies where everybody was an outlaw in some way…"

"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…"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"To us, it was important throughout the writing process that we put things in that were funny, number one, but also that felt like they came from a real place. And the conversations these characters have, reflect on the conversations we have. For us, it didn’t really feel like we were making any commentary or making any stereotypes, it was really us trying."

"I was super-excited to do it, but I still felt a little nervous about it and I felt like my parents would be a good way for me to test if this was OK…They’re immigrants, and they understand what’s going on over there a little better than me…As soon as I brought it up to them, they thought it was hilarious."

"I came into it equipped with these principles because of my Asian-American-studies background, but there was certainly a negotiation that had to take place just for me to get a foot in the door."

"What happens when you populate a movie with a lot of Asian-American people is that they get to be people."

"It’s gone away from the thing that I hate, and now it’s more the thing that I don’t know how to do at all, or the thing that’s really hard to do…"

"But theatre is so dominated by men that no matter what kind of sheltered bubble you’re in, you’re going to encounter sexist bullshit. That’s just always going to be an issue…"

"When I’m making work, I’m very much thinking about how there’s a relationship between whatever the play is doing and whatever sort of automatic dismissive mechanisms people have for not wanting to deal with a particular issue. I think all of my plays have some sort of issue that they’re wrestling with that the audience normally doesn’t want to wrestle with. They want to be like, “I know what that is,” and not have to wrestle, because it’s a human instinct not to want to have to be challenged…"

"There is a duality between Awkwafina and Nora. Awkwafina is someone who never grew up, who never had to bear the brunt of all the insecurities and overthinking that come with adulthood. Awkwafina is the girl I was in high school – who did not give a hoot. Nora is neurotic and an overthinker and could never perform in front of an audience of hecklers."

"People say that you’re never famous as an Asian-American ‘til you make it to the Chinese newspaper… You could be on the cover of Time, and your parents won’t recognize you until you are on that newspaper!"

"When I first started, YouTube was known as Asian Hollywood…A lot of these Asian YouTubers popped off because they’re in control of their own content. There’s no gatekeeper on YouTube."