I learned my weaknesses at the Asian Games and other competitions where I lost. My guard was down.
Our first and main focus will continue to be producing content for a huge domestic market and the second largest migrant population in the world, which is south Asian.
Being Asian in this business is something you have to consider, because sometimes people aren’t as open. They’ll say, I can’t see you with a Caucasian person.
I always tend to gravitate toward the idea of things being human: that this isolation I feel as an Asian American, even though it’s real, other people have it too in their own way.
Yes, we become stronger when black and whites, Latino, Asian American, Native American, when all of us stand together.
My parents are Jamaican immigrants and both have a multiracial background. They’re Jamaican but my genetic makeup is West African, European, Asian.
First of all, Asian representation hardly exists to begin with.
Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.
I am very happy that I proved Asian players can deal with the high levels of European football.
My dad has blond hair, my grandmother has blue eyes. My daughter has blue eyes and blond hair. So it is pretty funny to me that I’m so heavily identified as an Asian person.
China and the Asian territory is an incredible opportunity. We spend a lot of time looking at it, looking for the right partners.
It’s always fun to see faces that are either familiar or resemble yours. I was fascinated by movies like ‘Big Trouble in Little China’ growing up because there were so many Asian people in it! The same with ‘Year of the Dragon’ or ‘The Last Emperor’. It was just so great to see so many Asian actors working.
And people are always saying he deceptively quick, deceptively athletic, and I don’t know if that’s just because I’m Asian or what it is, but obviously there’s going to be stereotypes that you have to fight.
I grew up in a steel town, and at the time, when I was a kid, there weren’t any Asian families in the area. So it had its challenges.
Hollywood likes to put actors in boxes, and it likes to put Asian actors in really small boxes.
My family was one of the few South Asian families in my community in Illinois. Growing up in the ’80s, I remember going to the K-Mart with my mom, when she was wearing her sari, and she’d get made fun of. People would ask my mother, ‘Were you born with that dot on your head?’
In America, people think being South Asian is still kind of exotic. When you go outside New York and Chicago and L.A., there are people who have never tried Indian food… they’ve never even tasted it!
It’d be nice if Asian actors could be perceived as profitable, which is the bottom line. We’re perceived as not mattering much fiscally.
Quite honestly, I never thought it would be possible for Asians to make it in the States. But now I feel like it’s totally changing. You see so many Asian celebrities now, and more and more of them are taking bigger roles in movies. I feel like everything has changed.
The majority of my blood is Asian.
Holding those two identities of being gay and Asian have, I guess, made my skin a little thicker.
I have Asian friends – second generation – and I am the worst in terms of being in touch with my heritage.
I don’t want to be defined as the Asian leading man. I want to be the leading man. Henry Golding.
American audiences and European and Asian audiences are so different.
I went to an exhibition at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum about Shanghai, about how courtesans had been influential in bringing western culture to Shanghai. I bought a book and in it saw this striking group of women in a photograph called ‘The Ten Beauties of Shanghai’.
The confidence is really driven by the woman – whether she can have the confidence that there will be enough earning or income to finance all the domestic spending – but also by the middle-income class, which for many Asian countries has become the growth power for the economy.
The Sixth Sense is not a good white film. Insomnia is not a good white film. They’re just good films. So why we can’t we have good films that happen to have black people, or Asian, or Latino, or any other minority group in them?
We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.
Asian parents generally tend to channel their children, especially their daughters, into studying and not sport.
I always think it’s really hard if you are Asian or Chinese to be really in Hollywood. There are not so many really great characters for you.
When I first arrived in Los Angeles from New York in 2004 to try to break into television, I couldn’t believe how segregated it was – how many neighborhoods were nearly all-white or all-black or -Asian or -Latino.
Drag Race’ was, like, my outlet and finally being able to see myself in television and that was through Manila Luzon, who was a ‘Drag Race’ contestant. Manila was the first Asian queer person that I ever saw on mainstream media and ‘Drag Race’ really did that for me.
Ang Lee and ‘Hulk,’ for instance – a movie about a guy with different-colored skin and a lot of repressed rage? Sounds like the perfect film for an Asian, to me!
A brief visit to Nepal started my insatiable love for Asian art.
I don’t know that there’s a division between American and British, European, South American, Asian sensibilities when it comes to rock n’ roll or, really, any form of music. Songs travel, and people take them into their lives in all different kinds of unpredictable and really untraceable ways.
The Asian airlines have the best wine programs.
Red Bull have always been very good at nurturing young talent – Sebastian Vettel and Daniel Ricciardo are products of that – and it is important with Asian talent that people keep investing in it. There’s a massive pool of people, for sure, and the next Sebastian Vettel is out there somewhere.
Pakistan is the first South Asian country to sign a free trade agreement and currency swap agreement with China.
There was never a point where I thought, ‘I’m going to do something Asian American.’
The Panda mission really speaks to our philosophy. It is, ‘Deliver exceptional Asian dining experiences by building an organization where people are inspired to better their lives.’ I’m talking about everyone who works at Panda. They’re inspired to better their own lives.
I’m not trying to disrespect anybody by saying this – I’m not sure I feel any interaction with Asian America in any collective sense. – It’s like, when you’re telling me this right now, my reaction is, Really? Asian America knows about me?
When depicting Asian people in movies, books, and television or as historical figures, it’s more important to humanize them and give them all of the dimensions of humanity, and that includes sexuality. Ascribe the human the full range of human qualities.
It was great to be able to play a hero in ‘The Magnificent Seven’ in a film industry where Asian actors are often limited to playing a villain.
I want to see more Asian. I want to see more Latin. I want more Indian. There’s more than Mindy Kaling out there, guys! There’s more than Bai Ling.
My kind of cooking is not a single style – French, Asian, Australasian or British – it’s not modern, old-fashioned or classic; it’s a mix of all these things. And at its core is a boy who loved to cook with his Nanna.
Just because there’s one Asian American superhero in the MCU, it does not by any means imply that our fight is finished right there.
It’s very hard, you know, for an Asian actor to be in a prime-time television series.
A China that trades extensively with the U.S. and its Asian neighbors will think twice before it pursues any policy that would place those relationships at risk. Likewise, trade between India and Pakistan could contribute to the normalization of ties between these long-estranged neighbors.
The Asian Championships are like the Olympics because the top 6 or top 8 are already here.
I think screenwriters, I think editors in the cutting room – they have a lot of responsibility that we don’t think about, but they could cut the coverage of an Asian person to focus on a white person because, unknowingly, they think that white person has more to say or is more interesting.
Asia has a great future; we here in the Philippines will benefit from this Asian prosperity.
I know Asian actors out there won’t even audition for a role that have an accent. But for me, I was the kid with an accent. I still have an accent to some degree.
My dad and I would go to Blockbuster and look for Asian films and we could never find any. If we saw a Jackie Chan movie we would watch that because it was so comforting to see a face similar to ours.
They were concerned about the racial issue. They thought it was not a safe issue to go Asian, unfortunately.
I do not want to name any individual names, but I felt like when I was working in Hollywood, there were some fellow colleagues of mine who didn’t even look me in the eyes because I was Asian.
If you haven’t heard my story, my mom is full Korean, and my dad is Caucasian. Kids in kindergarten would make fun of me for being Asian, and when you’re that age, you don’t know really how to process that; the way you take that is, ‘Who I am isn’t good enough.’
