A Quote by Hiro Murai

As an Asian guy, I would love to see a big blockbuster with Asian lead characters. — © Hiro Murai
As an Asian guy, I would love to see a big blockbuster with Asian lead characters.
As an actor of color, I was overlooked at every possible opportunity. I was given roles that were almost not roles. It was, like, Scared Asian Guy. Whether I was a scared Asian guy in front of a computer or a scared Asian guy getting robbed in the grocery store, I always played these pathetic, low-status characters.
I'm definitely more Asian than a lot of people who have never been to Asia. But by blood and by race, they instantly say I deserve to be Asian. I've worked really hard to be Asian, and I think I'm Asian enough.
Usually when you're Asian and you're on set, you're the only Asian there. Either you're the token Asian or you're the Asian sidekick.
A lot of 'Star Wars' fans who are specifically Asian never had a character they could dress up like, or they would, and people would always call them 'Asian Rey' or 'Asian fill-in-the-blank.'
There were so few examples of Asian or Asian-American lead characters on American TV or even in the movies. And the ones that have existed for so long were either stereotypical or offensive in some way, or just not reflective of the lives of people in the community.
I would love it if, even for one day, you could walk through a neighborhood and see an Asian guy sitting on his stoop, then you look across the street and see a black guy and a white guy sitting on their porches, and a Mexican dude walking by.
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.
When you're the only Asian in the room, the last thing you want to do is to point out you're Asian. And be the Asian dude.
There are no Asian leading men in Hollywood. There's not an Asian Ryan Gosling or an Asian Brad Pitt.
Really annoys me any time I see Asian fusion too. Asia is a big place; which Asian are you talking about? You notice it's never Uzbek or Tajik food. It's Thai, and it's generally insulting.
And so it became a priority for me to make sure that all Asian Canadians or Asian Americans or wherever you are, Asian Australians, felt like they belonged.
White supremacist? Let's see: if you have a guy who was married for 13 years to an Asian woman and who has two lovely Asian daughters, wouldn't that disqualify him from membership in the white supremacist club?
In British TV, if there is an Asian character, there usually has to be a reason for them to be Asian, whereas in America, you have a lot more roles where the person just happens to be Asian.
Does people not asking me about Asian American literature mean they don't see it as its own literary tradition? I certainly believe in it as its own literary tradition, because your race plays a great factor in how you are seen by the world, and how you see the world; the fact that I'm an Asian American isn't incidental to who I am as a writer. Where it becomes difficult is defining what, if anything identifiable at all, makes an Asian American book an Asian American book, other than the fact of its creator being Asian. And I'd argue that there is nothing identifiable beyond that.
I wish people wouldn't just see me as the Asian girl who beats everyone up, or the Asian girl with no emotion. People see Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock in a romantic comedy, but not me. You add raceto it, and it became, 'Well, she's too Asian', or, ‘She's too American’. I kind of got pushed out of both categories. It's a very strange place to be. You're not Asian enough and then you're not American enough, so it gets really frustrating.
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.
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