A Quote by Liu Wen

I hope that when people see Asian women, they realize we are all different. A lot of time with Caucasian people, they just group us together as Asian. But even with different cities in China, people have different personalities... We look Asian, but we still look different. We don't look the same.
I always feel like people misunderstand the difference between an Asian story and an Asian-American story. That's completely different, too. I have friends who grew up in Asia, and our experiences are so different. Even though we might look the same, I feel like being Asian and then being Asian-American is completely different.
Your look changes depending on your confidence, and then your beauty changes. When I first came to New York, all the people were saying, 'You look so Asian because you have a different eye shape.' They didn't really understand because they didn't really see that many Asian models.
I have no intention of ever writing beauty tips on how to make an African-American nose look slimmer or Asian eyes look bigger. That's degrading. Asian eyes are what's beautiful about you and what makes you different.
Years ago, there was one Asian person in a soap and the entire Asian acting community was going for that role. Now, you can find a few different Asian people, and their character isn't entirely based on their religion or culture: they just happen to be in a soap.
I think what people need to realize is that, with trans people, we're like everybody else. No group of people are all the same. All women are not the same, all men are not the same, all children are not the same. It's the same thing with trans people - we're all so different, we have different goals, different dreams, and different aspirations.
I have to also get into producing if I want to see these stories being made... Let's venture out and do projects with people of different ethnicities: not just black but also Asian actors and Asian superhero films. Just an equality across the board.
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.
I remember watching Swan Lake and everybody looking exactly the same, but being able to relate because they were the only company I had ever seen even on video that had Asian dancers. The Asian community in Hawaii is actually almost as dominant as the Caucasian community. I thought "I can relate to that company because they look like people that I see every day." They weren't all little stick-thin Russian ballerinas.
I love getting to have different food and getting to be around different people and different cultures and different ways people look at life. It's really kind of helped me open up my mind and see the world from different perspectives.
There are so many individuals. We're not going to all have the same ways of being or priorities or personalities. You can't have this umbrella thing. Even if you look at other artists my age, people are making completely different music and have different goals.
What I noticed is that the lens from which people want to look at 'Minari' is just from that Asian-American angle. And I think that can end up being very frustrating. Because the craft of the film, and this film itself, is meant to embody a lot of different things.
And the political system is changing rapidly in this country, and we better realize that. The elephants or donkeys are not what younger people look to. They look at individual candidates' philosophy, and I think it's a different time and a different generation.
Even though we look at the past through the lens of distance and think that because people are wearing different clothes or have different technology, their experiences are different, it's all the same, right? Our experience of love and sex and death are the same in any time period.
Think of all the different features from Asian to African to Aboriginal to Caucasian. But we are all within the same species, Homo Sapiens.
It's very difficult to be asking other people for opportunities. It is much more empowering to be creating opportunities, to be the one who is saying, 'Look, I'm going to take this from the ground up and create a story that is meaningful to me as an Asian American and cast it with Asian Americans and have Asian Americans writing it.'
I wish reporters were more in tune to the difference between the Asian experience and the Asian-American experience. I think often they lump the two together and think that when I talk about Asian-American narratives that they can cite 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' or 'Mulan' as proof of concept when it's a different experience.
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