A Quote by Yunjin Kim
I know when I was growing up in New York, whenever I turned on the television, I never saw a face that looked like me. Whenever there was an Asian person on television, it would be a huge event, me calling to my older sister 'There's an Asian person on television!' It was unheard of back then.
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Television and movies were our biggest teachers. When we came to the United States, the Vietnam War was just ratcheting up. And so the Asian faces that I saw on the news, they were the face of the enemy. Asian men, particularly, were either small, ineffective, or they were evil. And those messages were deeply, deeply embedded in me for many years.
I also know that I have represented for us a certain kind of journalist and for me over the years when an older Black person comes and tells me how proud they are of me and the way I represent us on television, or when a younger person says to me, 'Hey Mr. Gordon, I watched you growing up and my parents made me watch you,'.
J.J. Abrams wanted me to do a part in Lost and we probably had three meetings, and I finally turned it down, but it wasn't because I didn't like television or Lost, although I think I said to J.J., "I don't want to be in Hawaii and have an insurance person tell me I'm not allowed to go free dive and spear fishing." That would be the worst kind of torture in the world. But I don't hate television.
You put this face on television, week in, week out, they'd stop me and they'd say, 'Hey, Roy, how are you doing?' They'd know who I was, what I was, what I looked like, and what I did - all from seeing and hearing it at the same time on television.
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.
Sometimes, we want Asians in the media, but we don't want them to talk about being Asian. For me, that's interesting because I'm from Asia. If you want me to be on television but I can't be Asian, I'm not being true to myself.
I would really like to focus on directing features, and then eventually take that skill set back to television. On features, you have more control. On television, the producers are the creative forces behind it. Directors come and go on television.
But I never, never thought of the ministry nor did - of course, television when I was growing up, there was no television. So I didn't know anything about it.
Let's face it. How often do you see an Asian face in films and television? They are practically invisible. Now and then, you will get one, and, interestingly, he gets the role of a scientist. Isn't that interesting?
I have quite a bit of experience reporting on corporate behavior, both doing it with independent operations in early in my career, in the underground press, to magazines like 'Rolling Stone,' to regional newspapers and television, and television news programs, to papers like the 'New York Times' and public television.
Modern politics today requires a mastery of television. I've never really warmed up to television and, in fairness to television, it's never warmed up to me.
When you watch television, you never see people watching television. We love television because it brings us a world in which television does not exist.
You always have to give back to the fans. I remember being a fan of television and film when I was growing up and if I would've had the opportunity to meet somebody that I watched on television, it would've made my day, it would've made my life.
Ratings to me are a little like the Chinese Government. I don't fully understand what makes a rating go. I don't know what makes the American television audience respond to one person and not t another. There very seldom are great differences between many television personalities.
The Chinese Student Association at Cornell put together their own play. It was all Asian people in the cast except for me, because they wanted to do a couple of scenes about an interracial relationship. I was the only non-Asian person on stage; the entire audience was Asian apart from my 10 friends that showed up.
As an actor, it was important to me to play gay characters because, growing up, it was something I never really saw done on television and in film, and I was questioning why there weren't more people like me.
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