As far as I know, I am of Chinese ethnicity. My parents emigrated from Guangzhou to California at age 33 and I was pretty much born and raised in the Bay Area during the ’90s.
Whenever I’m home I have to speak Chinese with my parents. Whenever I’d go to school I would be mostly speaking in English so I already lived in two different worlds. I have been fortunate growing up in that I didn’t really encounter race issues for being Asian because it was such a diverse environment for me. I was more the weird kid where everyone else didn’t know how to interact with me and I didn’t know how to interact with them. Come high school, I would go from one clique and talk to them for a couple of minutes and then go to another clique and talk to them for a couple of minutes, and so I pretty much bounced around and that enforced my independence, which echoed in a lot of my future decisions and in eventually becoming an actor.
In high school, I developed a love for swimming and a love for creative writing while also doing martial arts. I went to UC Riverside and studied for a degree so I have a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing, but after I graduated I realized that I like to move around. I don’t want to be sitting down and writing all the time. So the best alternative for me I realized was film. My love of pursuing film began during my college weekends of renting random B movies from the local video rental stores.
As I was getting into acting I started to notice the trend of how Asian men are portrayed as the butt of a joke where they feed on the stereotypes that we have small dicks and are good at math; not attractive, not made to not be sexual, basically to get ridiculed. Some of the first acting I did was to play a triad member, play a gang member, or someone with martial arts. So a lot of it was just doing fighting, doing stunts. But over time after a decade or so of just doing fight scenes, it started to become very one-sided and imbalanced. I was playing characters that were just beating people up or getting beat up and that kind of aggressive energy was affecting me as well.
Asian women in movies and media actually get over-objectified, or they’re the ones lucky enough to land a role because they have the pretty face, the vulnerability. If anything, Asian men are not objectified enough. To be part of Objectified was something that I have been dying to do probably before this concept even came to be. Doing the Objectified series has allowed me to express my passionate side. I’ll bounce between the two extremes of being a martial artist and then do nude modeling or a movie that’s maybe LGBTQ oriented where I get to portray a softer version of myself. Nude modeling was an opportunity for me to put another image in for the cause, and you can see I’m getting hard for a cause I believe in. Objectified gave me the opportunity to portray the side of me that I have been hiding and had repressed for a long time.
