I am obsessed with Chinese restaurants. Like many Americans, I first discovered them in my childhood.
If you wanna do a film where you have a big scope, you’ve got to make your characters relatable and genuine.
Don’t lose faith in what you are trying to do, even though you will get pummeled emotionally left and right. There are a lot of NOs to any YES. And that’s OK.
I’m still the person who naively thinks if I can imagine it, I can have it.
When you are free from self-doubt, you fail better. You accept criticism and listen.
People are funny. They often don’t mean to be, and that’s what makes it even more endearing.
The philosophy I always have is what’s the sentence that would tell me about each shot. If I can’t read why the shot’s there, what is the story trying to say?
With a film, things constantly have to go up in the story, and you’re constantly putting pressure on the main character. It allows to go really deep into what its relationship is.
We might be shifting away from a Eurocentric view of the United States into something that’s much more multicultural, multinational, and Chinese food is just one slice of that.
I like to say, Chop sueys the biggest culinary joke that one culture has ever played on another, because chop suey, if you translate into Chinese, means tsap sui, which, if you translate back, means odds and ends.
Headline writing is an art form.
Chinese restaurants have long been a weekly or monthly ritual for many Americans.
Chinese cooking is noisy – a multitasking activity that requires constant vigilance. There is no downtime.
My siblings and I are known as ABCs, American-born Chinese.
Let your heart beat for music. Don’t be a DJ for the wrong reasons, do it because you have a passion for it.
If you don’t want the nickname, don’t live up to it.
In deference to American traditions, my family put our oven to rare use at Thanksgiving during my childhood, with odd roast-turkey experiments involving sticky-rice stuffing or newfangled basting techniques that we read about in magazines.
That the good that we do might live on after us, while the evil lies interred with their bones.
Stupidity makes you dangerous-to yourself and everyone around you.
Laughter in the face of danger is a mark of courage.