People, young Asian actors, will ask me all the time: “What’s your advice? How do you do it?” You just do it. I could have looked around as a kid and been discouraged because I didn’t see any Asian leading people. In terms of movies, there’s never been an Asian-American actor who was allowed to carry their own movie for several movies. You can look at all these stats, and it’s very discouraging, but you either just do it or you don’t. And if you fail because Hollywood doesn’t want to let an Asian person be the lead in anything, well, you failed doing something that mattered to you.

It’s like Yoda says: “Do or do not. There is no ‘try.’ ” I came out to L.A. from New York with credit-card debt, thousands in student loans. I’ve been on my own financially since I was 18. It was the dumbest move I could have made, coming out here. But I did it.

What do you like to do when you’re not acting?

I read a lot — I actually think that’s a big part of what made me become an actor. When I was little, I wanted to become a writer.

What is it about reading that led you to acting?

I’m one of those people who thinks there’s nothing more human than a book. If the writer is really good, they get into a character’s life and their heart and their head in a way that makes you, the reader, feel less alone with your own personal little embarrassments or hopes or dreams or heartbreaks. I think really good writers have always done that for me — made me feel less alone in the world by showing me characters who felt the way I did on the inside, and maybe weren’t brave enough to show it on the outside.

I’m not able to write characters in the way Marilynne Robinson is, or Jeffrey Eugenides is, but I think I approach character in acting similarly to the way a lot of these writers write characters — which is to have anything I do be informed by a deeper thing, even if I don’t always intend to show it.

Did you ever consider another career?

When I was in New York, I quit acting for a couple of years to study psycholinguistics. The fact that it is biological, that there’s an acquisition period, that we have a part of our brain that is programmed to carry language, the way all languages have a grammar and the lexicon — when you break down what language is, and how unique it is to us as a species, it’s amazing. My first intro to it was an essay by David Foster Wallace called “Authority and American Usage.” He breaks down why the evolution of language matters. That essay is still one of my favorite things I’ve ever read.

A big theme in the first season of “Fresh Off the Boat” was the family trying to find its footing and fit in among new neighbors. What themes or new conflicts will we see in Season 2? And how much more will you veer from the book? Are there things you’d like to see explored on the show that haven’t been yet?