As a kid, I only wanted to watch old musicals. They just felt like home to me. It changed every week, but no matter what I was watching, I’d say: “I want to be that person.” If it was West Side Story, I wanted to be Maria; if it was Funny Girl, I wanted to be Barbra Streisand. When I was seven years old, I decided to pursue a musical-theatre career. I played “Young Cosette” in a Broadway production of Les Misérables and then moved to Los Angeles to start auditioning for film and television.

Right away, my manager told me that because I was biracial, there weren’t very many parts I could be considered for. I would hear “they’re going in a different direction,” or that I “didn’t have the right look,” but really what they were saying was that it was too hard to place me into a family because they couldn’t figure out what I was. I come from Hawaii where it’s a melting pot.

Onstage, I played Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. But when I came to California as a half-Asian actor, suddenly it was impossible to cast me. I couldn’t understand it. Why couldn’t I be the girl next door, or a family member in a biracial family? That’s who I was when I was growing up in Hawaii.