You obviously don’t have your character’s heavy accent. How did you go about perfecting it?

“I listened to video footage of the real Jessica Huang — she’s a real person in Orlando — reading every single one of my lines. And then I break it down phonetically. From a vocal standpoint, you break it down in terms of the placement of the voice, the rhythms, and the cadences.”



What’s your response to people who say that it’s stereotyping?

“I empathize with people who were afraid that [the accent] was stereotyping, because for those people — who are pretty much all Asian-Americans — the only time that they saw an Asian character on television in a comedy was when that Asian person was a humor tool and not a person whose accent was merely one facet of their [character]. It’s a beautiful part of the story of immigration, so I wanted to make sure that I didn’t water it down to quell the fears — the fears that are based on the shitheads who used an accent as a humor tool. I’m not going to use those shitheads’ metric to determine the worthiness of my voice. If somebody has an accent, that often means they know more than one language, and I don’t think that’s anything to be ashamed of. I actually think that’s pretty fucking cool. Hopefully, we’re writing our own history, instead of trying to be accepted by the white American framework history. Because by trying to be accepted by that framework, we’re already putting them at a higher level than us — and they’re not. They’re not at a lower level than us, it’s just a different story. So let’s start telling our stories.”



Do you think the industry is finally moving away from having ethnic actors typecast in roles like the “Asian overachiever” or “tiger mom?"

“I don’t think we’re moving away from that…. I think the problem is when producers don’t want to tell an Asian story. They still want to have their white lead actors, but they feel bad, so they want to make sure that they surround the lead actor with people of color. So often, I’ll go to an audition that’s for, like, the best friend and the only character description, aside from being best friend, is all ethnicities except Caucasian.... It could be a Latina girl, it could be a Black girl, an Asian girl, it just can’t be white because we already have our white people. In a way, it’s like their bastardized version of trying to be more diverse, without giving props to what diversity really means, which is our individual stories.”