I think you just have to appreciate who you are and hopefully they can see what a superhero is about.
I wish people wouldn't just see me as the Asian girl who beats everyone up, or the Asian girl with no emotion. People see Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock in a romantic comedy, but not me. You add raceto it, and it became, 'Well, she's too Asian', or, ‘She's too American’. I kind of got pushed out of both categories. It's a very strange place to be. You're not Asian enough and then you're not American enough, so it gets really frustrating.
You can't look back; you have to keep looking forward.
I try to believe like I believed when I was five...when your heart tells you everything you need to know.
You don't want to continue to do one thing and only one thing. You want to keep challenging yourself and if you do well at it, great, if you fall on your face, you tried. Like, she's really terrible at comedy! Who knew? But if you didn't try and put yourself out there you'd never know.
Everything I buy is vintage and smells funny. Maybe that's why I don't have a boyfriend.
When you have something that close to you, you want to make sure that you're aware of it.
I grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens, with no money. I was taught not to take anything for granted. If you are too busy being a diva or a freak, then you are not enjoying it.
I think people sometimes get the wrong impression when they're like, Oh, well, so-and-so was straight and then she was gay, and now she's straight again, you know? But it's like, how many times do I have to kiss a woman before I'm gay? Everybody wants to label people. Sometimes you just fall in love with somebody, and you're really not thinking about what gender or whatever they happen to be. It think that if I happen to fall in love with a woman, everyone's going to make a big deal out of it. But if I happen to fall in love with a man, nobody cares.
It is an absolute privilege to be able to speak another language and have it be something you grew up with. I think it's a very important thing and I think that everywhere else in the world people speak more than one language.
You have to look out for becoming trapped in a place where people want to see you all the time doing one thing.
Nobody really tells me what's going on, and I find out via the trades myself.
I try to distinguish my characters from each other.
Producing is like pushing jello up a hill on a hot day.
Once you embody the language, the character comes really naturally, especially when you put the costume on.
There's always sacrifices. My family don't generally say that they're related to me - my sister doesn't say she's my sister - because they don' t want to be judged or lauded based on who I am.
The neck is kind of what's sexy in Japan, so you have to have the kimono a little bit back. It was just a whole different way of appealing to what was sexy.
I always admired Wonder Woman and the Incredible Hulk - but I don't know if I'd be a very convincing hulk.
Pilates introduced me to muscles I never even knew I had. Soon I started to feel longer and leaner. Ten years of Pilates has really changed my body for the better.
It was probably very difficult to go from Chinese and then suddenly go to kindergarten and start speaking English; it's very hard to transition back and forth when you are in that pivotal age. It's also hard to transition back, but if I was immersed in the country for a given amount of time, you are surrounded by it, everyone is speaking, you are learning new things, you are practicing all the time.
I generally won't do a role unless I feel like it's in my system somewhere, even if it's just a molecule of it. Like I just felt like I knew it and if I talked about it or discussed it or tried to rehearse it that it would take away the energy from that scene so I went in there and just did it.
Ten years of Pilates has really changed my body for the better.
It's like kill or be killed, that's my thing basically.
Martial arts are art forms and require a great deal of discipline and dedication. I so admire people who focus their lives on it, because it's not an easy thing to do.
The wonderful thing about film is that you have something that has a beginning, middle, and end, and you have a concrete amount of time to shoot it.
