Published in LA Weekly

At a performance at KCON earlier this month, Tiffany Hwang, one of nine members of the popular K-pop band Girls’ Generation, recognized a fan in the audience. It was Oanh “Soy” Nguyen — who was particularly noticeable because she’d recently dyed her hair Sailor Chibi Moon pink.

Hwang happened to know that Nguyen’s favorite Girls’ Generation member is her bandmate Yuri, so she brought over Yuri, who waved, flashed Nguyen a heart hand sign and blew her a kiss. The moment lasted less than 30 seconds, but for a die-hard fan it was a dream. And because Nguyen is the founder of Girls’ Generation’s international fan site, Soshified, it was a moment she was quickly able to share with her 176 staff volunteers, 300,000 fan club members and 280,000 Twitter followers, who appeared to be just as excited about it as she was.

Nguyen, 24, works in Burbank as a community manager and strategist at Frederator Networks Inc., which is Hollywood producer Fred Seibert’s animation studio. The majority of her free time outside work is devoted to running Soshified, an international fan community she started in February 2008, when she was 16. The name Soshified is a nod to Girls’ Generations’ nicknames SoShi and SNSD.

Growing up in Florida, where there wasn’t a large Asian-American community, Nguyen watched marathons of Vietnamese-dubbed Asian TV shows to find stories she could relate to. Her love for Korean dramas led her to K-pop, and she was soon captivated by Girls’ Generation, which came up in an industry dominated by boy bands like Super Junior, TVXQ and VIXX.

Nguyen remembers finding a TV series called Girls’ Generation Goes to School online, but she could only track down English subtitles for one episode. She tried joining the Girls’ Generation fan site that had translated the show, but membership was restrictive. So she decided to subtitle it herself. She asked a Korean-American classmate to stay after school with her to translate as she timed and edited new English subtitles into the videos.

“I wasn’t trying to start my own site,” she says. “They just weren’t subbing the videos fast enough, and I figured if I wanted to understand the show, other people probably wanted to understand it as well.”

These days, fan-subbing is commonplace — popular Asian drama sites like Viki and Dramafever rely on the work of passionate fans for subtitling — but back then, Nguyen and her team were making it up as they went along. As their community grew, they pursued bigger projects such as crowd-funding gifts for the band members’ birthdays or anniversaries.

In 2010, when Girls’ Generation was one of many acts to perform at a Hollywood Bowl concert hosted by their record label, SM Entertainment, Nguyen not only helped get 300 Soshified members seats together but also matching glow-in-the-dark T-shirts they all wore as a sign of solidarity. It caught the attention of SM Entertainment, which later contacted Nguyen to help organize Girls’ Generation’s official U.S. fan meet-up, which attracted more than 2,000 people.

“I was very passionate, I had a lot of free time, and I wanted everyone to know about Girls’ Generation,” she says. “I started posting daily about them. I’d email K-pop sites like Soompi and Asianfanatics to tell them to check out the group, and I think Soshified did a lot for Girls’ Generation internationally.”

In 2013, Soshified led a voting campaign that successfully won Girls’ Generation a YouTube Music Award, beating out more well-known acts like Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga and Psy.

“People like to complain that K-pop groups always dominate these online vote-based awards,” says Reera Yoo, a writer who has contributed to KoreAm Journal and Hallyu Magazine. “Their fans rally together and vote over and over again. Other fan clubs could do the exact same thing, but they don’t.”

Nguyen thinks most American pop acts don’t have the same type of fan loyalty. “In American pop music, the word ‘fan’ is used more casually,” Nguyen says. “You can be a fan of multiple things, and the focus is more on the music and the craft. That’s not to say Girls’ Generation isn’t about the music, but even if they have a bad single, you still support them.

“I don’t think I’m obsessive,” she continues. “But I’m not a casual fan. I’m committed to helping the community grow and helping the artists become whatever they want to be.”

It’d be easy to dismiss her and her team as mere fangirls, but part of the reason behind Soshified’s success is the legitimate talent within the club. Their latest T-shirt design was done by an artist that works at Marvel. A Soshified poster was designed by a member who does graphics for Pixar. As for Nguyen, she’s basically developed through Soshified the skills to run her own media and production company. One of Nguyen’s proudest accomplishments is that Soshified raised more than $100,000 from fans for various charities over the years, including aid for Japan’s 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami relief and for the Korean Retinitis Pigmentosa Society.

“Growing up, it was weird to be a fan,” she says. “But now, people understand that I’m not just a weird outcast who loves this girl group. They think it’s cool that I’ve created this international community.”

Now Nguyen’s the one with fans — including the girls of Girls’ Generation.

Constance Wu has had one surreal year. As Jessica Huang on the hit ABC comedy Fresh Off the Boat, Wu not only jumped from a relative Hollywood unknown to a Critics’ Choice nominee for Best Actress in a Comedy Series, she took a character — who could well have been, at best, annoying and, at worst, a hideous cliché — and made her possibly the funniest, most quotable, gif-worthy part of the show. We talk to Wu about how she’s like Jessica (and how she’s not), the most difficult scene to shoot and why she’ll always speak her truth, for better or worse.

Story by Ada Tseng
Photos by Jack Blizzard

Constance Wu says she can tell if someone is lying to her. “I study behavior,” says the 33-year-old actress who shot to fame earlier this year for her role as the strong-willed Taiwanese immigrant mother Jessica Huang on ABC’s family sitcom Fresh Off the Boat.

“I don’t just listen to the person’s words,” she explains. “I watch how they act, and I have a pretty good gut feeling for when people are being authentic or if they’re trying to push forward an agenda or image. And when it doesn’t come from a sincere place of honest, humble goodness, I can tell, and it turns me off.”

She’s talking about Adnan Syed, whose 1999 murder conviction was recently re-investigated in the podcast Serial. When Fresh Off the Boat, loosely based on celebrity restaurateur Eddie Huang’s memoir of the same name, was shooting its first season back in late 2014 (this was before they knew they’d inspire a fanbase passionate enough to ensure them a second season, which premieres September 22), members of the cast and crew were captivated by the other Asian American story that had taken the country by storm. Serial was a podcast that singlehandedly brought the audio storytelling medium into the mainstream, as listeners debated and obsessed over whether they thought the likeable Syed was serving a life sentence for a murder he did not commit. But Wu wasn’t buying his good-guy persona.

“Oh, he’s guilty,” she says, without a doubt in her mind. “I know he’s probably fooling a lot of people, but he’s not fooling me.”

“She’s extremely assured in her beliefs,” says Randall Park, who plays Jessica’s optimistic and good-natured husband Louis on Fresh Off the Boat. Park, who followed the podcast just as closely, is less inclined to assume Syed’s guilt, but he admires his co-star’s conviction. “There’s something really comforting about people who are so confident and so sure, and Constance is very confident in a lot of ways.”

It’s a trait she shares with her on-screen persona, who, despite initially not fitting in with her new clique-ish Caucasian neighbors in Orlando, Florida, knows who she is and is unapologetic about it. Wu remembers meeting the real Jessica Huang for the first time before they started shooting the show: “She yelled in my ear at dinner, ‘My sons tell me I need to be quieter because I’m too loud. You know what I told them? I told them they need to get used to it.’” Wu laughs. “I was like, ‘High five to that.’”

Showrunner Nahnatchka Khan remembers when Wu first came in to audition. Khan and the other producers, Melvin Mar and Jake Kasdan, immediately thought Wu was too young to play the mother of three preteen boys. “But when she got into character, she transformed herself,” says Khan. “She was so funny, and she really elevated the mom character and made it her own.”

Park thinks Wu shares a lot of similarities with her character. “She’s a really tough, strong person, and she’s very opinionated, which is very Jessica,” he says. “But also like Jessica, deep down, she’s very warm, and she holds the people she loves really dear.”

Wu has a knack for making Jessica Huang an over-the-top, disciplinarian mother whom you actually cheer for. Despite the character’s stern exterior, Wu always invokes humor and vulnerability, whether Jessica’s micromanaging the employees at Louis’ restaurant, taking the children’s afterschool education into her own hands, chasing down hooligans who have disrespected her husband and hitting them with her car (or as Jessica says, “You hit my car with your bodies”), or pummeling her son Eddie with a stuffed bunny as a lesson against date rape. In short, Wu’s Jessica has the power to deflate Eddie’s straight-A-earning pimp walk with a single disapproving stare, and yet surprise everyone weeks later with a gif-worthy pimp walk of her own.

“In a lesser actress’ hands, the character could be very unlikeable,” says Khan. “But there’s an honesty in her performance, so you always know where Jessica is coming from, even if you don’t agree with her. Constance can also switch gears within a scene and go from being very loving and supportive to angry and sad and make it seem so effortless. So once we realized she had all these levels she could play, we started writing towards that.”

Wu didn’t always have such control over her emotions. “As a kid, I was so emotional, to the point where it was crippling,” she remembers. “When I was around 4, my family used to reward me if I went through one day without crying, because it was a huge accomplishment. I didn’t like that about myself, because it was embarrassing.”

Even now, she sees her sensitivity as a mixed blessing in terms of her work as an actor. She remembers actually breaking down in tears while filming an episode where Jessica is remembering how she never got the Sparkle Time Beauty Horse toy she wanted as a kid, despite how hard she had worked.

“I wasn’t trying to be funny,” she says. She remembers while filming the scene, she kept pressing her knees together, looking down and rubbing her hands really slowly, which is what she does in real life when she’s trying not to cry. “It was just upsetting me so much, and I was like, ‘I can’t cry! This is a comedy!’” She laughs. “Jessica’s not Constance; she’s not going to get super weepy at the steakhouse.”

Wu grew up in Richmond, Virginia, which she describes as a genteel type of Southern city. “Historically, it was the capital of the confederacy, and it has a long tradition of debutante balls,” she says. “But even though they’re conservative, they speak from a point of education, which is really valued. And there was the Southern hospitality and manners. People there were very welcoming and polite.”

A second-generation Taiwanese American, Wu is the third of four daughters. Her father is a biology professor, though she emphasizes that he went into the sciences for passion, not for profit. (“He’s so obsessed with science that he breeds his own orchids and clones them for fun,” she says.) Her mother was a computer programmer, and her sisters are all accomplished. (“They’re all very smart,” she says. “My oldest sister has a J.D., my second oldest sister has a Ph.D. in policy analysis, and my younger sister is getting a Ph.D. in comparative literature.”) It’s no wonder that Wu, who studied at The Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute and graduated from State University of New York Purchase College’s Conservatory of Theatre Arts with a degree in acting, is extremely well-read. References to Franny and Zooey and Hamlet roll off her tongue. She once directed a magical realism short film with puppets called “My Mother Is Not a Fish,” the title being a play on one of the chapters in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. She even spent a summer in a Buddhist monastery in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, because her college self wanted to “go to the woods and live deliberately” like Henry David Thoreau.

When Wu first read the pilot script of Fresh Off the Boat, she actually related to Eddie’s 12-year-old character (played by Hudson Yang), because she remembers trying on different personalities when she was younger to see what fit best: She wanted to be an opera singer. She was a cheerleader for a year. She even went through an emo phase (still in it, she jokes). But once she started performing in plays, she gradually came to believe that acting was her calling, even though she hates it when people overly romanticize the life of a Hollywood actor. “It can be such an ego-driven industry, but in our work, you can’t be afraid to not be the hero and not be a saint,” she says. “It’s the dirty, ugly stuff that gets me going. Being glamorous or pretty or sweet or cool is not even on the table. I don’t even participate in it. It weirds me out, almost.”

In that sense, it must have been a surreal several months since Fresh Off the Boat debuted in February to both critical and ratings success, when Wu quickly went from being a relative unknown (the Logo TV web series Eastsiders may have been her most high-profile credit prior) to a nominee for both the Critics’ Choice Award for Best Actress in a Comedy Series and the Television Critics Association Award for Individual Achievement in Comedy. Now she’s not only having to navigate being recognized by fans but walking red carpets and posing for glamorous photo shoots (the shoot for this story included).

Wu only recently hired a publicist, who is encouraging her to step out of her fashion comfort zone in edgier looks. This past April, pre-publicist, she had gone by herself on a press tour to promote the show’s airing in Taiwan, and she remembers getting off the plane wearing pajamas and glasses, not realizing her hosts would show up wearing suits in 90-degree weather and handing her flowers. She was mortified.

Her fish-out-of-water experience continued, as she remembers feeling a little bit like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation as she did interviews in her American-accented Mandarin and navigated the slightly spastic world of Taiwanese talk shows. (“They do these sound effects live as they’re taping. It’s not done in post-production. There’s a DJ putting in laugh tracks and fart noises as you’re doing the show.”) She remembers a cheesy promo she was asked to shoot where she had to dust a house, look at the camera and say, “Do you know how to be a good mom?” One memorable moment of the tour involved her learning how to make Taiwan’s prized Din Tai Fung soup dumplings, which she realized was a big deal because there were photographs of Tom Cruise doing the same thing in 2013. (“It looked like I was holding two testicles,” she jokes, of having to hold up one soup dumpling in each hand for the cameras. “They were like, ‘Smile!’”)

Though it wasn’t necessarily her style, she went along with it. She figured she was already there, and Wu isn’t one to worry too much about her public image. “There’s this saying that you can’t cheat an honest man,” she says of her philosophy that extends to her sometimes controversial opinions. “But I stand by what I say, and if you conduct yourself to a standard of dignity that you stand behind at all times, then you can’t really slip up.”

This ability to distance herself from press hoopla and Internet chatter was helpful when Fresh Off the Boat, as the first network television show about an Asian American family in over 20 years, struck a nerve within the Asian American community, many of whom had plenty to say — good and bad — about the show almost a year before it premiered, even when all they had seen of it was a three-minute trailer of the pilot.

She found some of the early criticism constructive, but most of it irrelevant: “When I was younger, I was more insecure, but now I can say, ‘Yeah, you know what? You’re right. I could’ve done better. Next time, I’ll do better.’ But other times, I’ll read something and think, ‘This poor person. They’re just bitter and bitchy.’ And you feel sorry for them.

“I honestly think that all of that is deeply rooted in our experiences of shame,” she says, of Fresh Off the Boat’s critics. “Their fear that we were going to be exploiting the very things that other people have made us feel ashamed of and giving them a free pass to hit on these old wounds. I was the yelling [immigrant] mother, and the gut response was that I was going to be a stereotype — even though there are yelling mothers in Italy, Greece, Colombia, everywhere.”

But Wu believes in confronting these false assumptions head-on. “I was talking to a guy friend the other day, and he said when he was a kid, these bullies would make fun of him and call him gay,” she remembers. “And I was like, ‘So? Why is being gay an insult?’ It’s like if someone accuses me of being tall. It’s not true, but I’m not insulted by it. And he was like, ‘It’s different in the South. You don’t know.’ And maybe it is, but the way that we stop that is by not letting it be something that’s insulting.

“In the same way, there are going to be some people who are mad that the character has an accent because, from a Hollywood metric, a Chinese accent is something to be used as humorous fodder,” she continues. “But why are we using their metric? I don’t even dignify that metric with a response. I didn’t exploit the accent. I based my accent purely on character work and the truth of a real person.”

She says sometimes interviewers will ask her to do the accent, but she refuses. “I don’t care if it makes me seem like an asshole,” she says. “It’s not a party trick. I’m not going to do it just to make you giggle. If they want to laugh [at the accent], that’s their business, but I’m not responsible for catering my performance to other people’s idiocy. That’s like kowtowing to the Hollywood metric again, being too PC at the risk of your own authenticity. And if you have to sell out the very colors of yourself to be accepted, then I don’t want to be accepted.”

Before Fresh Off the Boat, Wu admits she didn’t put a lot of thought into the politics of Asian America in the media. She had prided herself in making her own living and not depending on her parents financially after college, so she didn’t have the luxury of being picky about her roles. But nowadays, contributing to the goal of achieving greater representation and more nuanced roles for Asian Americans is a responsibility and opportunity she takes very seriously.

“I’m really interested in supporting talented Asian filmmakers,” she says, though she’s not shy about stating that there are some projects that speak to her and others that don’t. (“I have a very strong sense of what I think is quality, courageous work,” she says.) She recently reached out to a couple filmmakers whose projects were selected for the 2015 Sundance Directors and Screenwriters Labs, including Christopher Makoto Yogi for his feature I Was a Simple Man, and Yung Chang, the critically acclaimed documentary filmmaker (Up the Yangtze) who is working on his first narrative feature, Eggplant. She is also excited about a feature script by writer-director Jennifer Cho Suhr called You and Me Both, which was the recipient of 2015’s Tribeca All Access Grant.

“I’d rather do that kind of movie for free than do a supporting, thankless role in a big budget Hollywood movie,” she says. “So these are the choices I’m trying to make now. That doesn’t mean that I’m only going to do Asian American films, but I’m trying not to take supporting roles. Because I think we should tell Hollywood, ‘No, we’re not just going to be your checklist so you can pat yourself on the back and say you hired an Asian in the second supporting role. I’m going to make you hire me in a leading role. Because we can carry a story, even though you think we can’t. And the only way we’re going to prove that is by not legitimizing their preconceptions.

“Once you’re not trying to cater to this white Hollywood idea of cool, you accept your own level of cool,” she continues. “It’s why Empire is such a success. They’re embracing their own legacy.”

And then comes that glimmer in her eye that seems so Jessica Huang. “Asians have our own level of cool,” says Wu. “We’re good at everything.”

Cue the pimp walk.
Styling by Sarah Kinsumba 
Hair by Derek Yuen, Starworks Group 
Makeup by Tamah, The Wall Group 
Manicure by Kait Mosh 

This story was originally published in our Fall 2015 issue. Get your copy here. 

– See more at: http://audreymagazine.com/audrey-fall-2015-cover-story-constance-wu/#sthash.xTyoCg3t.dpuf

It may be cliché to say that as Asian Americans, we’re often pressured to forgo our more artistic or creative passions for a stable career path. And yet this was even more the case for generations past, who had few role models and their sights set on a better future for their children. But some are finding a newfound freedom after a lifetime of raising families and paying the bills. Here, three stories of Asian American retirees who are using their sunset years to recapture dreams once left to the wayside.

In 1969, Dick Ling, a new immigrant from Taiwan, took the subway to Chicago’s Michigan Avenue carrying two portfolios: one for architecture and one for cartooning. He had crashed on his friend’s dormitory floor the night before, and he was looking for the Playboy corporate headquarters.

Not for what you might think — though he was pleasantly surprised by the gorgeous female receptionists and the artful mosaic of nude women on the wall. He wanted to draw cartoons for the magazine. Growing up in Taiwan, Ling’s dream was to be a cartoonist. He’d get in trouble at school for drawing epic spaceship battles on top of brand-new classroom desks. And he was very inspired by Western-style cartoons, from Bugs Bunny to Disney films, so his father, knowing his son’s passion for American comics, subscribed to Mad magazine — and occasionally Playboy.

Ling imagines the staff at Playboy must have been confused when he showed up unannounced at their offices. “The receptionist looked me up and down and asked, ‘How long have you been in Chicago?’” he remembers. “I said, ‘Second day!’”

The chief editor at the time was nice enough to sit down with him and take a look at his cartoons. Though there wasn’t a position open for a cartoonist, the editor admired his gumption and gave him three people to contact who might be hiring. One actually offered Ling a job as an apprentice at a photo lab, but it only paid $70 a week. Figuring it’d be difficult to survive on that kind of salary, he politely declined.

“To this day, I still wonder what would’ve happened if I had taken that job,” he says. Ling is now 70 years young. He smiles. “Would I even still be alive?”

For the next few decades, Ling would try and forget about cartooning and concentrate on his architecture career. It was what he had studied in school and what was allowing him to stay in America on a student visa. But dreams don’t die so easily. He kept coming back to cartooning, even if he was drawing on the side.

In the 1970s, he developed a comic strip called “The Woks” (later renamed “Potstickers”), which was a Chinese American version of Charles M. Schulz’s “Peanuts,” about a young boy named Chung, his younger siblings, his friends, a dragon and a philosopher named Buddha. He submitted to all the major syndicates in the United States but was met with rejection, as editors politely told him that their audiences weren’t interested. He finally sold it to TransWorld News Service in Washington, D.C., in 1977, but before they could distribute the comic strip, the news agency filed for bankruptcy, and he was never able to resell it.

More than 30 years later, after making a living for his wife and two kids as a licensed architect, Ling has retired and returned to his true love. He is now the editorial cartoonist for Orinda News, a community newspaper in Northern California.

Looking back, does he have any regrets? “Sometimes you take a step that’s right at the time, and you don’t know what the outcome will be until 15 to 20 years later,” he says. “But I think my decision was still correct if I wanted to better myself financially and raise a family. It was the safe route. Becoming a cartoonist during that time was really unknown territory. It would have been too scary.”

If there is still some truth to the cliché that Asian American youth are often discouraged from pursuing the arts and pressured into stable careers like medicine, law or engineering, imagine what it was like 40 years ago.

“At that time, we were taught that we have to bring pride to the family, especially the elders in our home country,” Ling says. “And I think that’s a very heavy burden. If you want to excel at the arts, you have to give 100 percent and be fearless, but sometimes that means you can’t be as responsible.” He shrugs. “Some people might think it’s sad that I decided to get the steady paycheck, but that’s the choice I made.”

It wasn’t just the traditional cultural pressures that were prevalent in that generation of Asian Americans. The landscape of the time period was entirely different as well. Sure, in the early ’60s, there was the groundbreaking film Flower Drum Song, an Asian American musical starring Nancy Kwan and James Shigeta, but it was also the era where Mickey Rooney’s bucktoothed yellowface portrayal of Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s was seen as a laugh riot. Most Asians in the media were still depicted as villains, laundromat owners or untrustworthy foreigners. Bruce Lee wouldn’t emerge as a star until the early 1970s.

So there may have been glimpses of the American Dream, but when it came to the arts, lack of support (Ling didn’t know any other Asian American comic artists at the time) and lingering anti-immigrant sentiment suggested that your average paying American wasn’t interested in Asian American stories. And even if there were Asian American talents, it would have been extremely rare for one to be able to make a decent living at it.

“I was lucky if I got one acting job every six months,” Stephen Woo remembers, back in the 1970s when he was trying to make it as an actor. Woo grew up in California on movie sets, introduced to the entertainment industry by his uncle, actor Walter Soo Hoo. Stephen worked as an extra to make money through college, mostly in war movies or films with Chinatown scenes, though when he started pursuing acting more seriously, he was constantly frustrated with the limited and stereotypical roles that were available.

“My agents would send me out on these auditions for kung fu masters and Chinatown bandits,” he says, “and I’d think, ‘I’m not going to get this. Why can’t I just play a normal person?’”

While he was still struggling to make ends meet, he fell in love with his future wife, Barbara, who told him that she’d only marry him if he got a “real job.” So he gave up his SAG card, started a business in marketing and telecommunications, raised two beautiful daughters and didn’t look back — until he retired.

In 2014, he decided to give it another shot, just for fun. But this time, he’d include his wife in the process. “I started using all my marketing and sales skills to market us as a husband-wife acting team with 2Woos.com,” he says. Within a week of Barbara retiring, they had a Skype audition for the reality program Freakshow and booked the gig. Soon, the 60-something duo found themselves filming a scene in Venice as a suburban couple who is invited over to their neighbor’s house to meet a bunch of “freaks,” including the tallest man in the world, the shortest woman in the world, a red-bearded woman, a man who’s in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the most body piercings, and a performer who can swallow 27 swords at one time.

“It’s an irresistible industry,” says Barbara, who grew up in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, and loved musicals as a kid (and was even in a high school production of Flower Drum Song). But she never, ever imagined herself as an actress. Now she loves it.