For network TV, you obviously have to appeal to a wide viewership.

People really liked my dad.

My father was a small business owner. When I was growing up, he ran a one-hour photo store - back when there were one-hour photo stores.

I'm not a big steak guy.

When you write a memoir, and it's your life, and you're exposing things that are close to home, it's hard to see it changed.

One of the first jobs I did was a commercial, a local commercial on the Chinese channel here in Los Angeles, and the whole thing was in Cantonese, I think, and I didn't have any lines, but I was kind of the focus of the commercial.

Early on, when I first started acting professionally, it was really important for me to get my parents on board, because they were so against it.

There were so few examples of Asian or Asian-American lead characters on American TV or even in the movies. And the ones that have existed for so long were either stereotypical or offensive in some way, or just not reflective of the lives of people in the community.

I remember, as a kid, I loved kimchi. It wasn't weird to me at all because it was in our house all the time. There was never a second when a huge jar wasn't in our refrigerator. I remember bringing it to school, and that just did not go over well at all.

I ended up going into the Master's program for Asian-American studies at UCLA, in part because I was passionate about it, but also because I wanted to keep acting in the theater group that we founded.