School of Drama ’13
MFA Playwriting ’13, School of Drama
What are you working on now?
Right now, I am working on a handful of things, including a movie that my friend wrote. It’s an adaptation of a book called Crying in H Mart. I’m producing that with Stacey Sher, and it’s been a complete joy. I really love that book, and I’m excited for people to see the movie. Then, in TV, I have a couple of projects that I’m writing, which I’m not quite ready to announce yet, but I’m doing that with a new network called Onyx, which is a part of Hulu and the studio 20th Century Fox. So that’s been really lovely as well.
When you started your program, what did you think you would be doing?
I thought that I would only write tiny two-hander plays that maybe five people would see, if I was lucky. I never thought that I would be a writer full-time, so the idea that this is my profession is actually really absurd in a way to me, if I think about it, and it certainly would have been almost obscene when I was still in school to think about. I really thought I would just be a playwright.
When I was attending grad school, I had a job working for the two showrunners of the third season of In Treatment, a show on HBO. They were instrumental in opening doors for me as I was graduating. They gave me my first writing job and taught me everything there is to know about production and screenwriting, and I just got superlucky. I just lucked into having great bosses-slash-mentors, basically.
What was a new way of learning that you experienced at The New School?
I came from a very academic background before I started at The New School, so the idea that you would have to mine your own experiences and feelings and fears to be able to write something was really foreign to me. I walked into the program thinking that it would be more of an intellectual endeavor than an emotional or psychological endeavor. By the time I left, I was just crying every day—in a good way.
I loved working with Laura Maria Censabella. She taught me my first year, and I think she really saw something in me and pushed me to go there. After her, I studied with Christopher Shinn, whose work I was a giant, giant fan of. He really trained me in how to think about plays and writing.
How did that change your way forward?
I now think of writing as something that involves every aspect of you. Before I thought it just involved your brain and your fingers, but it’s something that involves, I think, the entirety of yourself, and that was a lesson that I didn’t quite even know until I left school.
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
I really hope to be opening doors for people. One of the most pleasurable things about having been in this business now for, I guess, a decade, is that I’ve come to recognize young people who are just like me. It’s been really lovely to meet them and open doors and also see what’s possible for the future, especially for Asian American writers, because we’re few and far between. In a way, that was the only reason why I have a career—because people gave back to me—and so that cycle has to continue.
How do you want to leave your mark on the world?
I hope to leave behind some words that somebody could read in the future and feel something about and really question their prejudices and what they had in mind coming into it. If I could do that for one person or even a handful of people, that would be a dream.