Su-chin Pak Quotes

The fact that I am a Filipino actor playing a Filipino role is crazy. Filipinos are the second largest Asian minority in the United States, and we're hardly represented in the media and on television.

I was very conscious of the world being this very crazed place that demanded explanation. I didn't see a whole lot of people who looked like me doing it on television.

More Asians need to be on television as a positive role model.

It used to be, on TV, you'd see only two types of Asians. You'd see the science geek who's using his mobile phone or something like that, or you'd see a very token Asian family - yuppie mother and father and two little Asian kids. It's the last barrier for Hollywood.

I know when I was growing up in New York, whenever I turned on the television, I never saw a face that looked like me. Whenever there was an Asian person on television, it would be a huge event, me calling to my older sister 'There's an Asian person on television!' It was unheard of back then.

Every year, Hollywood is looking for that new, white leading man and new white starlet that audiences fall in love with. But they're not looking for the next Denzel Washington, Will Smith or Sidney Poitier.

I go to castings and see several black and Asian girls, then I get to the show and look around there's just me and maybe one other coloured face.

There's a burden of representation that comes into play when there aren't enough representatives of a certain group in popular culture.

When I was a little girl, there was no Variety Latino. When I was a little girl, there was no nothing. There were very few roles for people like myself.

Asians narratively in shows are insignificant. They're the cop or the waitress or whatever it is. You see them in the background.

Point-blank, there is not enough diversity in media.

The way Hollywood and TV is, black people don't have any choice but to see ourselves in white-dominated television shows and stories and movies.

In Germany, you have to see that there are not a lot of black people in the media. I am a tiny bit of colour on German TV and there are a lot of kids who write to me.

Growing up, usually when I saw a black female on television, she was either a broken character or sidekick.

Just speaking for myself, when I'm complimented for being Vietnamese-American in television - the only one - that doesn't make me feel happy, that makes me feel really lonely, actually.

The argument has been made that smart women on screen are already enough of a minority to make up for the lack of women of color. Nope. Not good enough.

For me, personally, I didn't see many people like me on TV growing up.

You rarely see a Filipino family on TV.

If you were to turn on the TV in 1986, '87, you wouldn't see anybody having, I guess, a low-to-middle-income person of color experience. And you definitely wouldn't have a young LGBT person or their story told. The experience of being invisible in our culture has ramifications that I don't think any of us can really understand.

'Formation' and 'Lemonade' speak to experiences that are too under-represented in our culture. But there are costs to certain forms of visibility. I don't think it is a bad thing to discuss what these costs are.

It's not unusual for me to find that I'm the only female journalist of color in the front row during some of the briefings.

I grew up figure skating, and in figure skating there is only a handful of black people at the time figure skating with me.

I'm curious when I look across the dial Monday through Friday, you know, where are the other female black anchors?

Young Black actresses were not necessarily given the space in Hollywood to fully see ourselves.

Even if you look at 'American Idol,' or 'X-Factor,' or 'The Voice' or anything, it was always difficult to see an Asian or an Asian-American make it to a certain point.