Celebrating Asian-American Voices & Stories | The Daily Show

[Music] it's a beautiful film you know and people love disney movies but it's also like the timing of who the movie is about you know right now the asian community in america is facing one of its toughest times where hate crimes are just skyrocketing many you know prominent asians in hollywood saying hey we need to fight against this everybody needs to step up and i've seen people on social media saying let's work together to do this what do you think the significance of a movie like this is for kids and for people who just watch movies and might have a subconscious understanding of what they're seeing exactly what you said you know when you make a movie like this you cannot control the environment in which it's going to be released in you've absolutely no idea what kind of world you're releasing into so to be able to be a part of this movie right now when the news is a a con like you know because i'm lurking lurking on the internet it's a constant barrage of attack after attack and i know for me like i just really hope that this is a moment where we can come together as a community and really recognize the pride and the joy that comes with celebrating where we're from you know we live in a world telling us we need to be afraid and we need to hide and we have to be ashamed and to be part of this movie that is so clearly celebrating instead of hiding feels like such a proud moment for me and um i hope that it's one that the community can celebrate i am not a young asian girl spoiler alert i know but i found that i wasn't alone in connecting with the story in this film it really is a love story that brings back everything we associate with high school and life and maybe even things we deal with today in society do you think the movie did justice to the book i think so um i hope so i feel like the book is all about that kind of warmth and being cozy at home and being with your friends and family and first love and i think the movie does capture that right you you chose to be a part of the story and that was one of the conditions and included in that is you said you wanted lara jean's character to be played by an asian girl because that's who was in the book why was that so important to you you know that's part of why it took so long to get made because people didn't understand why that was important and for me it was like that was what her spirit was was that she was asian american and it didn't have anything to do with the plot which is why people were confused because they were like well you know as long as the actor can you know get the spirit across then it's you don't care about age or race and i was like but her spirit is asian so it's important right and um you know it's really about it's not her whole identity but it's like a part of her identity a lot of the time people think that you know inclusion in stories is about just telling the stories of the color of the people in the movie and so when studio executive said to you oh but she doesn't have to be asian because she's not doing asian things you felt like it was about more than that i mean i've never seen a movie um a teen movie very few romantic comedies even where the lead was asian so to me i wanted teenage girls to have that experience right that i never got to have welcome to the show thanks for having me i'm a big fan of yours from uh silicon valley and now thank you thank you thank you now you've got the book and you've got uh crazy rich asians which is coming out too much fanfare people are really excited about this can you feel the buzz as well i've been feeling it for the last like three weeks we've been on this press tour yeah and and it's crazy they're actually spending money on us which is which is amazing like like we they sent out three teams each of us hit like three different cities and the reactions from each city is amazing you got the really heavy asian populated cities you know like say boston new york we expected a good turnout from them but then when we went to like dallas and people still loved it and i barely saw any asian people in the audience it was white people black people it's just such a universally fun movie to watch right that i'm just so grateful to see everybody enjoying it it's really doing well it has like what 94 on rotten tomatoes yeah everyone is enjoying the cultural significance of the film it's funny because ronnie chang is on the show is also in the movie and when he came to me to tell me that like they wanted him in the movie he like really undersold he's like hey man so i might need to leave the show for a few months to go do this movie i think it might be a little bit big for like you know asian the asian community and he saw that like it was going to be like a little indie movie in the middle of nowhere and then i saw this come on i was like ronnie this is major this is huge and it really is because for 25 years we have not seen a hollywood movie with a full asian cost that's a pretty big deal since joy luck club and i think going in i mean ronnie probably wasn't underselling like because we didn't know we intellectualized it like we understood it's important it's uh you know statistically 25 years first studio movie but we didn't feel how special it was until we got to singapore when you got like the most beautiful talented funniest asian people from all over the world yeah you got asian americans asian british asian australians from everywhere you know uh irani asian malaysian right like which sounds amazing by the way asian malaysia asian malaysian asian malaysian i'm gonna start calling them in the office and i'm gonna get a lawsuit the uh the movie is also great that's what i enjoy is you know like oftentimes when people talk about diversity people always make it seem like it's charity but it's a great story and you play a character who like seems like the most fun ever is it true that you you also try to go for the lead like the really good-looking handsome lead thanks for putting it that way um yes when i first got the script not every day you get a script that's crazy rich asians with a full asian cast so i talked to my manager i picked up the phone right away i'm like guys i know i'm usually the funny guy you know like like the character actor but let me this is an important movie let me try out for the leading role right okay and then my manager was like look jimmy i don't know how to tell you this properly but um they're looking for a good looking guy for this role and uh you know here i am here i am so uh yeah but you but you you crush it in the movie because you play like a versace wearing mad potty animal oh it's awesome it's awesome to play that guy because you get to go as big as possible so just fill the screen with any energy you have kind of pent up inside yeah because i think normally as as functional members of society you can't just act crazy but but with a character like that with billions of dollars and he doesn't care about anything right he lives his life like as if it's lawless so it's just so fun and freeing to play somebody like that you also have a cost that is all asian but at the same time really diverse and don't get me wrong i mean i'm not saying it covers every single aspect of asian culture but it is interesting that you said so many people come from so many different walks of life when you're on on set did you feel that because i remember when black panther was happening people were talking about how this the set felt different it was a new experience was it similar on crazy rich asians there was some kind of magic when we were all just hanging out you know eating dinner i didn't have to explain oh let's go to a chinese restaurant it's like authentic but like not that exotic you can handle it you know we were all just so much on the same page we all just love the same kind of food we all say karaoke every night it was great you haven't lived until you seen ronnie chang sing backstreet boys it's amazing man you were just giving me ammunition on running tanks non-stop let's talk a little bit about the book as well because um i i love how your book talks about your journey in america how to american an immigrant's guide to disappointing your parents um it really is a universal story that is all about yourself becoming an american citizen and the journey that you went on why why do you think it's really been as difficult as it has been for you to understand the difference or the difficulty in duality being an american right but then also being asian and staying true to your roots i moved here when i was 13 from hong kong 13 is probably a tough age for anyone finding themselves but i was in a new country with a new language i couldn't really speak english very well and also one of the hardest things aside from just making friends in school was dealing with the pressure from your parents the expectations of growing up asian right and they value um obedience they they they value finding a real job right like i'm obviously not doing right but but in american culture it's the complete opposite we value independence and and we value pursuing your dreams whereas my dad ever since i was little has told me that pursuing your dreams how you become homeless so how do you which one do i pick and how do i go about doing this when i started doing stand-up like my dad thought i was crazy he doesn't he doesn't know what stand-up was right we never watched stand-up in hong kong you know my first stand-up like that i watched was bet comic view when i came here right and that was like a cultural experience yeah i can only imagine it wasn't just jokes it was like about culture like when they were talking about why people do this black people do that i didn't know any of those stereotypes right but that was like broad strokes of america that i learned from tv and watching these comedians which is in a way culture tellers right that's why i became really interested in doing stand-up and my dad still till today calls it a talk show which i guess i'm doing now so it's fine i'm actually doing a talk show you have a great book with a great story congratulations on the film you talk about your success the grind that came behind it but then you talk about like just the experiences that you've had where where someone you know many people in fact tried to reduce you to just you know your your fact so they went like oh you're getting you're successful just because you're asian just because even now just because you're pregnant there's so many there was a guy who i i won't name names he's not a very successful comedian so i don't even know if you would know who he was but he came up to he you wouldn't know you're you're out of there now uh but he like came up to me while i was pregnant the second time and he touched my belly with his like fat sweaty hand which is so gross to begin with it's like it's like why don't you finger me while you're at it this is so not okay like just because i'm pregnant doesn't mean it's okay for you to touch my belly and he was like oh so this is your shtick this is like your thing now right and i'm like i was like getting pregnant is not rainbow suspenders it's not a stick and then he was like you're so lucky ally because you get all of this attention because you're both a female and a minority and i was like yeah because you know historically that's always been the winning combo for recognition and success and he was like and he was like you know what i mean like me i'm just another white guy and i was like be a better white guy there's so many successful there's like there's jimmy kimmel there's will ferrell there's nick crow there's john mulaney i can name like i could go on this whole show for like 35 days we'll do like maybe successful white comedians just be a funnier white guy this netflix series has started off with the bang people are loving it why the title ugly delicious well as you saw in that clip i grew up eating really well my mom cooked a lot of korean things and growing up in northern virginia it wasn't that cool in fact i was like the butt of many jokes so when i started cooking professionally those were the foods that i never wanted to touch because i was ashamed of it or just wow didn't want to like embrace it and that sort of encapsulates a lot of the foods that i think are truly delicious but nina may not be cool or is uh looks good on a photograph something right like a curry is a perfect example of curry is so good but isn't something that's going to be on the cover of a magazine and for you growing up your food was a part of your culture but it was also something that people used to tease you about do you think that that's that's a big part of food is the cultural identity that comes with it absolutely because we're at a not a crossroads but food is pop more popular than ever before and it sort of intersects so many different parts of culture throughout the world right so in so many ways you know creating the show with morgan neville and eddie schmidt we decided that food could be sort of a trojan horse to talk about many of the great things in culture and many of the bad things in culture right like for instance with um chinese food there's an episode where you delve into chinese food and it feels like it's less about the chinese food itself and about how chinese people in america have had to assimilate and what what that means and how the food has had to assimilate in many ways to fit in with american culture what like what did you learn in that experience when looking at chinese food on its own in america i mean it goes all the way back to when they came to work on the railroads and how they were marginalized way back then in the 1890s or so and without getting too much in the history i feel like as delicious as chinese food is and it's like the most prevalent kind of food throughout the world it seems uh it's never been seen as like as cool as other european cuisines right and quite frankly i think that there's been a lot of sort of hidden racism in how people perceive not just chinese food like basically anything that's like different than the mainstream america right you see that with msg or how people see like cheap meats in asian restaurants chinese restaurants and a lot of that's not true right they're just you know not even misperceptions they're just wrong right it's interesting that you bring up racism with regards to food because those are stereotypes that you see you know rearing their ugly heads all over the world you know people go oh watermelon black people and chicken black people and they'll be like oh you eat this type of food if you're asian and you eat this there are certain ideas that come from food there are certain stories that are told by the food there's an episode where you talk about fried chicken and what i loved is in the story you know you're out in the south you're meeting with people who cook fried chicken white people who make fried chicken did you find that it was interesting to speak to people about where the chicken came from how it came to be popularized and how they saw the story as it related to the food absolutely and i think first and foremost about fried chicken it's a story that you know a lot of people don't know about everyone i think that eats chicken will find it to be a fried chicken to be delicious right again the world over almost but the story of how it was born out of oppression and slavery for the most part the fried chicken that we all most are commonly associated with that's a really tough story to tell right and if we can't talk about fried chicken how are we supposed to talk about other things that are problematic right right so um and going back to the sort of the popularity of fried chicken shops there's a scene where i'm talking to my friends really and questioning them the same questions i'd ask answer myself and the reality is it's like it's a it's a responsibility that i think today in 2018 that we should know more about and we should talk about and it's uh it's not easy to talk about right i mean i think you have to watch the episode because i think we're not trying to answer anything we're just trying to start the conversation about that because it's just too dense of a topic do you feel like that's something people could do like at restaurants like the waiter should have to tell you about the history of the food when they give it to you so you should be like what are you going to have i'll have the fried chicken let me tell you about slavery and oppression like this chicken over here comes from a long history of people being oppressed and you're like i'm going to go with the rice can i go to rice no it's not about that i mean certainly it could be but we live in a world where there's so much information at your fingertips like why not go down that rabbit right just a little bit and you know there's a scene in in that fried chicken episode where it's not about fried chicken where i say to david simon great director of the wire where i'm like hey i would have a problem with someone that's not korean starts making kimchi right and he sort of smacks me down being like you're an idiot right like america is about cultural appropriation when it's done like very well if that makes any sense and i thought about that and i was like man he's absolutely right in the sense that the only way i'm going to get this person that's making kimchi to appreciate kimchi is to let them go down the rabbit hole right right and maybe they're going to be the biggest advocate of it but if i'm there judging them saying like you can't do this right then i'm not making any progress there so i feel the same way about fried chicken and i think that i could have been that that fried chicken shop down in nashville because i love hot fried chicken so much of course the first thing you want to do is pay homage but it's a problem sometimes right it's a what happens if you start killing the very thing that inspired you you grew up as a child who was adopted uh you were raised by white parents who loved you to the ends of the earth but in this book you talk about something that many people struggle with every day and that is the relationship of being a child who is adopted who is living in a trans-racial household why is that so difficult i think um it's just difficult i think given that a lot of the first of all a lot of people go into adoption not necessarily fully prepared to talk about race uh which is of course crucial in a transracial adoption right you know like my parents for example went in and they asked a lot of questions of a lot of different experts social workers and judges and adoption attorneys and they were basically told don't worry about it you know it's going to be okay no matter what um you don't really have to talk about this it's not going to be relevant and of course it very much was right because you read it in the book and you write about how you had this experience where your parents didn't talk to you about race at all it was just ignored completely it's never mentioned and many people would agree with that they would say but yes why why should your parents talk to you about race nicole because they don't see you as a color they're seeing you as you call their daughter so why why do you think it would have been necessary or should be necessary for people to speak to their kids about race if they've adopted them it's completely natural in a way for parents of course it doesn't affect like their love for their child i wasn't like my parents didn't think of me as their korean child or their adopted child i was just their child um i think what none of us really knew how to talk about so much especially when i was young was the fact that of course even if it didn't matter to them it was going to matter a great deal to me in my life it was going to matter other people wouldn't notice they would comment um and i think also none of us are really prepared for all the questions that we got you know moving about in the world because we kind of stood out in my hometown right right so often when i got those questions i wasn't really sure like what to say because in my life at home it wasn't really acknowledged or spoken about your book takes us through such a painful exciting loving wonderful journey where you begin to explore who you are and you have that yearning to find out the rest of your story and and that in of itself i mean you described in such detail is is scary but at the same time really exciting why do you think it was so important for you to want to find who your biological parents were where you had these parents who loved you so much i had thought about it for many years and really for me what was the final push was when i became pregnant with my first child up until that point i i thought of course about what it would feel like to have a child and to share my life and my history with them but i hadn't really thought about how being adopted would affect them like what questions they might have and i remember so vividly sitting like at my first prenatal appointment getting all these questions about my medical history and like what my birth mother's pregnancy and her births were like and i had no answers and i suddenly just felt like this deep sense of fear and inadequacy that this was information i needed to have that my children might need to have so that was really the final push you went out you searched and you found your answers um i don't want to give away a lot of the book but but there is a beautiful connection that you made with a sibling who you discovered uh your your sister i believe you have two right and a half sister and a full sister as you call them in the book but but you're very close to to your sister that is that is a really interesting relationship to have somebody who has been a stranger your whole life and let you you feel like you've known them forever yes she's an amazing person and a lot of this book really it's her story as well as mine um you kind of get both stories on a parallel parallel tracks and then they intersect when we finally meet and find out about each other um and she's just an amazing person i feel so lucky to have her in my life um my kids have always just known her because like we connected the same month that i gave birth um but it's been interesting to talk with them about it just in terms of like they kind of take it for granted that like she's there that we're together that we have this family and these relationships we've recovered um but really we had to do a lot of work and it took a lot of effort and a lot of heartache to put our family back together in this way so it's not something i'll ever take for granted it's a story about a character willis wu who is a man who just dreams of making it big on the big screen right and what's what's what's beautiful and what resonates in the book is it talks about the challenges that he faces and so many asian americans and asians in america have faced with being represented on screen in a way that is not boiled down to stereotypes right yeah i mean it's um his dream so will to willis's story is basically that he his job is to be generic asian man on a show called black and white and um so you know everyone's seen law and order right and you have the two leads in the front and they're discussing the case and way in the back pretty much out of focus is like an asian guy unloading a van right i was like what if you told the story from that guy's point of view in the law and order universe universe right and and i and i started get interested in this world and exploring the world because the view from the bottom looks different than the view from where the leads are standing it really is powerful because you you talk about in this book one man's journey but but really a lot of this book deals with how asians have been pushed to the side in america and a lot of storytelling you know some some people have argued though that that asians have it good though because they go like oh at least asian people have the model minority thing to them so they're seen as less threatening and they're given more opportunities but but you have a different view on that idea yeah i absolutely i think you know the model minority is just sort of the age-old strategy of divide you know divide and conquer and holding one group up justifies holding a group apart and it's not just your sort of saying asians have it good you're kind of showing the other groups you could do it too right right right and also the fact is there are plenty of asians who have not succeeded you know there are the characters in this book are struggling economically they're struggling to assimilate culturally and i that's a story that we don't see as often we see in the media stories about asian success asian american success but not always this story in this book is um is a character who dreams of just getting to play the lead in a kung fu film that's that's what he's dreaming of doing interestingly enough though and i mean i get why the character's doing it that's one of the things that you say like always broke your heart in the smallest way when you'd be watching tv with your family is you'd look up when you see an asian person on screen you'll be like wow that's amazing and then they would always be distilled into like a few categories like why do you think that that affected you so much especially with your children right yeah i mean that it's exactly what's happening now is that i'm a dad and i'm my kids are old enough that we watch stories together and sort of i had made peace with being you know watching asians on the side but now they're old enough that i have to turn and explain to them you know why is that guy doing a funny accent you know or why is that person squinting their eyes and playing an asian on tv and you know there has been a lot of progress we see stories about asians but we still don't see enough and we don't i i don't i wanted to be able to you know explain to them so i had to kind of work through it in this book and you know for instance i was recently watching the golden globes and i watched aquafina get that award and my daughter was sitting next to me and it was like i felt uplifted and so did she i could see in her eyes that this was something that we'd both remember and at the same time we see things on tv where you sort of can't believe that that's still on tv right you're 20 20. 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Channel: The Daily Show with Trevor Noah

Views: 766,716

Rating: 4.9103665 out of 5

Keywords: the daily show, trevor noah, daily show with trevor noah, the daily show episodes, comedy central, comedians, comedian, funny video, comedy videos, funny clips, noah trevor, trevor noah latest episode, daily show, trevor, news, politics, daily show trump, asian american, asian, aapi, stop asian hate, stop aapi hate, atlanta, atlanta shooting, asian voices, kelly marie tran, raya the last dragon, aliali wong, david chang, jenny han, nicole chung, charles yu, jimmy o yang

Id: kWi8wo74BBM

Length: 24min 42sec (1482 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 29 2021