Bryan Eng Interview

1. What is your name and your profession(s)?

My name is Bryan Eng, and I'm a musician and an actor (but lately, mostly just a musician).

2. What is your ethnic background and what is your citizenship?

My ethnic background is I'm Chinese American. U.S. citizen; half Cantonese, half Mandarin.

3. Are either/both of your parents musicians or somehow involved in the music industry?

My parents are not musicians and they are not in the industry, but they do enjoy music. They went to maybe a few concerts growing up, but they're not super musical.

4. Please tell us a little bit about your experience, either growing up as an AAPI in America, or as a person of Asian descent who immigrated to America, whichever applies.

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5. How connected do you feel to your heritage/culture(s)?

I’m going to merge questions 4 & 5 as they seem related.

I grew up in a primarily white, Jewish area. There were some people of color, I guess; it's not like there weren't other Asians. I was friends with a bunch of Asians. Growing up, the most connected I was to my culture was through my grandparents because I'm a few generations from immigrating here. My grandma was born here actually in the US, so that makes me third or fourth generation on that side. My other grandparent was born in China and my other ones were too, but my dad was also technically adopted from Hong Kong. Even though he was adopted by Chinese parents who lived in the US… so you see, it's kind of gets a little bit confusing, but I'd say in ways that I feel like culturally impacted and socialized, I do feel like third generation, kind of like one more generation than a lot of my friends were.

My parents don't have an accent. In fact, they don't even really have the ability to speak Chinese. We've been here for a bit, which definitely impacted my experience growing up, because I still look completely Chinese and I am by blood 100% Chinese, but culturally, socially, I felt so much more Americanized.

At some points kind of growing up, I was even embarrassed or ashamed of my cultural identity because I looked a certain way, but didn't want to be judged to be that certain way, so it kind of deepened my connection to American culture. I ended up having a lot more white friends and Asian friends, which was different than my twin sister and older brother, who were my Asian friends.

This kind of has to do with me getting into music and art, in particular acting and theater, as there weren't a lot of Asians doing that. So, I just got closer and closer to this idea of being kind of American or white specifically… you know, it's not just American, it's white. Even in the theater world, I would say that's so deeply ingrained and connected to being culturally American and white—it's pop culture. We were performing musicals that were written by white people, for white people. This continued to shape not just my musicality, but my connection to white culture, even in the way that I started to try and speak and the accent that I inflected, and it all comes from my upbringing of kind of rejecting my culture because it brought me stereotypical racist comments and the like.

I kind of had this realization recently with one of my friends that kind of the things that I strive for now, for better or for worse are my ways of overcoming the racist things that were said to me—now I'm chasing proof that I am not what they said. I can achieve the things they said I couldn't achieve; I can get, I can obtain. In the back of my mind I hear myself saying, “You can do this, you can't do that”. I'm going to show you what I can do. Now, I've been getting a lot more connected to my culture. You know, I have a good friend, Amy Tan, and she's encouraged me greatly to pursue those stories from my grandparents and my parents, to understand them and understand why they came here as well as the sacrifices they made for me to even reject the culture. My grandma passed away a year ago at 101 years old, and she was my last surviving grandparent. There was a lot of cultural artwork and memorabilia and things that she had in her home that we kind of all split up, so now I have a lot more of that in my apartment. It makes me very, very happy to have the oriental rugs and calligraphy on the walls and everything else like that because it reminds me of where I'm from.

The more I pursue the stories of my grandma and understand the sacrifices that were made on both sides of my family, for them to come here, the the great success they had to achieve in China to be given the opportunity to come here … like my grandpa took that test in China. I can't remember what decade this was now, but he got top five in all of China. Everyone takes this test, so he got a full ride anywhere in the US he wanted to go and that's how he came to the US. SNow I’m starting to understand the shoulders that I stand upon, which is something that I didn't care about as a kid.

I think a lot of it's just maturity too. As I get older, I think “Can you believe what these people did for someone that they would barely ever get to know?” I don't know, it's just within us—I guess it's a cultural thing, but it's a human thing to me that always says the whole point is to make it better for the next generation of our family.

I feel like the great recipient of serious sacrifice. Now I feel so spoiled in many ways, I really do. That's kind of why I've been getting more connected to the culture, is to understand why, how I got these opportunities. I think the more I can contextualize why I got these opportunities, the more that I can create the opportunities for the next generation, my kids, but also all the Asian Americans …I think it's important to, to help them out because I wouldn't have gotten here without the people who came before me who were deeply connected to their culture. If I reject that culture, I will reject the next generation of people who look and come from backgrounds like me. I guess I'm getting a little bit more mature, but I'm not perfect.

I'm 27, so I'm still worried about my own future and my own family. That kind of occupies most of my brain space day to day, but my great big why comes from my grandma. What was her "Why?" How can I continue that tradition for the next generation of Asian Americans who maybe are rejecting of their own culture because society and people who don't look like them are telling them that they look weird and they can't do this well… then they can point at me and say, well, “Bryan did it and I look like him, so I guess I can do it”.

6. 6a.) How did you get into music? Did you major in music in college? Where did you attend college/university (and grad school(s), if applicable) and in what subjects did you get your degree(s)?

6b.) When and how did you decide you were going to pursue music professionally? What were your parents’ reactions to you deciding to pursue music? Do they support your music career now?

I got into music at a really, really young age. People always ask me when I started singing, and my answer is always, “I have no memory of starting singing because I feel like I learned it in tandem with learning English”( the only language I know). I truly have always done it and don't know life without it which is kind of a beautiful thing. Now, I got into piano a little later, maybe six or seven years old. I started taking classical lessons. All of us kids were doing it at the time. I really didn't like it, to be honest. I didn't practice enough. I would cram beforehand and I had enough talent to get by on that when I was young enough. I ended up quitting by probably somewhere in middle school when my parents just didn't want to invest anymore in lessons if I wasn't going to practice. I was so into sports at the time and around middle school.

Sixth grade is when I got into acting and theater.  I was also playing a lot of sports; soccer and golf were my two main ones. My brother was more of an athlete than me. I would see him doing sports, so I wanted to do them too, but the bug really bit me in middle school, and by high school, I had quit sports entirely. Acting and musical theater were my real loves at the time. I got super into Broadway shows and I was lucky that my parents would take me up to see a lot of them in New York, and we would see a lot of regional shows in the DC area. My love for performance just grew and grew.

All the while, I was still singing in church every once in a while, and that was where I really started music in a more organized setting. My mom had a twin sister and I grew up singing in the children's choir together. Growing up, I was doing all kinds of arts. It was singing in church, singing at school, singing in the chorus, playing in the orchestra at school. Once I got to middle school, dancing in the school talent show, I was really into hip hop at the time and breakdancing and that continued all the while. Then, like I said, by high school, I really distilled it. I was like, “You know, what I really want to do is musical theater and acting in plays”. So I really started pursuing that, and it was around that time that I came to realize that some people did this for a profession… this was something you could really do for your life. Once that became something that was in my mind around freshman year of high school, I knew that's all I wanted to do.

Now, like I mentioned earlier, my parents didn't come from this industry. So while they thought that I was talented themselves, they also were smart enough to know that their opinion was biased and not informed necessarily. So, um, the most important thing was that they heard it from other people, and fortunately, I was very, very talented as a kid. A lot of people were telling my friends, “Oh my God, amazing singing”. My mom would always tell us how people would cry when we sang in church and stuff, but at the time, I took it for granted. I still do, I'm not going to lie. I'm not really big on the accolades thing… I can unpack that with my therapist who I don't have.

I wasn't playing piano at this point. Now, what happened was I had a really great voice teacher, and he was one of my great, early influences. Now, during our voice lessons, we would play the piano. When he was teaching me voice he could sight read all this music to accompany himself, and I at the time thought that was an incredible superpower—something that I just thought, “Wow, if I could ever do that would be amazing”.

The reason I wanted to do that was so that I could hear the piano part to the audition cuts before I went into the room, because I was auditioning professionally by the time I got to high school, uh, for regional shows. And I would go to these auditions at these regional theaters, and you'd give the accompanist your music, and they'd play it for you, and you'd sing, and you get one part. There's no rehearsal. I was amazed by the fact that some people could receive a piece of music they, in theory, might have never seen before, and play it for the audition on their first try and I wanted that skill. So, I asked my voice teacher how to do that, and he told me to take jazz piano lessons. I had already taken many years of classical music, so I was familiar with the piano, but I'd never heard of jazz—this was my junior year of high school. I say, “Okay, I'm going to try that” and I started taking private lessons in jazz; lo and behold, this jazz teacher started to expose me to Count Basie and Jobim and Sinatra… the list goes on and on and on. I fell in love with that style of music. I had never heard it before and it was like, whoa, what is this world that is being opened to me? This is something really beautiful.

All the while, I didn't lose my love for theater, so I kept doing that and the jazz thing was kind of more of a hobby. I ended up deciding, you know, I want to do theater as a profession. And my parents were like, “We're still Asian parents, even though we're third generation, so we're going to let you do it under one condition, which is you have to get into one of the top three schools in the country for it”. They did this just because they didn't trust their own opinions. Why send me to blah, blah, blah school for so much money a year if anyone can get in there? They wanted evidence from industry professionals and experts to corroborate their feeling that I was worth.

Now, what happened was I boiled down the three schools and it was going to be. At this point, I didn't even want to go for musical theater. Ironically, it was my voice teacher who told me, you should go for just straight acting… no singing, just straight acting, because people are more interested in actors who can sing and singers who can act. I'll pause there and let you unpack what that means. Anyway, I trusted this guy a lot as he gave me he told me to jazz piano lessons, and he changed my voice a lot, too. Anyway, I decided the top three acting schools for straight acting were going to be Juilliard, Carnegie Mellon, and University of North Carolina School of the Arts. After further research, I decided, “You know what? My parents are right? I don't even want to go to other schools. In fact, I don't even want to go to UNSCA”.

I ended up only applying to two schools for acting that I was extremely, extremely overconfident at the time too. I did not end up making the cut at Juilliard or Carnegie Mellon auditions and was devastated. So, I ended up in of in a weird situation because I didn't apply that many schools. I ended up applying to Northwestern regular decision and ended up enrolling there. At Northwestern, I basically got into music again and I found a mentor who became my second big mentor. The first one was my voice teacher and this second mentor, he music directed for the musical theater department. One of his mentees was a senior at the time and I ended up meeting with this guy and he said, “Do you play piano?” I said, “Yeah, I do.” He said, “Can you sight read?”  I was like, “Uh, not really, but I really want to be able to and I've been trying to learn jazz unsuccessfully… and I have a classical background”. He said, “Okay, look, we're going to get you in the rotation. You're going to start doing voice lessons and accompanying voice lessons.” So, I started doing that, accompanying terribly…. But, this was the mentorship that he had and I got paid… one of the higher paying student jobs. I just would accompany these voice lessons and it turned into musical theater classes and master classes and even auditions on campus for other musical theater students that I was accompanying. Naturally, my sight reading got a lot better… and the mentorship didn't end there. I ended up doing an internship with him at the at the regional theater that he was the music director at in Chicago. Then, I really got bit by the music direction bug, so I was still taking acting classes, but now I was like, “Wow, this music direction thing is really, really amazing. I love learning how the keyboard program. I love learning how to conduct. I love learning how to orchestrate and do orchestral reductions and learning about how to write for Ableton and how to program in Logic, etc.”

Like any bug that bit me, I got fully immersed and just spent all my time doing it. I really didn't go to any parties in college; I just would be at home late at night, orchestrating and studying the scores of Wicked and Les Mis. I just loved music so, so much. During the daytime, I would be running from my classes to go accompany other classes… it was just kind of a beautiful time. I'm smiling, thinking back on it.

I grew a lot in my musicality and I grew so much and loved it so much. I ended up adding a second major in School of Music. I took a whole year of sequence and classical orchestration and studied Ravel and studied Mahler and studied Debussy. I took a whole year sequence in orchestration for jazz music and arranging. And I studied Duke Ellington and I studied Gil Evans and I studied Miles Davis…. the list goes on and on and on. Then I took a whole year sequence in the study of musical theater orchestration in the theater school.  I ended up thinking that I was still going to pursue acting, but in the meantime, I would I it seemed like I had a pretty destined future in conducting for Broadway shows and music directing for Broadway shows.

At this point, my parents were in full support. They were happy as long as I was proactive and they were getting good feedback; I was getting a lot of opportunities in the professional arena, so they were with it. I did not go to grad school. I graduated actually two quarters early, so I graduated in December of 2019. I was always looking way ahead and getting bored with where I am. I couldn't wait to get out of college because I was already doing a lot of professional work at this point—I had an acting agent at this point already. I had been interning and orchestrating for the regional theaters, and I was already going into the city to do these things and these shows. I had understudied another regional theater downtown and was already one foot at least out the door. So, I graduated a little early, which ended up working out really well because the next quarter, while everybody was doing online school because Covid hit, I was in an interesting situation where there was no professional work to be done and I didn't have to do any classwork. This my life changed for a third time under a third big mentor and it pivoted majorly and is kind of where we are now.

In December 2019, I had gone on a trip with my girlfriend to New York City to go see Harry Connick Jr on Broadway. He was already a hero of mine; I loved the way that he did crowd work. I loved his musicality, his singing… I just thought he was a great pianist, great entertainer all around. We went to see him on Broadway and that was amazing, plus, I got to meet him. What was really amazing was we went to this jazz club called Smoke Jazz Club. It's on the Upper West Side, and I saw this pianist and I saw him play non-stop between 12-4am —him and his quartet. They blew my mind. It was one of those moments in life you'll never forget where something just changed… the course of my understanding; it changed the way I understood what was humanly possible.

Once I saw that, that was my next big bug. Fast forward, I graduated from college and I don't have anything to do during the pandemic. I hit him up on Instagram to take a lesson. Now, he never taught lessons, but due to covid, there was nothing for any artist to do and he gave me a lesson.

This turned into a mentorship and I ended up I credit him to this day. I was just on the phone with him a couple days ago and he taught me everything I know. He really killed my ego in a way that was necessary. He just was never impressed with what I could do. In fact, he felt that I kind of was too late to the game in jazz piano. I had never gotten to a place where I was even kind of really rudimentary at jazz piano until then. He taught me, and like I said, I put my hard work to action and I practiced all day, every day. I was really lucky to be in a position where I could do that, because I graduated early and I just was living at home and my girlfriend's house too. She was doing school and I was practicing eight nine hours a day, not an exaggeration. Then his career started to take off and he needed help with some admin tasks and social media tasks and our mentorship continued. I started working for him and he taught me the piano and business and he humbled me really well— in a way that made me just want to work harder than I'd ever worked. I felt like I finally learned the meaning of hard work, even though people already said that I was working really hard. My parents supported me a lot.

7. What are a few of your (music) projects of which you are the proudest? What were your roles on those projects? Beyond those projects, please feel free to name some of your other credits as well as any brands/companies you officially endorse.

The project I'm most proud of right now is my trio, The Bryan Eng Trio. These are my best friends in the whole world, and we've been together about five years now. Steven Parisi on the bass and TJ Thompson on the drums. We met in Chicago. I was playing with some other guys at the time, but, um, they moved on and I needed new guys and we all met at the same time. Steven was new to the city. We all met on the gig and we just have had so much fun together. We've gone from playing gigs where we lost money. We've gone from sharing hotel rooms, we've gone from doing tours and playing in two cities in one night, driving up for the late set from Toledo to Ann Arbor. We've had to refill a leaky tire on, on the highway every exit while we tried to make our way from Cleveland to Chicago.

On the other hand, we've seen in some ways the high highest of the highs. We've had our own suites in The Bahamas at a five star hotel. We've eaten caviar together in the French Riviera and played with Dave Koz. We've done everything together because we've been together for five years.

To have people who were down for the cause, you know, they just believed in what we were doing— I believe in them and they believe in me… and we go to war; we go to battle with each other every time. They’ve seen me cry through breakups and vice versa and it all gets reflected in the music. We have our own unique concept on stage and so I'm so proud of this group. It does feel like we're just at the beginning.

Other than that, I'm proud of the original music I've been putting out lately. I don't think my fan following loves it as much as the jazz stuff, but I'm proud of it because it's true. As an artist, I am proud of when I can capture truth. There is nothing like writing a song that was true or playing a spontaneous solo that just was true because truth doesn't care what other people think. Only you know, if it's true or not. When you put out something that's fake, only, you know, if it's fake or not. I feel that there's no worse feeling than putting out something that's not true and there's no greater feeling than putting out something that's true.

So, I'm proud of these songs that I've put out lately.

I'm also proud of my first album, 20, that came out when I was twenty. I'm not proud of it so much musically; this was before I met Emmett when I felt like my musical life was changed, but I am proud of the undertaking that it was. I had to apply for grants at Northwestern and I had to fundraise from maybe a hundred people to raise the money to do it. It was my dream when I always to do a big band album with strings. I worked on that summer before senior year. I arranged a whole album for a big band plus strings—about twenty five musicians and we used students and some professionals. I fundraised for it, budgeted for it, music directed it, hired all the people, paid all the people. It just was one of the best projects to do at that age because I learned so much—I learned how to use Excel, I learned how to license music, how to distribute music, how to hire people, how to reserve a studio, what it takes to put out a project, what is an engineer? what is mixing and mastering? I just learned it all because it was my project, so I'm proud of that one.

8. What are some obstacles you have encountered (if any) being an AAPI in the music world? What are some obstacles you have encountered (if any) as an AAPI in general (non-music)? Conversely, has being an AAPI ever helped you in the music industry or in general?

I don't really remember too many obstacles. Maybe there were some slightly racist things, but I have to say there probably were obstacles and things that I could mention, but I don't really remember those things. I have a tendency not to remember bad things even as it pertains to personal breakups etc. I just remember the good and I start blaming myself a lot.

In general, my approach in life is that if there is an obstacle, I'm going to find a way to overcome it and forget about it immediately. If something racist was said, I'm going to forget it as quickly as it was said, because those things, they just don't help me and what I'm trying to achieve and where I'm trying to go. If it doesn't help me, I'm on to the next. If it just is hurtful, if it's just harmful, if it's only going to slow me down, I don't really make any time for it. I just start doing my own thing, so I don't even keep a place in my memory bank for them. Maybe it's really deeply lodged. I have to think about finding it.

I'd say the biggest obstacle is probably in perception, but it's hard to say. You know, I can't really quantify if this ended up being an obstacle or conversely, as being something that has been an advantage. One of the biggest comments I get is, “I can't believe that that sound is coming out of someone who looks like you”. This could bother somebody, but I don't think it would bother somebody who's looking for the success that I'm looking for. I recognize that everyone has their own biases and that actually is a beautiful thing to have something so specific—to look the way that I look and sound, it ended up becoming my brand. It ended up becoming the thing that makes me different, the thing that makes me special.

I'm not trying to discredit racism here… sometimes if you take a certain perspective, it can reveal to you what makes you unique. It can reveal to you your superpower the very thing that maybe was intended unintentionally or intentionally to cut you down can actually reveal to you your greatest strength. So, I’d say it’s been more racism than obstacles… and it's always unintentional.

We were playing this jazz festival one time in the Midwest and this one guy asked me my name. I responded and he then asked, “What are you guys here for?” “We're doing this jazz festival.” And he asked, “Are you related to Yo-Yo Ma?” That could have really bugged somebody, but I ended up talking to this guy for a while and I laughed about it at the time. Maybe I shouldn't have laughed, but I understood where he was coming from. He was the way that he was and he didn't mean to be hurtful; we had a great time together, hanging out, drinking beers in the parking lot. It just was the way he was raised. If I had just discounted him at the moment, I would not be real. I would not be really recognizing who my audience is. What is the state of America? What is the state of the Midwest? You get what I'm saying? I'm starting to realize, you know, if you want to understand what your strength is, you have to understand the context of which you exist. He revealed it to me through that maybe uninformed comment that there's probably a lot of people who see you this way, Bryan, and it doesn't have to be bad. It can be a strength because you can show them how unique you are. You can change the stereotype they have in their head.

Going back to my “why”. What does this do for the future generation of Asian American artists who might face similar things? Maybe the next time this guy sees an Asian guy who says that they need music, he won't say that because he'll have met me. He'll have seen what I did. He'll instead say, “Do you sing jazz?” And they'll say, “How weird. Why would you think I sing jazz?” “Well, I know this guy, Bryan Eng; I’ve never seen anybody sing like him who looked like him.”

You see what I'm saying? Sometimes if we change our perspective, the greatest value can come from the things that we think are the most harmful, the most hurtful. I know I kind of changed your question a bit, but I, I couldn't think of many obstacles… and I think that that's not because they didn't exist, but more so because I just refused to accept that kind of thing.

I need to supplement these thoughts with something else as this brings it all together. I am this way because of my grandmother, the one who was born in Chinatown and has a vaguely New York accent who passed away a year ago at 100 years old. I interviewed her a good bit in her final years, and one of the crazy things she said to me that shocked me was, “I don't think I ever experienced racism or prejudice in my lifetime”.

That stunned my sister and I, because we knew we had even witnessed it not to be true, even in our lifetime with her… the fact that she grew up in 1925 in New York City didn’t want to say that she experienced prejudice in the very stories that she told us.

She recalled the prejudice she experienced and yet she said that to us. She would tell us these stories and that was more revealing to me than anything, because when I knew what she went through, when I knew the sacrifices she made, when I knew the racial prejudice that she overcame, I understood why I feel that way too, because she would not have been such a pioneer for Asian Americans if it wasn't for this perspective that she had that “nobody can bother me. I ain't never been bothered. I'm going to do what I want to do because I deserve to have a place in this country and in this world”.

I'll give you one quick example. When she was a college student at Hunter College in New York and she wanted to start a Chinese American Students Association—a student group. A white teacher asked her, “Why would you do that? You're the only Chinese student here. Don't do that.” She responded, “Well, then I'll make an Asian Students Association”. The teacher replied, “There's only one other Asian student. It's just you and this other person”. My grandma said, “Well, then I'll start it with two people and we'll grow from there”, and she did just that. It's now become one of the biggest Asian student associations, whatever it's evolved into. She told me to think about that. I now think of all the college campuses that now have Asian student groups, Chinese student groups, etc. She started one of the first ones in the entire country in the face of somebody telling her, “Why would you do that?” and she sat and told me  she ain't experienced racial prejudice. Now I understand why I have a difficult time recalling the obstacles because of my race—because I refuse to. Because she refused to. I want to continue to carry that torch that she did because her bravery and her stubbornness in many ways is what I carry on, because I think that's what's required.

9. 9a.) Who are some AAPI musicians/composers/producers who have previously inspired and currently inspire you (if any)? Why?

9b.) What are your hopes for the AAPI music community and your hopes for AAPIs in general?

This is a tricky question. To be completely honest, I can't think of really any other Asian American Pacific Islander musicians, composers, producers who I listen to. I'm certainly aware of a lot of them and they're doing their thing. I admire them in so much as I understand what it takes to be in this space and, um, to create in any capacity. Now, you know, from an artistic perspective, I'm kind of niche in what I listen to and what influences me.

So I do feel like there's nobody who looks like me who I can look to as doing what I want to be doing in an all encompassing way.

For example, the person who's always been my North Star has been Harry Connick Jr, a white guy from New Orleans. I admire him so much because he does music, he does the acting, he orchestrates, he writes for the piano, he does the entertainment showmanship thing. I don't know anybody who is Asian, who does that, who I can look to. I believe that I'm the only one who is doing it at the level that I look to be doing it.

There's obviously other great Asian musicians who are doing their thing and I look up to them in other ways. I hate to go really obvious, but someone who really was a pioneer, and I think we don't really give them enough respect for this is Yo-Yo Ma. Obviously, when we get to the classical world, we're talking about a lot more Asian representation, but the different thing about Yo-Yo Ma is that is transcendent ability to become culturally significant for white people, for black people, for all people, because he transcended the racial doubt because he transcended the classical limitation that was placed socially on Asian musicians.

“Oh, you grew up playing violin. You grew up playing, you know, piano.”  Those stereotypes.

Yo-Yo Ma, yes, he plays the cello, which is a stereotype… but now he plays pop music. He plays all kinds of music. He's like, he reminds me of Wynton Marsalis in some ways. Not that Wynton plays pop music, but Yo-Yo Ma proved himself already to the snobby people who who hold certain types of music so closely and so prestigiously, and yet he made it accessible for others, for people who may not have had the privilege to hold those prestigious perspectives. I admire him for that because he became palatable to all different demographics. He represents greatness and he represents accessibility snd that's really important to me. I don't listen to him that much, but I did growing up a lot. My mom loved him, so that's probably why.

Now, the real inspirations that I have in the AAPI community are not musicians, because like I said, there was nobody who was doing what I wanted to do, who I could look at and say, now that's what I want to do and also look like me. I grew up in the YouTube age and I would religiously Wong Fu Productions, Ryan Higa, Jabbawockeez…A lot of dance groups, the Asian hip hop groups. These were my inspirations because they showed me, “hey, look, we can be on your laptop, on the TV doing cool things”. I grew up watching Hawaii Five-O. My dad used to watch it a lot and I loved seeing Daniel Dae Kim. Man, what a cool guy to hold a gun. He could do all the cool white guy things, the James Bond things. He was ripped and he was cool. Steven Yeun—another big one I looked up to on screen, from The Walking Dead.

So, while I didn’t look up to a lot of Asian musicians, I was certainly looking up to these few Asian pioneers who were given opportunities in the entertainment industry at large. I looked up to the superstars like Daniel Dae Kim, Steven Yeun, and these YouTubers because they showed me, “Hey, look, even if we're not given the opportunity, we can create the opportunity ourselves”. They inspire me so much. They give me my “why” just like my grandma. I looked up to her more than anyone. I looked up to my dad and my mom. The things that they did to give me the opportunity to take lessons, to go to theater camp and be the only Asian there. I mean, can you believe that? Why? Why even need to look any further than my own parents who gave me everything, all the opportunities I could have been given.

My hopes for the future are that people are not in a position that I am where they have these sparse inspirations within the community. Now I have a zillion inspirations who are not Asian American, but my hope for the future is that someone younger than me can say, “Well, I had a zillion inspirations for people who look like me”. Now white people can certainly do that, and even black people can do that now, which is a great thing. I just hope that we get the same great thing within our community and I think about how I can play into that. I can be the change I want to see. I can be at least one of those faces. That's been one of the great things of shows in the past six months—the number of Asians who have been coming out. I used to resent that, not resent it, but it embarrassed me. It likely goes back to the childhood trauma I might have.

Seeing these Asians come out has meant a lot to me because they say, “Keep going, man, we support you. We see what you're doing”, and I know exactly what they mean. So, I hope there's more of that and I hope more people can see me —and their parents can see me— and say, “I don't need to be a doctor. See, look what he did”, you know?

I want to emphasize this—if I want to talk about real inspirations, it comes from people closest to me. I speak of this grandma mostly because I got to know her for most of my life …for the first twenty six years of my life. The other one's passed away at younger ages, but if I knew their story more, I would tell you theirs too. Grandpa, her husband was a Purple Heart recipient who fought in World War Two. Shortly after he immigrated to the US from China, he got drafted, fought for the US, was shot, and survived. They both ended up being government workers for basically their whole careers.

On the other side, my grandpa was the one who took that Chinese test and came to the US (and got a full ride to anywhere he wanted to go) and studied engineering. My grandma immigrated. I look up to these people because of what they did, which can be translated to the industry. They might not have been able to have the opportunities that I had, but they did it so that I could... that's really the deeper message. What can I do to create the opportunity for people behind me to do what I wasn't able to do? I recognize there's still a ways to go.

There's also my parents-- the things they did, the environments they put me in, the attitude of proactivity and hard work that they taught me... and also I want to shoutout my sister--my twin sister--she is a huge humanitarian social activist (I wanted to leave the best for last). She worked for the 1882 Foundation and another foundation, and she's created databases online, created media and content for us to uplift and have a place to access movies and books and articles that were written and created by AAPI people.

I'm reminded that I'm doing things my own way. She's doing things her own way; she deeply influences me and reminds me of the importance of this.

10. Name at least one or two non-music-related things/subjects about which you are also passionate.

The first obvious area or subject to talk about is acting. I mean, I already mentioned some of my acting influences and my acting background; I just think that is another area that's really important for influencing the way people see Asian Americans in this country--visual representation. Yes, music is visual, but it's also mostly aural. We think about getting on screen, getting on stage. I'm very passionate about that.

I have a bunch of hobbies I'm interested in--I like golf a lot. I grew up golfing and I love watching it. I'm passionate about Jesus Christ. I put all my blessings and trust in Him. It's its own journey that would merit its own conversation and might not be super relevant, but, to me is the most relevant thing.

11. Any final thoughts? Alternatively, do you have any questions for me and/or the greater AAPI music community?

N/A

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