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The start of May and AAPI Heritage month always comes as a welcome reminder to me of the significant strides Asian and Asian-American artists have made in representation and in our agency as storytellers. So in that spirit, I wanted to tell you a small part of my own story. One of the perks of being both a veteran story keeper and self-appointed guidance-counselor-slash-cheerleader of the next generation is I get the benefit of hindsight coupled with a clarity of context with what’s happening now. To you, to me, to us. Ready? Ok!
So in 1999 I was puttering around town auditioning. I’d gotten my BFA and my Equity card two years prior and was doing a lot of workshops and such for new musicals. See, back then, there were three, maybe four canonized shows “for us.” You know the ones. They weren’t written by us, and they weren’t written for us, and some of us have wonderful ties to them to this day and that’s alright. Because they did a LOT. For one, they employed us. For another, they lent us some sense of professional credibility. They were something we could claim ownership over. But chief among the things they did not do well (for honestly, how could they) was provide us with the comfort that if we, as performers, were not right for any of them, we could find another show that we were right for. You follow? Someone who wasn’t right for Grease, might find themselves a track in The Sound of Music. If you weren’t right for Chess, you might be right for Merrily.
Back in the day for folks like me, if you weren’t right for the big three, you were S.O.L.
Back in the day for folks like me, if you weren’t right for the big three, you were S.O.L. This was very problematic for me. Some people trained just so they could be right for those shows. There were schools founded expressly to fill this need. I was maybe not so smart. I thought I should be able to act without prejudice and for better or worse what that meant in that moment was being cast in a lot of new musicals and workshops.
Some were fantastic. One piece, a little show called Making Tracks, (which I guess is a thing that people still talk about but don’t know I was in and maybe that’s interesting?) is how I met Woody Pak, Brian Yorkey and his other then-collaborator, Tom Kitt. These guys were dope. Smart AF and really approaching the work with unprecedented skill and with great and generous intention.
But others? Not so much. No names, but I’ll tell you I once found myself in a show that rhymed “chance” with “dance” no less than six times in the same song. And if memory serves, twice in another. Another time, there was a non-Asian writer who mansplained to Cindy Cheung (yes, that Cindy Cheung) what an internal rhyme was, as if she didn’t already know. (We all did, eyeroll.) He’d walk around rehearsal patting himself on the back for employing Asians with self-congratulatory quips like “maybe my next show should be called The Phantom of the Chinese Opera.” In today’s world that’s at best a micro-aggression and at worst a hostile work environment. A third time, a director offered me a role they then rescinded at the 11th hour because they had mistaken me and my 6’1” frame for Eric Bondoc. Yes, that Eric Bondoc. Who is not 6’1”. Years later, Eric would tell me they had mistook him for yet a third cookie-cutter Asian, but couldn’t return to the well again for fear of… I mean, you get the idea.
He’d walk around rehearsal patting himself on the back for employing Asians with self-congratulatory quips like “maybe my next show should be called The Phantom of the Chinese Opera.”
What I was witnessing in these moments though, was how performers of color were leading double lives. Triple, if they had corporate day-jobs. On one side, we were getting submitted by our agents for commercial work where we either were delivering food, or running gambling/prostitution houses or were seeing America for the very first time…. and on the other, we were doing low- to no-pay work for artistic fulfillment and the idea that these two lives could ever be synthesized was inconceivable. Sure, it wasn’t great rhyming “chance” with “dance” six times a song for eight shows a week, but it was an opportunity to make my own tracks in fresh powder, where no one had tread before. To wit, there was a moment in the aforementioned Making Tracks where the generous Mr. Yorkey gave me latitude to write my own lyric into a recurring segment of leitmotif. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to nod at that other show, so I worked in a chance/dance rhyme of my own. (see below) Not clever, but it was a thing I got to participate in. Those kinds of opportunities were few and far between.
A scene from Making Traks (1999) featuring Welly Yang, Thomas Kouo, Rodney To and myself.
You might not know by looking but two of the four guys in the above clip had already made their Broadway debuts in Miss Saigon. To them, that was their day-job. This too, became a thing I’d notice. That those gainfully employed Broadway Asians were often bored out of their rice-picking minds. I guess one can only “see America for the first time” so many times before it loses it's luster.
So, I started writing in earnest for my new friends. It wasn’t good writing? (I wouldn’t learn to write well till many, many years after finishing my MFA, late-bloomer’s gonna late-bloom.) But it had heart. And it was attractive.
The very first show I ever wrote, which I actually never talk about, was called So Far So Good. I called it that because whenever I would tell colleagues I was writing something they’d ask me “how’s it going?” Inevitably their curiosity would land them in my studio in Washington Heights, singing music for hours (and for no pay, sorry friends.)
It wasn’t really about anything. Just young people in chaos, bouncing off of each other and trying to find common ground. But each piece of music gave its character a specific want, and a lot of room to play subtle or broad choices. Each workshop we had, I’d use my Asian-American friends because I knew how thirsty they were to sing something that hadn’t already been sung to death by twenty of their closest frenemies.
There wasn’t a language for it. There wasn’t a context. It was just like, people making super gross assumptions about everything and expecting us to go along with it.
At one such workshop, the father of a Caucasian friend of mine came to watch and when I pressed him for feedback, very respectfully said “But why are they all Asian?”
You cringed a little reading that right? I’ll admit, so did I. But back then there wasn’t a precedent for characters of color in musicals who didn’t have to justify their presence with an in-narrative connection to their parent culture, their parent language, or a set of radically opposing moral values to contrast Western sensibilities. There wasn’t a language for it. There wasn’t a context. It was just like, people making super gross assumptions about everything and expecting us to go along with it. And when we didn’t we were left behind.
An early demo from Death and Lucky, featuring the great Ali Ewoldt.
This would become a recurring theme for me and the stories I wanted to tell: There was never a language for the “why” in musicals until it would get forged first in other media. It was 2005 when I started writing about the Tiger-mom and her estranged daughter who found themselves living under the same roof again, coming to blows over how best to care for their neuro-divergent son/brother but the book which coined that phrase “Tiger-mom” wouldn’t be published until 2011. Nobody knew what that was. People asked “Shouldn’t that be enough? Why bring in the Autistic kid? What is a ‘lazy Susan?’”
Britney Coleman, Dan Urness and David Epstein
I remember once, after we premiered The View From Here at NYMF, an actor in a Broadway show I hadn’t seen emailed me through my website saying. he “saw my work” and “liked my sound” and thought it might be a “good fit” for a show he himself was writing. I met with him at 4pm at the Lunt-Fontanne theater, chatting with him about his piece in one of the empty seats. The show I wrote had been a jazz piece, which involved a little bit of improvisation where the singer traded eights with the pianist and trumpet player. This guy’s show was about Asian immigrants. Which I found to be a little disturbing only because to this day I’m still not sure how my ethnicity or my parent culture qualifies me to orchestrate for erhu or pipa. Like… where does that even come from? Even back in 2006 there had been a dog-whistle code for “I am looking for political cover.” But this guy was using very different language. Caught me off guard. I politely declined.
When the culture finally caught up, and I was shopping American Morning around, one potential producer read it and said “this is great, but do both of the cab drivers have to be Asian? What if one was white?” He could still be an immigrant, they qualified, but what if he was an Eastern European immigrant? This was 2011, when it was okay to have Asians in lead roles, but apparently not okay to have JUST Asians in lead roles. I thanked them for their time and politely declined. (I will, however, take this time to thank everyone who DID have the courage to meet it where it was and help it grow.)
all I ever need do is get on social media and look at everything that you’re making. And really, at the end of the day what you’re making is history, so keep at it.
Which is kind of the whole point of this novel I’m writing to you now. Thanks, by the way, for sticking around. These days, whenever I fall into the quagmire of “what-about-me”, all I ever need do is get on social media and look at everything that you’re making. And really, at the end of the day what you’re making is history, so keep at it. Normally I’d take this opportunity to name check a ton of high-profile projects that really great people are making, but I’m growing. I trust you know what those are, and I trust you see their value. And to some degree, I trust you see your contribution to them.
But maybe the thing you’re making isn’t getting recognized. Maybe your gifts are undervalued. Maybe, like me, there isn’t a language or context to properly understand it yet. I hope nonetheless you’ll trust in the universality of its worth. That somewhere, some time, the light will shine on it. There is no good excuse not to make the thing. Always, always make the thing. Remember Gandalf:
This is where I leave you. Thanks again for sticking around. Your reward? A tiny time capsule 1999 Tim buried in a salt mine twenty meters below sea level so 2024 Tim could share it with you. Because he thinks you need to hear it. He hopes you don’t. But better safe than sorry. Also, call your parents, they miss you. Tim out.
If I could take the whole world’s dreams, if I could take my good intentions and wrap them all around you
If I could promise you no pain, a life less weary than your own, could I relive the day I found you?
There are things we can’t control. There are choices we must make. You must step back to see the whole. If not for mine than for your own sake.
You have come so far, so good. And it’s all just as I knew you would.
See the work that you have done. Measure strength in who you are, all you’ve won. So good, so far.