I didn’t grow up thinking about identity as something I needed to define. If anything, it was something I was constantly adjusting to without realizing it. It showed up in small moments, how I introduced myself, how people tried to place me, the pause before someone asked, “What are you?” like there was supposed to be a clean answer...There wasn’t.
My dad is Taiwanese, and I mainly grew up with him. Quiet, precise, disciplined in a way that didn’t need to be explained. He worked in a technical field, something structured, something that made sense. A lot of my day-to-day life was shaped by his rhythm, his values, the way he moved through the world. There wasn’t a lot of over-explaining. You just understood what was expected.
From early on, I wasn’t just navigating one identity at home, I was moving between different energies, different expectations, different ways of being, then outside of that was everything else.
School, friends, the industry I eventually stepped into, spaces that didn’t always know what to do with someone like me. I wasn’t just “the Asian kid,” but I wasn’t not that either. I wasn’t fully one thing, and people tend to look for simple categories. So, I learned early on how to read what people needed me to be in order to make things smoother.
You start to notice patterns. The assumptions. The shortcuts people take when they’re trying to understand you quickly. Instead of pushing back every time, you pick your moments. Sometimes you correct it, sometimes you let it go and sometimes you lean into it because it’s easier, or because it opens a door. That’s the part that gets complicated.
When you’re building a career in acting and stunt work, perception isn’t just personal, it’s professional. You walk into a room and there’s already a version of you that exists before you even speak. The “type.” The role they think you fit, and early on, you take what you can get. You learn how to use that perception without letting it completely define you.
However, there is always that tension in the background. How much of this is me, and how much of this is just what works?
Growing up mostly with my dad, there was always this underlying expectation of stability, building something real, something reliable. There’s a logic to that way of thinking. Somehow I ended up choosing a path that requires both, but guarantees neither.
There’s no real stability in this career. No straight line, and when you come from a background where sacrifice is part of the story, that weighs on you. You don’t just want to succeed, you want to make the risk make sense. You want it to justify everything that came before you.
For a while, I think I was trying to figure out where I fit between all these different identities. Asian, mixed, American, artist, athlete. Trying to find the version that felt the most “correct,” but there isn’t one.
What I’ve realized is that the mix is the point. The tension is the point. The fact that I don’t fit cleanly into one category is the thing that actually gives me range, in how I see the world, in how I move through it, in the stories I’m drawn to tell.
Pride didn’t come from choosing one side over the other. It came from understanding that I don’t have to simplify myself for anyone else’s comfort. My dad’s discipline, and the cultures I come from, the environments I’ve had to navigate, they all exist at the same time. None of it cancels anything out.
Balance isn’t something I’ve mastered. It’s something I’m constantly working through. Some days I feel completely grounded in who I am, and other days I still feel that pull, like I’m shifting depending on the space I’m in. However, it doesn’t feel like confusion anymore. It just feels like reality.
Growing up Asian in a Western world, especially coming from a mixed background and a split household, didn’t give me a single identity to hold onto. It gave me multiple lenses. It forced me to adapt, to observe, to understand people in a way that goes deeper than surface-level.
It's because in the work I do now, that matters. I’m not trying to fit into a predefined version of what I’m supposed to be. I’m building something that actually reflects where I come from, all of it. Not just the parts that are easy to categorize. At the end of the day, identity isn’t something I need to resolve. It’s something I carry. It’s something I use.
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