Back to Rumble

In Fear of "Dr. Kim"

Who is Dr. Kim to you? Did you feel, or experience, that any other role was open to you after graduating from SFU? What were your expectations? What was more fearful, to be cast as Dr.Kim for the rest of your career, or to pioneer and navigate your own artistic path?

For me as I think is the case for many Asian-Canadian actors "Dr. Kim," simply put, is a fear. "Dr. Kim," while she may contribute substantially to your monthly income and consequently raise your standard of living, is a stereotype that quite frankly I don't want to get labeled with. The idea playing a "Dr. Kim" or a "Nurse Nakamatsu" makes me fear that I would be contributing to a close-mindedness that I think North American society needs to let go of already. Upon leaving theatre school five years ago, facing the idea of being sucked into the world of stereotypes propelled me further into the belief that if I didn't do for myself, and by that I mean form a company to create my own work, well, I probably wouldn't be doing this at all. A teacher of mine once said, "I would be just as happy owning and operating my own restaurant." So what keeps me in theatre? I think part of the answer to this question is that I have a fear of being alone in my beliefs. By doing theatre I have met or worked with people who convince me otherwise. In performance, I have related to people in the audience and this convinces me otherwise. The world is a lonely enough place as it is. To know that what you believe is believed by others, or at least understood, is a comforting thing.

On starting a theatre company, I really didn't have any expectations except that I had better get started and that it would be a lot of work. And that it would be GREAT. But I admit I was very naive at the time. I was young and energetic, and didn't want to acknowledge the fact that there are many barriers out there in the work that you have to deal with. Now that I'm good and bitter, looking back I'm not sure if it wasn't this dreamy-eyed notion that kept me in the world of theatre. These are two very different fears: The fear of being stuck in a world of what you are supposed to know, like the world of being Asian, and the fear of treading into the world of the unknown, carving your own path...starting a business. I'm not sure which is scarier. They both continue to terrify me daily.

We were laughing about t.v. and film representation, stereo-types. When will you, and when do you just want to, do the job as an actor, despite the cost as an artist of diversity? As for theatre, you said " theatre practice is too important". What is the major difference to you?

I love creating theatre. I love the small beginnings and how they grow into something quite large and consuming. I love how the thing you have built can be meaningful for many people in many different ways. I love opening myself up, and putting something out there that is very personal and important to me. I love the opportunity it gives me to say what I need to say to the world.

As a founding member of Boca del Lupo theatre, do you feel you are building your own community where everyone can be represented in context to the reality of your own communities and neighborhoods? Do you think this allows you to fight for and acknowledge all stories?

To me, Boca del Lupo is in all aspects a meeting ground where each individual artist brings in their own personal interests and history and relationship to the work together and ideally, these elements merge to form work that is ultimately about being human, not about being a particular kind of human, different from another particular kind of human.

I don't ever have the intention to create "cultural theatre." I want to create work that is meaningful to me and that comes from who I am. It isn't about representation. It's about relating to an audience through telling my stories. I find it really interesting that a story I may have heard in my childhood, a Japanese folktale for example, may be the same or very similar to an Irish folktale that I just read two days ago. Those connections are so very creepy, yet magical at the same time. How things travel, go around the world, touch down in different places and ultimately return to you...It's all very fascinating.

We talked about theatre, and collaboration, and about the physical side of creating story. Do you think that creating out of the physical allows "the voice of the other " to resonate, and yet include the universal? What are your thoughts on this?

I think physicality is in many ways a universal language. Take for instance a wave. A wave is hello, or goodbye. Without words we can convey this. I think what draws me to creating physical theatre is the way I can physicalize an image, or a moment, and this physicalization can resonate so deeply for someone watching it. The deeper meaning of what is happening somehow reaches them. I think part of the reason for this, although it might sound very carnal, is that our bodies with the exception of female/male intricacies, are all the same. Food goes in our mouths. Tears come out of our eyes. We listen with our ears, and so on and so forth. So physically speaking, logical gestures or movements evolve to form a shared physical vocabulary. And somehow we all understand. Rather than being a separation like other forms of language can be, the physical language becomes something that unites. A universal language.

I know what you mean, but what did you mean when you said, "it was unacceptable to be stopped"?

This life I've chosen is hard. It takes integrity. It takes resilience. It takes an incredible amount of open-ness and patience. I'm out there taking big risks and putting a lot of faith and trust into myself, and the people around me. And so it is unacceptable to me when I feel a person, or a situation, or a fear is shutting my work down. The day that my work is completely stopped by one of these things is the day when I'll know it's over.