My time at Pop has been a transformative experience that I am extremely proud of. It has afforded me the chance to collaborate with some of the greatest creative minds in the world, and I'm thankful to Ashley Heath and Bauer Media for the opportunity.
I played against Ashley Cole all the time in training. For me, he is the best left-back in the world. He was the hardest opponent and I had him every day in training.
My mum used to always dress me and my sister in matching Laura Ashley dresses. And I'd be like, 'Mum, I just wanna wear my Doc Martens!'
I took one guitar lesson, and they wanted me to play 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' or 'Michael Row the Boat Ashore,' and that was the last guitar lesson that I ever took, so I taught myself what I wanted to know.
Going to Southeast Asia for the first time and tasting that spectrum of flavors - that certainly changed my whole palate, the kind of foods I crave. A lot of the dishes I used to love became boring to me.
Southeast Asia has a real grip on me. From the very first time I went there, it was a fulfillment of my childhood fantasies of the way travel should be.
I grew up a skinny Asian kid who was often ignored or picked on. It stuck with me and branded my soul. As I grew up, I tried to stick up for whoever seemed excluded or marginalized.
I never thought I'd run for president. My parents were immigrants to this country - and leader of the free world was not on the list of careers presented to me as a skinny Asian kid growing up in upstate New York.
I can't think of the last Asian that I ran into that talked about internment camps. But black people always want to talk to me about slavery.
In Australia, it's people from Asian countries who most often recognise me. There are often people just looking at me at the supermarket, like they're shocked to think I would go to the supermarket.
With my husband, I do really appreciate the fact that we - even though we're different kinds of Asian, there is a cultural shorthand between us, and I don't have to explain anything. I've dated guys before who weren't Asian-American, and it frustrated me when I would have to defend why beans belong in a dessert.
Growing up, I thought I was white. It didn't occur to me I was Asian-American until I was studying abroad in Denmark and there was a little bit of prejudice.
When I was finishing 'Now You See Me 2,' I remember thinking about exploring the Asian-American identity side of my brain.
I've gotten scholarships from the Asian-American Directors Guild of America society and things like that, and those things helped me, even if I didn't realize how much.
Working on 'Fresh Off the Boat' has been really enlightening to me because it's made me actually think about the roles that Asians and Asian-American women have played in media. Not because I didn't think it was important before, but because before, I was really focused on just paying my rent.
I think there's a misconception that all Asian-American experiences are the same. My experiences with my family and the way they wanted me to know my culture are not the same as others.
The feedback for 'P.S. I Still Love You' has been pretty amazing. To have written this story about this family with Asian-American characters and be so embraced is really incredible for me as a writer as well as a person of color.
I read in 'Life' magazine that Asians had developed an operation to enlarge eyes, and I yearned to have this done. I wanted to dye my hair brown and to anglicize my name. Self-hate was the most terrible cost of the war years for me.
Sometimes, we want Asians in the media, but we don't want them to talk about being Asian. For me, that's interesting because I'm from Asia. If you want me to be on television but I can't be Asian, I'm not being true to myself.
It's called 'Crazy Rich Asians,' but it's really not about crazy rich Asians. It's about Rachel Chu finding her identity and finding her self-worth through this journey back into her culture. Which, for me as a filmmaker, exploring my cultural identity is the scariest thing.
