When I meet with students and aspiring artists, particularly if they’re Asian/Pacific American, I usually get asked, “How did your parents react when you told them you wanted to be a writer?”
Well, I first decided to try my hand at playwriting back in college. And the thing about Asian parents is, generally, so long as you’re getting good grades, they don’t really care what you do in your spare time (one of my favorite movies, Offender Justin’s BETTER LUCK TOMORROW, suggests you can even kill people). So I told my parents that my English major could be used as a pre-law, kept up my grades, and wrote plays in my spare time.
As senior year approached, however, I had to come out to my folks and let them know I was planing for a different kind of future post-college. Fortunately, I wasn’t raised in a “Tiger Mom” family; my mother is a pianist, and my grandmother used to say stuff like, “Why’s everyone so worried about getting ‘A’’s? What’s wrong with a ‘B?’” Still, my Father was a businessman, and it’d be quite a stretch for two immigrant Chinese parents to accept their son going for a career in the theatre.
I’d written my first play, called FOB, to be staged in my college dorm. My Father took a look at the script; he’d never read a play before, saw some swear words, and said, “I send you to that fancy school, and you write this junk?”
Then he told my Mom, “We’re going to go see this play of Dave’s. If it’s good, we’ll encourage him, and if it’s bad, we’ll tell him to stop.”
