Quotes from Hong Chau

I love public transportation! Who wants to sit in a car and be angry at other drivers for eight hours? I'd rather sit on a bus or train and read a book.

I'm never concerned about being first or on trend. I only want to feel like my most rad 'me.'

If anyone has to leave their homeland by boat, they all have difficult stories. But my parents had a difficult journey, and their story always seems like a movie to me.

The first time I went to Chicago was on a family road trip. We had our dog with us, and when we hit Chicago, I couldn't believe how many people kept coming up to us, telling us how handsome our dog was! He's a Rottweiler-Australian Shepherd mix, and he is a good-looking dog, but obviously Chicago is very dog-friendly.

I think one in five Americans has a disability of some sort. That's 20% of the population, and yet we rarely ever see people with disabilities on-screen, and their stories and their resilience and their zest for life and their humor and their humanity.

People who I've encountered who have had more given to them, they tend to be more disappointed and unable to carry on when something doesn't go their way, and that's not my parents.

I don't want to put on any gimmicky layers just to give the character more definition. I just want to play good characters. It doesn't matter to me if it's 'open ethnicity' or 'specifically Asian.'

Asian-Americans, we're not a monolithic group. There might be some Asians who are second-generation, third-generation, who may not speak the language that their parents or their grandparents spoke.

Americans have a wonderful way of just butchering everyone's names.

That's what I want to continue to do: really odd films, with interesting filmmakers.

My parents speak with an accent. A lot of people that I know speak with an accent. I have friends who speak with an accent. Accents in a vacuum aren't a problem; it's how you portray those characters and how well they're served in a script.

I fell into acting because I was really shy, and so at night after work, I took public speaking and improv classes, and I started going to auditions sort of as a dare. That was my version of 'Fear Factor.'

I grew up around Vietnamese refugees, around people who don't speak English as a first language.

I grew up speaking Vietnamese - that was my first language because my parents didn't speak any English, and I didn't learn English until I started school.

When British or Australian actors perform American characters, we laud them and talk about how great it is they are able to do this other accent that is not their own. Americans have different relationships with other accents.

Public libraries were a huge source of comfort and joy for me when I was growing up. I still spend time there.