Constance Wu will be the first to admit that she was reluctant to rejoin social media. In the spring of 2019, Wu found herself at the center of a Twitter firestorm when she expressed her disappointment about the renewal of ABC’s Fresh Off the Boat, the first Asian American network sitcom to debut in over 20 years, in which she played fierce tiger mom Jessica Huang.
Believing that the show was on the verge of cancellation, Wu, who had risen to international prominence the previous summer as the lead of Crazy Rich Asians, had lined up two new projects, which she would have to forgo in favor of meeting her contractual obligations to the network. Then came those infamous tweets. Her critics weren’t satisfied with her public apologies, accusing her of being ungrateful and egotistical and turning her into a laughing stock for the media.
What most people didn’t realize is that Wu had experienced sexual harassment and intimidation from a senior Asian American male producer named M— during her first two years on the show. After reading some particularly unforgiving private messages from a former colleague, Wu said she tried to take her own life at her New York apartment. Fortunately, a friend who had come to check on her was able to save her just in time, and Wu spent that night, under surveillance, at a psychiatric hospital before leaving social media and undergoing therapy to develop the tools to manage her feelings.
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Now, three years later, Wu is back in the spotlight with Making a Scene, a collection of 18 essays about the people and events that, as she writes in her introduction, “shaped my humanity and determined the direction of my life.” There are stories about her parents and younger sister (and even her pet rabbit); her old cars, friends and neighbors; the love affairs that left her permanently changed; the summer she spent at a Buddhist monastery in Taiwan; and the realities of being an Asian American actress in Hollywood.
“When you look back on scenes in your life and how they’re important to the play or the movie of your life, I thought it was a natural extension to write several parts of my book in scene format,” Wu tells BAZAAR.com over Zoom about the book’s title and structure. “My book is all about what it means when a woman ‘makes a scene’ in the symbolic sense, of what it means when you repress emotions so long that they come out in an outsized reaction. [It’s about] the way women are often taught that being super hyper-emotional is ‘unladylike’ or ‘crazy,’ and what that does to a person, especially a person who is naturally emotional like myself.”
Below, Wu speaks about her decision to open up about the most formative events of her life, the politics of onscreen Asian American representation and why she thinks Hollywood needs to go beyond creating “positive representation,” and the lessons she has learned from her years away from the harsh glare of social media.
You write in the book about the times when you didn’t even realize that you were being sexually assaulted or harassed. Why do you think it took you a long time to come to terms with what had happened to you, and how has writing this book helped you to confront and heal from those traumatic experiences?
Like I said in my rape essay, there are so many feelings of shame and regret and worrying about making a scene. There are so many different kinds of thoughts running through your head when the event happens that make you unable to hear what happened to you, because you’re busy struggling with all this guilt. When you have a physical trauma, you have a wound to show for it. You have a bruise, or you have a cut, and you bleed, and you see it heal. But when you have an emotional trauma, there’s no wound. There’s no physical evidence that it happened, so much so that it can feel like, “Did it happen?” And writing it was healing because it was almost like seeing the wound, and giving it the time and air and space to heal. It made it real for me. It made me see it more clearly.
Even the wound of my teacher accusing me of plagiarism—it took me decades to look at that and appreciate how it led me to who I am today when it was so obvious, right? The only teacher who believed in me [and said I didn’t plagiarize] was my drama teacher, and I’m an actress. I never put those two things together—I swear to God! And it’s crazy I never put those two things together, but it was because I was dwelling on the pain so much. But it took writing it down for me to have that eureka moment and then have a lot of gratitude for my experience, and I think just having the words on the page is like having a wound as a witness to your experience.
In the chapter “You Do What I Say” you write about working with a verbally abusive and emotionally manipulative producer named M— on Fresh Off the Boat. What do you think that says about the power imbalances that exist for women of color in Hollywood, and what are the lessons that you want readers to take away from that part of your story?
What’s interesting and tricky about that is, Fresh Off the Boat really brought up the conversation about Asian American representation in a way that was really helpful to the movement. And I kept a lot of abuse and intimidation a secret, because I didn’t want to sully the reputation of the one positive thing that we had going for Asian Americans [and] because I thought I had “handled” it. But when I think about how it felt to have an Asian American man who claimed to be such a proponent for women’s rights, and who treated white women and Black women with the utmost respect, deference and dignity and reserved all of his misogyny for myself and other Asian women, it really says something about our own internal struggles within the Asian community.
We have been so focused on “positive” representation that we forget that positive representation is the same side of the “model minority” coin. We need whole, human, flawed representation. We need to all be allowed to have a movie flop and still get another movie. We need to be allowed to make mistakes. We need to have Asian love interests who don’t have six-pack abs. This is what we need … and I think that got lost in the conversation, because we were just caught up in positive representation, and that’s why I kept my mouth shut for so long. I wanted to maintain the positive idea of the show. But that came at a cost, and that cost was almost my life.
I wanted to be in a workplace where I didn’t have all those memories of abuse and harassment and shame following me that I had tried to swallow [during] the first few years of that show, and I think what I want people to take from it is that feelings don’t go away just because you will them to. You can’t muscle through it. It’ll inevitably come out somewhere else. … A lot of people judged my whole Twitter scene a few years ago, and I am saying people should have their feelings when they have them, and people should also extend grace to people who are having big feelings, because you never know what context that they’re coming from.
It would have been easy for you to frame these difficult stories only from your point of view, but why did you feel it was necessary to write those events from different perspectives? Why did you decide to write that you have forgiven M— for what had happened on that set?
I try to do that for every character in my book. In a way, I even extend an empathy towards my rapist. In my book, I say, “You know what? I can understand how he might be baffled by my rape accusation, where in his mind I was the bitch who ghosted him. And he would think, ‘Oh my God, I’ve never raped anyone. Are you kidding me?’” Not because I’m trying to defend him, but because I think engaging in empathy is better for my own soul than vilifying somebody.
So I do that for M— the book, because I try to do that for everyone in my life, because I think it’s the better place to put my attention. Like, with Will Smith’s slap, everybody wanted to pass judgment on that. Another way you could have focused your attention is to say something like, “Hmm, that was really out-of-character and unexpected. I wonder what was going on in that person’s head at the time. Let me choose to focus my attention on my curiosity rather than my judgment.”
The problem is that people think engaging your curiosity means that you’re defending the person. You can still think somebody did the wrong thing and take the time to understand why they did it. It’s just choosing where you put your attention, and I choose to put my attention on the thing that I think will help me grow the best. Maybe that’s my selfish way, but I think judging people doesn’t help me grow. I think engaging in curiosity and forgiveness and empathy for people, even when they don’t deserve it, helps my heart grow.
Like many Asian Americans, you write about wanting to fit in and having to teach your parents about American holidays—all while trying to avoid stereotypical depictions of Asians in mainstream media. Did your onscreen work deepen your own appreciation of your cultural identity over time?
My appreciation of my cultural identity has been consistently at the same level since I was a youth. I think that the choices I make now have changed, and what I mean by that is, like in my essay about Jurassic Park, I did fit in really well in my school. … I was a cheerleader; I was a homecoming princess. I fit in quite well. But then some tiger mom would come on TV with a stereotypical accent and would make me feel embarrassed—not because my friends associated me with them, but because I was worried they would, even though they never ever did.
So many actors say, “I refuse to play stereotypical roles,” and I realized that refusal is a reaction to a system that never understood you in the first place. I got into the arts to be creative, not reactive. And if your choices are so reactive that you refuse a certain character, even though that character might be a real person who exists, it almost reinforces the shame that white supremacy has put on these Asian stereotypes. … The goal isn’t to get rid of stereotypes; the goal is to humanize and say stereotypes are only harmful when they are reductive to a person, but true artists know how to be expansive with them. Yes, I guess I have an accent. Why? Not because it’s funny, but because I know two fucking languages, bro. That’s pretty fucking cool. You’re gonna make fun of me for that? Alright, how many languages do you know? It’s [about] taking ownership of it instead of letting somebody else’s joke dictate the things that you find shameful.
How has your relationship with fame changed over the course of your career, and what did you learn from those quiet years of introspection that you spent away from social media?
When there’s scrutiny and criticism, I think the initial reflex is to be defensive. Like, if somebody criticizes me for dating one white person, and then they make an assumption about my entire dating history based on one boyfriend, I could say, “You know what? Love is love. That’s a stupid argument! I can’t believe you would insult my dating choices!” … Or I can use that criticism as an opportunity to be like, “Hmm, I wonder what made somebody so touchy about something that shouldn’t affect them that badly, like my dating choices.” I’m gonna have curiosity about this person’s experience, because I have confidence and I feel very centered in who I date and why I date them, so I don’t need to defend it because it’s not under threat by somebody else’s criticism.
But hey, can I take this criticism as an opportunity to engage my empathy even if somebody doesn’t deserve it? Yeah. That’s what I learned in the past three years: Scrutiny doesn’t feel good, but if you choose to focus your attention on not defending yourself but understanding why somebody might say something like that, it just becomes a wonderful lesson in humanity that I really actually enjoy. That’s why I like critiques of my acting work. I think reviews are more revealing of the reviewer than they are of me and my performance.
Considering that mental health is still often stigmatized and considered a taboo subject in Asian cultures, how do you hope your story will help to start a larger conversation about that issue, and what do you think can be done to break those barriers of communication across cultures and generations?
Hopefully, I think people who have the platform to talk about it will talk about it. When I was a kid, my mom would compare and be like, “Oh, Wanda’s son got 1600 on their SATs. He went to Harvard.” So maybe somebody will be like, “Oh, Constance Wu goes to therapy every week! And somebody who’s as successful as her talks about how it’s an okay thing, so maybe it is.” I think that’s a way I can help, but we’ve still got a long way to go.
There’s a whole episode on Fresh Off the Boat about how Asian families don’t say, “I love you.” What is that?! How does that affect you as a kid to never hear your parents say, “I love you”? It’s gotta affect you somewhere. You gotta get that out in therapy, man. That’s why we need to talk about these kinds of things, and the only way to get it out there is just to be open about it, and that means being open about things that aren’t positive.
I’m kind of sick of the stories of heroes overcoming the odds and being these great shining beacons of hope. I want to hear the story of the person who fucks up and continues to fuck up, but is still trying to be a better person and isn’t afraid of showing their ugly, embarrassing side. We’ve got to show our more embarrassing sides, and the funny thing is, usually, when you show your embarrassing side, it’s not that embarrassing. Then you get to laugh about it and be a little bit free from this idea of wanting to be positive all the time. It’s kind of nice.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Making a Scene is now available wherever books are sold.
Max Gao is a freelance journalist based out of Toronto, who has written for The New York Times, NBC News, Sports Illustrated, Observer, Vulture, Teen Vogue and Apartment Therapy. Follow him on Twitter: @MaxJGao.
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