Locating Agrabah: Orientalism and the Stage in Disney's Aladdin on Broadway
The Female Gaze, June 2017
Earlier this year, it was announced that Filipino-American Broadway star Telly Leung would be replacing Adam Jacobs—who is himself Filipino, Dutch, Jewish, and Polish—as the title character in Disney’s Aladdin, currently on Broadway and touring nationally. There has been some debate as to the legitimacy of the casting, especially as Leung joins a cast which features few, if any, actors of Middle Eastern descent.
An Open Letter to the Davis Museum
Wellesley Underground, February 2017
I would like to preface this essay with the acknowledgement that my response to this protest is informed by these four major factors: 1) I am an immigrant from a non-western country, 2) I am a woman of color, 3) I make art, and 4) I graduated from Wellesley College in 2014 with bachelor’s degrees in Art History and Cinema & Media Studies.
Yellow is the New Black: Reflections on Playing Chinese-American
Counterpoint Magazine, May 2014
In the spring of my first year at Wellesley, I was cast in a student production of Yellow Face (2007) by David Henry Hwang, the first Asian American playwright to win a Tony Award for his work on M. Butterfly in 1988.
21st Century Orientals: The Displacement of Eastern Identities in the Contemporary Hollywood Adaptation
Undergraduate Honors Thesis, April 2014
This thesis bloomed out of a budding interest in the Hollywood system that conveniently converged with my increasing desire to understand the complex social politics that govern my own identity as a first-generation Asian American, all of which was spurred on by the increasing prevalence of modern methods of mass communication.