WORDS

I am a screenwriter who also writes articles on history and travel, first person essays, and reviews for theater and film.

SCREENPLAYS

Read some of my scripts below! These are just three of my projects. There are more… so many more…

DELIVERY

Drama / Short

Hilario is a dreamer who collects long English words while working as a delivery boy for a fancy restaurant.

GILDED CAGE

Film Noir / Feature Narrative

Edward Lee, a successful Korean-American executive, attempts to help a Malaysian prostitute by paying off her smuggling debt. When he is arrested for being the kingpin of a human trafficking ring, he has two weeks out on bail to find out who set him up and why.

Quarter Finalist — Fade in Awards 2nd Prize - Suspense/Thriller — Indie Gathering Film Festival

EX LIBRIS

DRAMA / FEATURE NARRATIVE

An old Chinese woman wandering on the FDR Drive is picked up by a used bookseller, who embarks on a quixotic quest to find her family. Meanwhile, Grace confronts the past she thought she left behind as she searches Chinatown for her missing mother.

Finalist — Sundance Screenwriters Lab | Slamdance Screenplay Contest | Berlinale Talent Campus | Boston Int’l Script to Screen Contest

FREELANCE WRITING

I write articles about obscure history, particularly women and people of history. Here are some recent articles in the online publication Messy Nessy Chic:

THE GEISHA WHO BROUGHT KABUKI TO THE WEST

At the height of japonisme, Sada Yacco appeared like a comet, touring America and Europe with the first kabuki theatre company ever seen in the West. She was the undisputed star of the 1900 Paris Exposition, drawing bigger crowds and garnering more rhapsodic praise than the divine Sarah Bernhardt herself. A trailblazer who defied tradition as the only woman in an all-male kabuki company, she introduced Japanese theatre to the West and then brought Shakespeare to Japan. {Read More}

WHEN MONTMARTRE WAS HARLEM ON THE SEINE

After the Great War, a new kind of music began to waft through the winding streets of lower Montmartre. Unrestrained, audacious, with a potent syncopated rhythm unlike anything ever heard in Europe. It was the music of Black Americans who had started to move into the neighborhood. For a brief time, far away from Jim Crow in the United States, they established a cultural utopia with no color lines. And for that brief interlude known as Les Années Folles, Montmartre became known as Harlem-on-the-Seine. {Read More}

THE JAPANESE FISHING VILLAGE THAT VANISHED FROM LOS ANGELES

Imagine being given 48 hours to pack up and leave for an unknown destination. What would you bring with you? What would you do with your house, your business, all your clothing and furniture? On February 25th, 1942, some 3,000 Japanese-American residents on Terminal Island in Los Angeles county were faced with this unimaginable situation. {Read More}

RENOIR’S ART MODEL WAS THE GREATEST PAINTER YOU NEVER HEARD OF

Name a post-Impressionist woman painter and most people would draw a blank. Or they would cast their mind back to Mary Cassat or Berthe Morisot and their pastel domestic scenes. Few know of Suzanne Valadon, who shocked the turn-of-the-century art world with her boldly outlined nudes. A circus performer, single teenage mother, and art model turned painter, Valadon blazed a unique path through the Belle Epoque, and created a body of work as vivid and honest as her life. {Read More}

See All My Articles in Messy Nessy Chic

OTHER WRITING

My personal essays are about New York City, mostly about the city's arts and culture, but also immigrant communities, history, and the economics of art. Sometimes I also write about Asian-American and gender issues too.

I've written about the beginning of Off-Off Broadway, enlightened European tourists on free New York City summer events, penned biographies of radical Latino writers, and blogged my sex life for New York Magazine (no, I won't link, but yes, it's online). I can write in almost any style from highly formal to pithy vernacular. I've won a few awards for my screenplays and I make a living writing grants for arts organizations.

I also have spoken on the history of Asian-American Theater, Taiwanese identity, and Arts and Activism at several organizations, including Yale University, New York University, and MIT.

My personal blog is called A Hard Way to Make an Easy Living. I haven’t been updating it much lately but I’m back in NYC so maybe I’ll take up essay writing again.

SELECTED REVIEWS

I was the regular reviewer for NY Theatre from 2010 to 2012. Sadly, they’ve suspended their website and my articles are no longer online. And I can’t seem to find any of the 20+ articles I wrote for them in my files. But you can still read a few examples of my theatre critiques in Stage & Cinema.

THE GOOD PERSON OF SZECHWAN, Public Theater, Oct 29, 2013

“By casting Taylor Mac as Shen Te, gender issues are illuminated through the meta-theatrics of a man playing a woman playing a man. I was left pondering how one can be “good” faced with not only the general economic and social inequality of the world, but also marginalized as a woman with less pay and – in many places like the real Sichuan – fewer rights….”

MISS LILLY GETS BONED by Beckah Brunstetter, Ohio Theatre, July 21, 2012

“The real dilemma in the play has little to do with whether or not Lilly gets it on with Richard…That’s a foregone conclusion from the moment that he tells her that his name is Dick. Instead, Lilly’s late and involuntary virginity frames a smart and insightful examination of the animal urge for both sex and violence. As Lilly attempts to come to terms with both instincts, she discovers just how deeply – and tragically – they are intertwined…”

KING JOHN, Access Theater, Sept 24, 2011

“…Criticism of the play often centers on the lack of heroism in King John, the king everyone loves to hate (he’s the bad guy in the Robin Hood stories), and the attention drawn by the supporting character of the Bastard (more about him later).  Perhaps they are looking for valor in all the wrong places – and in all the wrong sexes….”