When I found out at the age of 22 that I was not somehow failing at being liked by others, but that a series of horribly well-meant mistakes by my parents, teachers and pediatricians had kept me from the autism diagnosis I should have had when I was eight, the only thing that cheered me up for months was hunting for serial killers in Copenhagen and Malmö.
I know I can’t represent All Asians Everywhere any more than Jubilee could. I can’t give everyone everything they want and need in art, in stories. But I hope that those who don’t find what they need in my stories will find it elsewhere, that we’ll keep working toward having a variety of superheroes to choose favorites from.
There is a sad truth known throughout communities of people with disabilities: exploitation. A plethora of videos make their way across various social media sites. These popular videos, known to some as “Inspiration Porn,” use the stories of people with disabilities and cut them into thirty-second clips with a caption along the lines of 'Wow! I need to be thankful for what I have!'
Art is important. It is an echo of the real world, capturing our perceptions and reflecting them back to us. And what do we discover reflected in the story of Marie-Laure? A well-crafted homage to destructive stereotypes about blindness, softened and made pretty by artful prose.
Some critics were calling Finn, among other things, comic relief, a token, and a coward. I don’t make a habit of arguing with people’s opinions, but what you’re not gonna do is flatten this character because he doesn’t fit your narrow expectations.
Celeste Ng is the author of the novel Everything I Never Told You, which was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2014, Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications. Everything I Never Told You was also the winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and the ALA’s Alex Award, and was a finalist for numerous awards, including…
I set out to write about podcasts and representation in terms of media criticism; to ask podcasters, Who do you record with? Who gets to hold the mic? Are you sharing the (Internet) airwaves with people of color, LGBTQ people, women, and other marginalized groups? I wanted to hear more about content and diversity. But when I talked to five podcasters, each smart and successful in her own way, I also learned a lot more about…
How important is it to see people like you in the media you consume? For your children to see themselves? Thanks to Claudia Kim's brief but welcome appearance in Avengers: Age of Ultron and the bewildering decision to cast white actress Emma Stone as “1/4 Hawaiian, 1/4 Chinese” Allison Ng in Aloha, the issue of Asian/Pacific Islander visibility in pop culture has been on my mind more than usual. I wanted to know what this lack of representation -- and the slow but (one…
I saw Avengers: Age of Ultron on Friday night. It was ridiculous -- RIDICULOUS -- and I loved it. I've seen several tweets and a few reviews panning the movie, and I admit that in the initial heady afterglow of seeing a Korean actor on the silver screen, I couldn't even begin to understand the disappointment. Is it possible that we did we not see the same movie? Did you people not notice the talented and gorgeous…
