All-American Asian: Finding My Place in Hollywood's Identity Politics

As a mixed-race Filipina/White screenwriter specializing in horror, thrillers, and grounded sci-fi, I've grown accustomed to existing in liminal spaces. My identity is fluid, contested, and often misunderstood. This sense of in-betweenness extends beyond my personal life into my professional one, where Hollywood’s sudden push for "authentic voices" has created an industry-wide obsession with identity that feels anything but authentic.

The Perception Paradox

I navigate two parallel rejections. When I'm with white people, my Asian features become my defining characteristic. In Asian spaces, my mixed heritage marks me as an outsider. Depending on who is looking, I'm either too Asian or not Asian enough.

I often joke that I’m the “all-American Asian” because society loves its tidy little boxes, and I’ve spent my life spilling messily outside all of them. Hollywood, despite its claims of progress, still operates on simplistic categorizations of complex human beings.

Most people assume I’m Japanese, a mistake I’ve corrected countless times. But the real issue runs deeper. My “Asian experience” isn’t rooted in traditional cultural markers like language, customs, or homeland connections. Instead, it has been shaped by how I’ve been exoticized and fetishized throughout my life. My experience of being Asian is more about external perception than internal cultural traditions.

I’ve also experienced the industry’s attempt to tokenize me firsthand. A studio executive once excitedly told me that I was their first female Asian filmmaker. Clearly, this was a milestone for them—but not for me. And when I’m submitted for writers' rooms looking for "Asian writers," I fear I am not Asian enough.

A Heritage in Fragments

I grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood in Orange County, where diversity meant being the only mixed kid in most of my classes. My mother is German American—practical, direct, and descended from European immigrants several generations removed. My father is Filipino, but his story defies the immigrant narrative Hollywood craves. Born and raised in Hawaii, he doesn’t speak Tagalog and has never set foot in the Philippines.

Most of our family traditions came from my mother’s side, though I did attend the occasional luau where we ate kalua pork. My cultural inheritance wasn’t passed down in neat, filmable moments of ancestral wisdom or traditional cooking lessons. It came in fragments—a phrase here, a food preference there, a way of looking at the world that didn’t fit any single cultural template.

If anything, I connect more with Hawaiian culture. The laid-back island mentality, the multicultural mix, and the deep respect for nature feel more familiar to me than traditional Filipino customs.

But this complexity doesn’t fit Hollywood’s idea of what an “Asian story” should be.

Hollywood’s Identity Checklist

In recent years, as studios scramble to make up for decades of exclusion, I’ve witnessed a troubling trend: diversity has become a commodity, something to acquire and display rather than a reality to embrace. When executives say they want stories reflecting the “Asian experience,” they have a clear but narrow vision of what that means.

They want stories steeped in folklore and mythology, tales of immigrant struggles and sacrifices, narratives about intergenerational trauma and cultural clashes. They want recognizable cultural signifiers that can be marketed and packaged for easy consumption. They want stories that fit their preconceived notion of what an “Asian story” should be.

The problem isn’t that these stories exist. They’re valid and important. The problem is that they’ve become the only framework for stories from creators of color.

The Reality of My Identity

My identity isn’t a neat package tied with a cultural bow. It’s messy, contradictory, and constantly evolving. This complexity is what draws me to genre storytelling. Horror, thriller, and sci-fi allow me to explore alienation, fear of the unknown, and the search for belonging without being confined by cultural expectations.

When I create a dystopian world where people are sorted into categories based on arbitrary physical traits, I’m examining the real-world absurdity of racial classification. When I write a thriller about someone infiltrating a closed community, I’m exploring my own experiences of moving between different cultural spaces.

These stories don’t include obvious cultural signifiers. There are no grandmothers teaching traditional recipes, no character journeys back to ancestral homelands, no explicit unpacking of racial trauma. Yet they are deeply authentic to my experience as a mixed-race Asian American woman. They reflect how I see the world precisely because they explore the uncertain, the in-between, the uncategorizable.

The Authenticity Trap

The industry has created an authenticity trap. Stories are deemed “authentic” only when they conform to predetermined narratives about identity. When studios say they want “authentic Asian stories,” they often mean stories that confirm what they already believe about the Asian experience. They want cultural difference packaged in a way that’s digestible for mainstream (predominantly white) audiences.

This creates an impossible situation for creators like me. I can’t honestly tell stories rooted in traditional Filipino culture because that’s not my lived experience. My authenticity lies elsewhere, in the spaces between defined identities, in the experience of being perceived differently across contexts, in navigating worlds where I partially belong but am never fully accepted.

Beyond the Checkbox

The entertainment industry treats diversity like a checklist. Asian writer? Check. Female? Check. Story about cultural identity? Check. But diversity isn’t about ticking boxes. It’s about embracing the full, messy spectrum of human experience. There isn’t a single “Asian experience” any more than there is a single “white experience.”

Real inclusion means allowing creators from marginalized backgrounds to tell all kinds of stories, not just stories about their marginalization. It means recognizing that my perspective as a mixed-race Asian American woman influences everything I write, whether or not the story explicitly deals with race or culture.

I bring my worldview into every script I create. The isolation, the feeling of being an outsider, the complex navigation of different worlds—these themes naturally appear in my work.

Reclaiming My Narrative

My horror stories are Asian American stories because I am Asian American. My thrillers are Filipino American stories because I am Filipino American. My sci-fi explorations of identity and belonging are authentic expressions of my experience as a mixed-race woman navigating a world obsessed with categorization.

I refuse to perform an “Asian-ness” that doesn’t belong to me just to satisfy industry expectations. I won’t craft narratives centered on cultural traditions I haven’t lived. That would be the real inauthenticity.

Instead, I’ll continue creating stories that probe the darkness, question boundaries, and explore the unknown, because that’s where my truth lies. I’ll bring my perspective to genres that allow me to examine complex questions without being confined by cultural expectations.

A Call for Complexity

The industry needs to understand that authenticity isn’t just about trauma, tradition, or expected narratives. It’s about the countless unique ways we exist in the world. The Asian American experience isn’t a monolith; it’s a kaleidoscope of different histories, cultures, and individual lives.

When studios limit what qualifies as an “authentic” story from creators of color, they aren’t promoting diversity. They’re constraining it. They’re replacing old stereotypes with new ones, exchanging explicit racism for a more subtle form of othering that still treats non-white experiences as fundamentally different from universal human experiences.

Real progress means allowing creators who don’t fit neatly into cultural boxes to tell stories that reflect their actual lived experiences, not just the ones people assume they should have.

It’s time the industry expanded its understanding of what an authentic voice is and embraced the full complexity of human experience. Only then will we move beyond diversity as a checkbox and toward true inclusion.

In the meantime, I’ll keep writing my horror, my thrillers, my speculative worlds— because through them, I speak my truth.

Charlene on Substack | Threads

*Feature illustration by fran_kie (Adobe)