John Cho on Finding Himself as an Asian American Artist

Before the fame, before Harold & Kumar and Searching, John Cho was just a college student trying to find his place in the world. In a recent interview about that time in his life, he shares that transferring to UC Berkeley was “the first independent, proactive thing that I did for myself,” a decision that marked a turning point for him. Once there, he suddenly felt a freedom he hadn’t known before. Surrounded by students from all walks of life, he realized he could explore who he was without being boxed in. “You could put on any T-shirt you wanted,” he says, “and I mean that in the identity sense.”

Cho didn’t start out as a theater kid. He was an English major who loved words. Then one day his roommate brought home a flyer for a student play, and he “wandered into this student production and that’s how I got interested.” That small decision opened the door to his first professional acting experience: a regional production of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. The show was a collaboration with East West Players, the groundbreaking Asian American theater company in Los Angeles. For the production, they needed student actors, and Cho was one of them. “In any other situation, I would not have met these Asian American actors,” he remembers, “without whom I would never have considered the possibility of doing it for a living.”

Growing up, Cho had struggled with being both “Korean” and “American,” labels that never seemed to really capture entirely who he was. It wasn’t until college that he discovered the idea of a collective identity that reflected his own real-life experience. “It was at Berkeley that I started to think of this third identity, which was being Asian American. It seemed to describe better what I was living.”

Cho specifically credits his professors with giving him “a set of vocabulary” to make sense of it all. They taught him about things like the ‘model minority’ myth. “I’m still having to talk about that particular myth when discussing screenplays. It still dogs us. It’s really quite dangerous, so it’s still something I think about and talk about,” he says.

Those lessons are still with him today. Cho’s approach to acting has evolved from chasing fun roles to considering those that have purpose and representation. “Now I ask myself, do we need this story right now? Do we need it today?” he says. This idea that art has power and responsibility comes directly from his education and growth as an Asian American artist.

“Berkeley was the flowering of that consciousness for me. It was a very useful step on the ladder to figuring out who I was. And it remains so.”

Photo by Charlie Nguyen/Wikimedia Commons