Quote

I remember being in Japan when Destiny's Child put out 'Independent Women,' and women there were saying how proud they were to have their own jobs, their own independent thinking, their own goals. It made me feel so good, and I realized that one of my responsibilities was to inspire women in a deeper way.

After college, I wanted to learned about myself as an American, so I left the United States and went to Japan.

Throughout my career, I was to be cast as a frontier girl, an aristocrat, an Arabian, a Eurasian, a Polynesian, and a Chinese.

I grew up in the age of discount air fare, and for me, the act of joining a culture was a great way about learning about that different culture. So I grew up in the South, and went to college in the North, and found out that I learned about myself as a Southerner by leaving the South and going to the Northeast.

I'm of Filipino, Spanish, and Chinese descent, and was raised on Hawaii.

I left home when I turned 17 and ran away to New York. I did a lot of moving. I was based in New York and country-hopping, so I was always 'the new girl'.

Growing up in California, I obviously knew about our deep connections with the Japanese.

I spent my first two years at a small all-male college in Virginia called Hampden-Sydney. That was like going to college 120 years ago. The languages, a year of rhetoric, all of the great books, Western Man courses, stuff like that.