The April issue of Allure is getting a lot of attention, and it’s the right kind of attention. Allure’s April issue is about beauty, diversity and inclusion, and they profiled more than forty women of color to discuss race and beauty issues and more. The issue includes that Meghan Markle piece about feeling too light for the black community and too dark for the white community, which I already covered. Anyway, Constance Wu also contributed an interview to the issue. I’ve become Wu’s fan in the past few years because she dares to call out specific people for racism and their backwards views on women (and women of color). You know she’s probably getting tons of sh-t and she might actually be hurting her career. But she doesn’t care, and I admire that kind of fearlessness. Wu talks to Allure about when she became woke to racial issues and more. Some highlights:

Her background: “My family is Chinese-Taiwanese. I’m from Richmond, Virginia. The community in which I grew up was pretty white. The storybooks you got at school featured white children and an animal, or animals, and as you got older the novels you were assigned were about, like, the problems of white boys and their dogs.”

Grateful for work: “I’d always booked television work, but I’d always been in the supporting role, the best friend or the assistant to the white person. And I was grateful and happy for that. I wasn’t forced to think about it, because I was placated to the point of satisfaction. But once I was in the lead role and other people started making such a big deal out of it, I realized I was previously blind to it. I thought, I should read stuff by people who’ve thought about it more than I have. It was quite freeing [to discover that] the self-blame I had internalized my whole life had a language and a community that I hadn’t previously had. That said, I think that sort of self-blame informed my work ethic. It made me want to work harder.

There’s a difference between Asians and Asian-Americans: “I wish reporters were more in tune to the difference between the Asian experience and the Asian-American experience. I think often they lump the two together and think that when I talk about Asian-American narratives that they can cite Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Mulan as proof of concept when it’s a different experience. We are told that we should be placated by those stories, even though they aren’t our stories. You can’t name an Asian-American movie that’s mainstream in the past ten years. You cannot name one. You cannot. You could name a Chinese movie, a Korean movie, blah blah blah, but it’s different. Even my television show is a period piece. It’s set in the ’90s. And a lot of times people think of Asian culture as some mythical world, instead of modern people with modern occupations with modern problems, modern tools, and modern occupations. Like we’re not all just talking Taoism and kung fu — some people are just trying to get over their breakup with their boyfriend, and they’re Facebook stalking.”

[From Allure]

I was thinking about what she said about Asian-American stories being represented, and I could only come up with a few examples: Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, which is probably the first and only time two Asian-American men got to be leads of a movie. There’s also a lot of great work being done on television, but I know she’s talking about films. That’s what I love about The Mindy Project, even when the stories go to problematic places – Mindy Kaling has made her Indian-American-ness a part of the show, but it feels like a quietly radical move to show an Indian-American character who is just like every other woman, with love drama and work drama and flaws and more.

Also, I laughed at the shade of this: “as you got older the novels you were assigned were about, like, the problems of white boys and their dogs.” It’s so true.

Photos courtesy of WENN, Allure.