"The Wedding Banquet" (2025) is now in theaters. Photo: Courtesy of Bleecker Street and ShivHans Pictures In 1993, Ang Lee’s “The Wedding Banquet” broke ground as one of the earliest films to bring a queer Asian love story to a global audience. It was a story of compromise, of navigating the delicate balance between cultural tradition and personal truth. For many, it was a revelation, a rare glimpse of queer life framed not by tragedy but by humor and heart. Thirty years later, the world has shifted in profound ways, and with it, the story of “The Wedding Banquet” has found a new chapter, reimagined for 2025. At the heart of the original film was a singular question: How can one stay true to themselves while upholding the expectations of family? In 1993, the stakes were clear. Marriage was portrayed as the finish line, a hard-won victory for those who could claim it. For Wai-Tung and Simon, balancing a sham marriage and a closeted existence was as much about survival as it was about love.  Photo: Courtesy of Bleecker Street and ShivHans Pictures The 2025 reboot, helmed by an ensemble cast including Bowen Yang, Kelly Marie Tran, Lily Gladstone, and Han Gi-Chan, takes that foundation and builds something bolder. It shifts the focus from marriage as the ultimate goal to the broader, messier questions: What else is part of an evolving relationship? Marriage is great, but what about parenthood? Choosing a family? How do we navigate the responsibilities and uncertainties of queer love in a landscape that is both more accepting and more precarious? Bowen Yang reflects, “I feel like we're still collectively figuring out how to move into those spaces of acceptance that feel uncomplicated and don't have an asterisk to them. It just feels very relatable. And there's the power in that.” The reboot captures that relatability by refusing to shy away from the complexities of queer life today, where the victories of the past coexist with the challenges of the present. Photo: Courtesy of Bleecker Street and ShivHans Pictures Family, of course, remains central to “The Wedding Banquet,” but the film reexamines the theme through the lens of chosen family. In this updated vision, family is not just a biological bond but a conscious act of connection and support. “Between Angela and Min, they choose their biological family, to bring them into the fold after years of being alienated by them,” says Bowen Yang.  “It’s kind of a double meaning. There’s the family you choose, and then there’s the act of choosing your family,” adds Lily Gladstone. “I have my own perspective that is shared widely through Indian country. We're not a homogenized society, but there are some things that are kind of common. And one of those is this concept of chosen family. We keep really tight record [of our family lineage] orally and [for] the last couple hundred years for government purposes, on paper. Adoption is as good as blood. Like when you're coming of age, and you're starting to date around, your family lets you know who you're related to and who you're not, so you don't cross those lines.” Bowen Yang and Han Gi-Chan, who play one half of the central couples, bring a contemporary depth to their roles (Chris and Min, respectively). Their characters delve into the complexities of queer relationships today: the shadow of generational trauma, the weight of societal expectations, and the joy of building something entirely new. Their story isn’t just about coming out; it’s about staying out, about the daily acts of courage required to live authentically in a world that still resists full acceptance. Photo: Courtesy of Bleecker Street and ShivHans Pictures “Min feels like he can't come out to his family because it would cut him off from something that he feels rooted to,” says Bowen Yang of his co-star’s character. “[And] Angela had a pretty tumultuous coming out that ended up boomeranging back into overcorrected acceptance. She still feels alienated even though it feels like it's this thing that's being embraced about her now. The movie does a really amazing job of mending those wounds as the story progresses.”  “I agree,” Kelly Marie Tran adds. “I also think Kendall’s coming out and the idea that Chris takes care of them in this process is also such a beautiful depiction of what a coming out can be if you have a family that doesn't accept you.” Photo: Courtesy of Bleecker Street and ShivHans Pictures Perhaps the most beautiful aspect of “The Wedding Banquet” is also its most coincidental: the timing of its release. While the film was crafted as a deeply personal story about queer love and family, its arrival feels a little bit like fate, or at least a blessing, shining as an inadvertent beacon in a sociopolitical climate battered by conflicting waves of progress and backlash. “We didn't make a political film,” says Lily Gladstone. “We made a film that had really solid bedrock with socioeconomic, cultural comments without being explicitly about queerness, about culture, about gentrification. Those are all just the world that this family finds themselves in. And I think that makes a film that represents people really authentically where they're at. And the rest of the ship was just built so well that it can weather a lot of different seas. So I do feel like it does have this timeless element because it embraces and acknowledges the culture and the time that we find ourselves in, and each character's proximity. It makes space for widening the lens and the conversation about queerness globally and culturally.”  “I learned just now that it is not a safer time for LGBT communities to live peaceful lives,” Han Gi-Chan says. “We didn't plan this timing [for the movie] to come out. And not only for those communities, but every humanity on earth could see this movie and feel what family means, what love means to them. It's a story for all times. We live with a family, we live with love.” “I feel like we did create this big warm hug of a film for people that we always intended to,” Gladstone adds. “We didn't know that we were making such good medicine for the times ahead for people who needed it.” Bowen Yang echoes this sentiment, noting, “They say hyperspecificity ends up being universal. I feel like this kind of hyperspecificity ends up being relevant and timeless. And it's never not going to be important to touch on these things, just like how the original movie was relevant at the time [and] still is.” About "The Wedding Banquet" (2025): Run: 87 minutes Director: Andrew Ahn Screenplay: Andrew Ahn and James Schamus (Based on the screenplay by Ang Lee & Neil Peng and James Schamus) Producers: Anita Gou, p.g.a., Joe Pirro, p.g.a. Featuring: Bowen Yang, Lily Gladstone, Kelly Marie Tran, Han Gi-Chan, Bobo Le, Camille Atebe, Joan Chen, Youn Yuh-Jung Directors of Photography: Youn Yuh-Jung Production Companies: Bleecker Street, ShivHans Pictures, Kindred Spirit & Symbolic Exchange Cover Photo: Courtesy of Bleecker Street and ShivHans Pictures

All 10 episodes are now streaming on Hulu. At some point, we all wonder: are we the star of our own story or just another face in the crowd? Through the journey of Willis Wu — a man stuck between aspiration and the reality he's expected to accept — "Interior Chinatown" (2024) delivers a tale that is both strange and achingly familiar. Willis exists in a world where everything is scripted, literally. Conventionally cast as Generic Asian Man in a fictionalized cop show, he dreams of transcending the background role he's been relegated to. But breaking free means confronting the invisible rules that shape not just his life but the lives of everyone around him. "Interior Chinatown" weaves together biting satire, surreal imagery, and poignant drama in a humorous and heartfelt exploration of identity, ambition, and the spaces between who we are and who we long to be.  The novel that the show is based on bears the same name, and, ironically, is told through the unconventional framework of screenplay format, with shifting fonts and typography that mirror Willis's fragmented internal life. Despite the already-cinematic feel of the book, adapting it to the screen was no small feat. Author and show creator Charles Yu  recalls the challenge of manifesting the novel's dual worlds outside of a reader's imagination without losing their complexity. "I might just type a few words casually, and then all of a sudden I have 50 people asking me, okay, so what color is that? Or what does that look like?" he says. "In a bigger conceptual sense, the challenge is the book plays in a kind of liminal space, I would say. How do you make it clear that Willis is caught between two worlds? How do you make the world of the cop show, make it feel very real and literal, and then drop Willis into that world?" Taika Waititi , director of the pilot episode, brings those coexisting planes to life with strikingly different visual languages. "If you're thinking about the world around [Willis] from his point of view and how he sees himself, it's kind of bland and muted colors," says Waititi. "And it's all handheld, so it feels a bit rough and clumsy. Then you contrast that with the world of the show-within-the-show 'Black & White.' We wanted that to be heightened. People are backlit, and it's all special lighting, and the camera work [is] always smooth and slick." "We worked really hard on trying to make it feel like a '90s-style police procedural," Charles Yu adds. "Sometimes a little bit off-kilter and hopefully funny, but real enough that you get it, that it feels like the world that Willis wants to enter." "The really interesting thing is that [the procedural] is a world that [Willis] aspires to get into," says Waititi. "Coming from New Zealand, that would be like how I imagined everything to look [in Hollywood]. But when you think about the closer you get to those dreams or the closer you get to being a part of that world, the more you realise the world you come from is actually more beautiful." For Jimmy O. Yang, who plays Willis Wu, the character's struggle to break free from stereotypical roles is deeply personal. Reflecting on his own career, Yang sees many parallels between his journey and Willis's. "I think I've actually done a lot of these characters that Willis ends up being assigned to or has gone through through," he says. "I was Generic Asian Man. I was Chinese Teenager #1 on ' Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. ,' a show that Chloe [Bennet] was a star in, funnily enough. I also snuck in as the tech guy, right? Like on ' Silicon Valley .'"  While these roles were welcomed at the time, Yang recalls how he didn't fully realize he was being put in a box. "I think I kind of had a blind optimism about me in my younger self, that although I didn't see a lot of myself on TV or I didn't see people like me being the star, I was like, you know what? It's one thing at a time. It's one step at a time." As Yang's career evolved, so did his understanding of Asian representation in Hollywood. Reflecting on this particular project, he explains, "It means everything. I think I'm very fortunate to have actually gone through every single number on the call sheet to be able to inform and help tell this story. But just being able to be a part of this and bring my own self and my experience to bring this character to life was quite special." "I think people talk a lot about representation and seeing someone that looks like you on screen and how much that means, and I absolutely agree with that," Charles Yu confirms. "I also think it's important to see yourself in people that don't look anything like you. And I think we got to make this [show] with a really inclusive crew. Yes, I mean a lot of Asian Americans, but I also mean a lot of non-Asian Americans." "Getting to tell this story on a platform like Hulu with people like Taika and our cast and so many other people is an amazing chance to tell stories about people that don't normally get that treatment," Yu says. "To really humanize and add dimension to them." Just as the show spotlights characters who are often overlooked, "Interior Chinatown" also offers a critique of how women — especially women of color — are often defined by their relationship to men or reduced to a simplified version of their identity. Detective Lana Lee, played by "Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." star Chloe Bennet, makes her grand entrance on screen in slow motion, hair blowing in the conveniently-aimed wind, glowing with the magical light of heroism behind her. Initially presented as Willis's ultimate fantasy — both as a woman and a main character in his story — Lana is promptly hoisted onto a pedestal of tokenized desirability with little attention paid to who she actually is and what she might want for herself or struggle with.  Yet as Willis's story progresses, so does Lana's. She exists beyond her connection to Willis and the role she plays in catalyzing his so-called awakening, giving her character something far more complex and layered than the part that was written for her. "There's a mystery within Lana that is revealed throughout the season," says Chloe Bennet. "Tonally, I really wanted the performance to be something that you could watch the first time around and be like, oh, that makes sense. But then you could watch it again. And if you're really paying attention, there are cracks to her façade, whether it's just little glances or just acknowledging the larger truth of who she is or what she doesn't know about herself right away." "Each character has their own version of discovering who they are and ultimately finding where they belong," Bennet continues. "I think Lana is seemingly a real asset to help Willis figure that out. At the same time, she's stuck in her own world trying to find out where she fits, how she is her own main character." "I think it's relatable for women," Bennet adds. "The trope of your relevance depending on whether you're in tandem with a man or how you're servicing a man. For a lot of women in film and TV, that is a constant box that we are put in. And I think that the show addresses that in a really smart way." The mystery of Lana also cannot be separated from her race. Through her, the show points to how mixed-race characters navigate a tightrope of identity, forced to exist somewhere between idealization and marginalization. In the fictionalized cop show, Lana's purpose is to be proof that the police department is "culturally considerate" — a statement made openly and with poorly-hidden resentment. "She toes the line as being this icon that is ethnic enough," says Bennet. "Ethnically ambiguous. She's white enough that we can let her in." Bennet's connection to Lana's struggle with identity feels deeply personal, as she navigates her own experiences of balancing belonging and alienation as a mixed-race actress. "It's more than just not fitting in, not necessarily feeling whole," Bennet says. "Psychologically, you can start to tell yourself a lot of things about what you are or what you're not, especially if you're just constantly referred to as half of something. It's not something that fits into a box in a way that's satisfying for an entirely white world or an entirely Asian world. I didn't have to fake a lot of the feelings of frustration or feeling like an interracial pawn to satiate both sides of things." "And certainly, for [Lana], it's breaking out of that in a lot of ways," Bennet finishes. "For Lana, her bigger journey is trying to take another step closer to finding out where she belongs, what she wants, and what her story looks like if it's not about somebody else." Through "Interior Chinatown," Charles Yu reminds us that identity is never as simple as the roles we play or the labels we're given. Whether it's Willis striving to be more than Generic Asian Man or Lana's search for her own identity, the show peels back the layers of performance to reveal the intricacy of humanity. "It's about who we really are underneath and how we sometimes feel like we have to perform aspects of ourselves or aspects of other people's expectations — and then what happens when some of that starts to slip," says Yu. "Just finding those genuine moments of connection between people and authenticities is what I hope people really start to see the show is about." All 10 episodes of 'Interior Chinatown' (2024) are now streaming on Hulu. Based on Charles Yu’s award-winning book of the same name, the show follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural called "Black & White." Relegated to the background, Willis goes through the motions of his on-screen job, waiting tables, dreaming about a world beyond Chinatown and aspiring to be the lead of his own story. When Willis inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, he begins to unravel a criminal web in Chinatown, while discovering his own family’s buried history and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. CAST: Jimmy O. Yang, Ronny Chieng, Chloe Bennet, Archie Kao, Diana Lin Recurring guest stars include: Tzi Ma, Chris Pang, Annie Chang, Chau Long CREDITS: Series creator Charles Yu serves as executive producer, along with Dan Lin and Linsey Liberatore for Rideback; Jeff Skoll, Miura Kite, and Elsie Choi for Participant; Garrett Basch for Dive; John Lee; and Taika Waititi, who also directed the pilot. The 10-episode limited series is produced by 20th Television. Cover Photo: Courtesy of Hulu

Many people think of classical music as a thing of the past. Its compositions have stood the test of time, holding a unique place in cultural history. Works by people like Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven, Mahler, Wagner, Schubert, and more still have the industry in a chokehold, dominating elite classical music institutions and programs worldwide. However, classical music is undergoing a remarkable transformation. The world today is immensely diverse, and musicians are reimagining classical works, infusing them with new perspectives and cultural influences. So, instead of fading into stagnancy, classical music is expanding thanks to the dedication of musicians who are reshaping its narrative and relevance in ways that continue to captivate. Dr. Xenia Deviatkina-Loh , a talented violinist, pedagogue, and advocate for diversity in classical music, is one of the individuals leading the charge for change. Born in Sydney, Australia, and now residing in Los Angeles, Deviatkina-Loh’s journey with the violin began with her mother. “I was a fidgety child,” she jokes. “And she thought, hey, let’s get her into violin. Maybe my kid will be less fidgety.”  (That plan never worked out. Deviatkina-Loh is, she admits, still very fidgety.) While she found her passion for classical music early in life, Deviatkina-Loh’s pursuit of that track also revealed the inequalities entrenched within the industry. She became acutely aware of the challenges faced by musicians from low-income or underrepresented backgrounds. “It isn’t just down to basic costs, like violins,” she says. “Your strings, bows, maintenance, and lessons all amount to a big dollar sign.” “A kid in college, if they want to pursue [violin], the instruments probably go between a four-figure to a low five-figure. It shouldn’t be normalized,” she insists. “Where does that money come from? Not every family has the financial stability to do that.” Deviatkina-Loh is not one to shy away from a challenge. Recognizing the need for change, she got involved with the Asian Classical Music Initiative (ACMI). “It’d be easy if I just put my head down, which is such an Asian thing to do, right?” she says. “But I was always that kid who told my mom, ‘this isn’t fair.’” The ACMI is a pioneering effort committed to promoting the work of AAAPI classical music composers and musicians. Founded by graduate students at the University of Kansas, ACMI holds concerts and conferences to raise awareness and celebrate the cultural traditions of Asia, Asian America, and the Pacific Islands. ACMI’s work comes at an important time when conversations about DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) are at the forefront of both the classical music industry and the wider world. The initiative aims to address the often-invisible racial inequalities within the classical music community, particularly for Asian and Asian-American individuals. As a platform, ACMI offers musicians of all backgrounds a place to showcase their talents and contribute to a more inclusive classical music landscape. “It’s hard,” Deviatkina-Loh says. “It’s a lot of work, and yeah, that’s a reality. People don’t get comfortable with you speaking up.” Deviatkina-Loh’s work with ACMI is part of a larger movement within the industry to make a positive impact on issues related to diversity, representation, and inclusion. While there has been some progress made in recent years, there is still much work to be done to make sure that musicians of all backgrounds are given equal opportunities. ACMI’s efforts, along with those of individuals like Dr. Deviatkina-Loh, are paving the way for a classical music community in which talent knows no boundaries.

< Back Kath Pacao Administrative Specialist Her weekday life revolves around being an administrative professional and communication expertise from staff to presidential levels. She has a demonstrated history of working in various financial institutions and organizations. As her weekday might seem tedious, Kath’s weekend revolves around cosplay as a hobby. For more than 10 years, she’s been traveling around the world doing cosplay photoshoots, meeting new friends, and trying world cuisines. Kath’s goal is to connect with people on various platforms and do small actions to make the world a better place.

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