Drama

There’s no royalty in America; the closest thing to it are the celebrities. That’s what people here worship. In European countries, many royal families still exist, and children there are raised with pride in their ancestry and heritage. In China, the Communist Party abolished royalty in the 1900s, and many members and descendants of the royal family changed their names and began living ordinary lives.

I’ve always been a bit ashamed of my last name growing up because in both in Chinese and English, it shares the same pronunciation as characters and words, respectively, associated with animals. It never hit me that I had a last name associated with royalty until maybe about a month ago. I have never thought in my life that being potentially related to someone who was once a very prestigious or wealthy figure was something to be proud of or worth celebrating. I guess I want to forge my own name.

It is fascinating that we live in a society where the film industry is our proxy for royalty. In some ways, Hollywood raised me because my parents didn’t have time to parent me: it wasn’t all their fault; we lived in the Bay Area, and money was tight when we first immigrated here. I learned a lot growing up, including English, by watching film, and somehow I’ve outgrown it because I can’t bring myself to watch television anymore. Maybe TV is something you can get out of your system.