Michelle Legro
Oct 16, 2020

The first installment of “How I Got Radicalized” is now up at GEN and it’s a doozy from Clio Chang about the 2000 film Charlie’s Angels and the iconic Lucy Liu.

For an East Asian American girl of a certain age, there is everyone else, and then there is Lucy Liu. I don’t mean this as a deep cross-examination of the lack of representation in Hollywood, but rather as a simple fact of life. I experienced time before I first saw Lucy Liu on-screen as some sort of amorphous blur; afterward, my life crystallized, organizing itself into a single, essential question: Do I want to be Lucy Liu, or do I want her to step on me?

Michelle Legro
Michelle Legro

Written by Michelle Legro

Deputy Editor, GEN. Previously an editor for Topic, Longreads, The New Republic, and Lapham’s Quarterly. gen.medium.com

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