Joan Chen

For the past few years, I was the more visible Asian performer, and I think it gave young girls a kind of role model showing it's possible to actually reach success doing movies.

If you know how to do a job very well, you keep doing it.

All Asian parents are into your children having a respectable, decent stable job. Acting was unimaginable to my parents.

I don't want to tell people what I make. It's a lot more than I ever dreamed of as a kid. I never think about it.

Physical hunger and physical poverty is something I could only imagine. I've been poor when I was in China... As kids we never had to starve, but just didn't have enough meat, enough rice.

There are a lot of stereotypes to be broken which I think a lot of us are doing. What I do is, as soon as people try to pin me down to one kind of part, I'll play a very different kind of role, so it explodes that stereotype.

There are many ways you can make money. Certain ways will make you happy, certain other ways will make other people happy. But if you go in because there's money in there, you're bound to fail, bound to fail!

The difference between me and American-born actors is that I came here with the expectation of not being treated fairly.

As an actress I find the most enjoyable part of acting is really just to please the director. I just want to please my director.

I know what actors fear, what they like; I know how to get things out of them and I listen to them better, since I've been there.

The romantic love we feel toward the opposite sex is probably one extra help from God to bring you together, but that's it. All the rest of it, the true love, is the test.

Acting for me is not a bad habit like smoking that I must make an effort to quit. I love acting; I love directing.