The thought of me wanting to act was not an option when I was growing up, so I was getting my teaching credential.

I probably didn't talk in public until eighth grade, and then in high school, I started doing oral interpretation - kind of like monologues. Through theater and plays, I started coming out of my shell.

Although I would like the negative balanced with the positive, what really bothers me is if it's not real. You can add humanity to what might look like a negative role.

I want to create a family with my fiance and be able to live a simple life and just be safe.

We didn't have any books at home. Not even children's books or fairy tales. The only 'fantastic' stories came from religion class. And I took them all very literally, that God sees everything, and so I felt I was always being watched. Or that dead people were in Heaven right over our village.

My mother wrote a teen column for the South China Morning Post in the 1950s when she was growing up in Hong Kong. Her name was Lily Mark, but she sometimes wrote under her confirmation name, Margaret Mark. That was how she met my father.

The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent.