Thanks for the shoutout, Cara! I meant to reply earlier but have just been swamped — for me a huge part of it is the limits that placing someone in the box or label of a celebrity doppelganger does. I have many students who will call me Jackie Chan or Bruce Li because they don’t know any better, but also because those are the only representations of Asians in film that they have seen.

Being labeled as a celebrity doppelganger is very limiting because not only does it limit how other people see you, but it limits how you see yourself. Luckily, I have a Christian faith that dictates that God is in control and that I’m just following God’s plan, but if I didn’t have that I would be a lot more constrained by many of these representations and expectations placed on me by societal constraints. You start to fulfill a prophecy laid out for you by the mainstream culture.

I asked some of my students over summer school if there was a prophecy for them, growing up in Baltimore City of what people outside Baltimore expected of them. One kid wrote this:

“That I’d be in jail or locked up like my father.”

Yes, we have representations in popular media, and yes, some of those representations are based on reality. But don’t let what you’ve seen on TV or film reduce or limit how you see people in your day-to-day life.

Thank you for the inspiration, Cara! May write a piece on representations and self-fulfilling prophecies.