GROWING UP IN NEW YORK CITY, I always wanted to be Italian. The thing was, I was inundated with images of cool Italian guys, from Michael Corleone to Charlie Moran in Stuart Rosenberg’s The Pope of Greenwich Village and Spike in Paul Morrissey’s Spike of Bensonhurst. All of which, at the time, were the opposing apotheosis of the prevailing nerdy, scholastic stereotype of Asian kids, which my mother — and her insistence on violin lessons and penchant for cutting my hair herself — had done nothing to assuage. To me, Italian guys, with their accents, their jewellery, their almost irrational confidence, defined the fabric of cool in New York. So much so that when I wrote my first screenplay in film school, it was about a Chinese guy who thinks…
