Roy Choi
speaker
872 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 24 Mar
Roy Choi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But a lot of that stuff, you just keep quiet and you just put your head down and you just keep going. People yelling horrible things at you, throwing things at you.
Oh, yeah. It was hard for me to grapple with, especially when like Cube made Black Korea. Yeah. You know, it was hard for me because those were my heroes.
yeah and then all of a sudden they're saying these really horrible things about my family and it was really hard for me to reconcile the two for a very long time and I think ultimately I think that came to define the philosophy of Kogi the truck instead of reacting in road rage towards it all I kept it with me and it took me a long time to figure out what will my reaction to it be it's so cool because I think the majority of people are going to feel at least the pressure to commit to one side or the other yeah
Building bridges, yeah. But sometimes those bridges can take 30 years, like for me, you know. But ultimately, I'm just so happy that I stayed alive long enough to be able to build that bridge. But we ate a lot of shit, so that's just the way it was. But part of it is language too, language and culture. Because when things get pushed too far, I've seen my uncles kick nine people's asses at one time.
So it's not that we can't fight back or that we won't. It's just that in many cases, the first wave of immigrants, Asian immigrants, didn't know what the proper protocol was.
And you got to remember a lot of countries that these people come from, the cops are corrupt. The governments are corrupt. That's the whole reason they're here in the first place. So then you have that, you have the language barrier, you have the cultural incomprehension of what you're supposed to do. So that's why food is so important.
Because during the week, it's so hard that the only time that we had together was through food. And all my extended family, my aunts, my uncles, my parents, they would just be cooking all the time. Like all the time. And I don't mean like making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I mean, like making stews, broths, dumplings, like full blown restaurant shit, you know, in their apartments.
And then we would all meet on the weekends and have these like tremendous potlucks every single weekend. It was like growing up with Quincy Jones as your dad or something. Or like Steph Curry, like how Steph Curry grew up, like on the NBA arena. You know, like that's how it is for us with food. So I never really used it as a space of here's my little private Idaho type thing. It was a given. Yeah.
I love how you just put it all because for people that are marginalized, we never hold any grudges in many cases.
And in many cases, when we do have opportunities, we're just giving back because we're survivors and we know our self-worth and we know ourselves, whether that's the African-American culture all the way to Asian-American to whoever. We know where we come from. We know what we represent. And so you can't just stop it. It just keeps growing and mushrooming. And so for us, it's just about sharing.
So, no, we don't hold those grudges at all.
The sad part is you go outside of L.A., it's still like that. Anywhere that's not like New York, L.A., San Francisco, it's like that. But we saw during the pandemic, even New York, L.A., San Francisco had to deal with Asian violence too in that same pattern that you just described in the 80s, which is so bizarre. I always equate it to the world that you come from, Hollywood.
Well, let's make clear. I don't come from. You come from Detroit. The place you found yourself is because we don't have enough stories and representation within Hollywood. So people are still living off of this idea of who we are. This representation through Mickey Rooney or 16 Candles of who we are. We don't have Asian addicts. We don't have Asian people who fail.
We don't have the euphoria of Asians that are dealing with sexual problems because we don't have any stories told about us in those manners. What happens is the image of who we are is still trapped. It's almost like trauma. It's trapped within this era and this age.
I agree with that, but I also don't agree with it only in the fact that with all the streamers out there and all the content and all of the shows being bought every single day, right now someone's Zoom pitching a show. The proportion of Asian storytelling is still not represented. Yeah. Yeah.
I argue that as well. Y'all make it in Hollywood. Y'all got big eyes, features, everything. Us Asians, you know, no islands. You still got to deal with the racism and stuff. But yeah, you got to consider all that. I don't know. Can you Google percent of AAPI?
That's like contact high.
More than his wife. More than his wife. Then you'll be truly Asian because you'll be overachieving.
So only 5.7% of the country is Asian? According to the 2019 Census Bureau. That's because probably like 25% more didn't fill out. Yeah, exactly.
There's no way there's only 6%.
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