I did not want to be insensitive to my culture, I did not want to be insulting, but I wanted to be as honest and realistic as possible.

As a filmmaker, your starting point should be telling the world about your culture and tradition.

I feel that copying western storytelling wouldn't help tell my story, to communicate who I am fully. You know maybe I've been influenced by these different cultures, but I wasn't taught filmmaking by anyone in particular, I wasn't told what sort of eye to have or how to see the world. I just on set cut out the sort of images and the moments that really touch me and share that, and that's what I do as a filmmaker and I think the world needs individuality, it needs uniqueness, but it's so it's important to be different from others and I think that's what it's all about. I think it's about enjoying life and showing what is different about how you see things through film and that's the most important thing that we can do through filmmaking.

Be true to yourself and to the culture you were born into. Tell your story as only you can.

Grateful I get to represent my culture and tell stories that matter and empower others.

I try to tell the most authentic stories I can about womanhood and Dominican-ness and Afro-Dominican-ness/Afro-Latinidad that I can. Then I go back in and edit with the eye of who sets the table in this book, who gets left out, what am I saying, and what am I not saying right? I lean in or be more intentional about that. For me, it’s trying to be authentic and mindful of my own biases and questioning those while also just being incredibly truthful since truthfulness is inherently intersectional, right? I can’t not be woman and Black-descendant and culturally Latinx. Everything I write will have that in it.

I don't make social statements in my pictures [...] though I do feel a film should be about something—that it have a raison d'etre. It should not shy away from social problems.

When Westerners remain silent out of 'respect' for foreign cultures, they show support only for the most conservative elements of those cultures. Cultural relativism is as much my enemy as the oppression I fight within my culture and faith.

I think all minorities are not happy to be whitewashed, or not happy that their stories are not told in a meaningful way. So that's why it's important. At the end of the day, if we don't have a beautiful, funny, amazing film, we can't make the statement. There's no movement. So, there is a lot riding on it, but we've done our part. We've put love and all the best ideas on how to make it as representational of the Asians. I hope it will make a strong impact, that Asians around the world will think, “I can tell my own stories because you guys wanna hear it. And you guys embrace it.”

I think women should know how to be cultured and traditional, yet independent. That balance is important. Every woman should have the strength to speak for herself.

I am not, have never claimed to be, nor do I claim to be a representative of culture. However, I am representative of something. I believe I am representative of those deep layers of the humblest and poorest masses who aspire to culture, who strive to study and seek to attain that level of knowledge that will enable them not only to ensure their own elevation as individuals, develop their personalities, but also to achieve the status that gives the masses a higher sense of their social function and their national and human dignity. Culture not only frees these masses from the prejudices that come from ignorance and the limits it places on people's horizons: culture is also a tool for moving forward and helping the whole national society move forward, progress and rise.