It's incredible being a woman. I was, of course, fortunate to have an Irish mother who is an empowered woman. She comes from the western culture where women's rights and empowerment happened much earlier in the 19th century.
It would be impossible to be a woman in Western culture and not have your own issues about your image and what you look like.
I went to an exhibition at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum about Shanghai, about how courtesans had been influential in bringing western culture to Shanghai. I bought a book and in it saw this striking group of women in a photograph called 'The Ten Beauties of Shanghai'.
In western culture, we have ignored death. We're running the other way - everything is about life and youth. So, there's something resonant about walking around with our own death masks. Zombies are the visible embodiment of death staring at us with our own faces.
Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics - a rational ethics - as a precondition of rebirth.
In the latter half of the last century the impact of the expanding influence of Western culture and economic system brought about in China a severe conflict.
The question was heatedly debated of how much Western culture should be brought into China.
In a lot of Western science fiction, you need some form of conflict, whether it's aliens or robots. I think in Western culture, being more suspicious of science, and hubris, you'll see a lot of fear of creating something that goes out of control.
Whenever I'm in a film that's from a perspective that is dominant within western culture... I'm always trying to prove myself. When it's from a black perspective, I don't have to - they get it.
In Malaysia, where Western culture was extremely influential, I'd grown up listening to Elvis and the Beatles and watching American movies. People wanted to be like Americans. In contrast, when I got here, I saw prosperous middle-class American college students wanting to somehow join the Third World.
