Ugly Feelings is a feature coming-of-age film that explores the questions of mixed-race Asian American identity that have followed me throughout my life. I've grappled with how my whiteness is in conversation with my Asianness. What does it mean to be simultaneously steeped in white privilege but to also be a person of color? How is multiracial identity informed by our families? Friendships? Romantic relationships? How do the media and the communities we interact with and belong to understand mixedness? How does their understanding inform how we see ourselves and the world? As strange hybrid creatures, the perfect examples of post-racial assimilation? Or a distinct and whole identity to celebrate, challenge, and be proud of. 

Credit: Ugly Feelings Stage Production

The desire to belong haunts Jenny, a biracial Chinese American 17-year-old girl navigating the world of angst, confusion, and teenage fantasy that is her senior year of high school. The play is organized as a series of vignettes – warped memories, distorted dreams, twisted nightmares – all filtered through the lens of Jenny’s mind, which obsessively racializes the people, places, and relationships in her life within the binary facets of her identity. 

Jenny’s world is populated by a tight orbit of characters: her perfectly assimilated Chinese American mother; her well-meaning white father that always misses the mark; her twin brother George, the golden boy with a Yale acceptance; her two Asian American best friends Orlando and Lauren; and Alex, a Chinese American new kid from Los Angeles who is...super hot. Follow alongside this group of 17-year-olds as they figure out how close the chapter on a childhood and town they've known their entire lives when a racial incident happens that is all Jenny's fault disrupting everything she thought about her friendships, her family, her identity and her place in the world.

Credit: Zoe Thorogood

In “The Mixed Metaphor: Why Does the Half-White, Half-Asian Protagonist Make Us So Anxious?,” Andrea Long Chu writes that:

“If there is one conclusion to be reached from the mixed Asian experience, it is this: People want race. They want race to win them something, to tell them everything they were never told; they want friendship from it, or sex, or even love; and sometimes, they just want to be something or to have something to be…There is, after all, a reason that people sit together: They don’t want to be alone.”

Jenny wants race.

She wants it to win her something,

tell her everything she was never told,

give her friendship, sex, even love.

Above all, she wants race to give her something to be.

At the end of the day...she just doesn’t want to be alone.   

Credit: Pinterest

Ugly Feelings was originally written as a playwriting thesis submitted to the English and Theater, Dance and Media Department of Harvard University in which it received a nomination for the prestigious Hoopes Prize. The stage play of Ugly Feelings premiered at the Loeb Experimental Theater in Spring of 2023. It was further developed as part of Fresh Ink Theatre Company and Chuang Stage's The New Play Development Residency.

Through the collaboration of writer Karina Cowperthwaite, author of the original play and director and filmmaker Grace Sun, we will be translating this work from stage to screen. We aim to build a cinematic language that reflects the volatility and unreliability of Jenny’s internal world—blending surrealism, satire, magical realism, and moments of emotional realism. The project shares a tonal kinship with Fleabag (Jenny’s fourth-wall-breaking asides), Never Have I Ever (the complicated intimacy of high school friendships), Everything Everywhere All At Once (genre-defying surrealism and theatricality), The Worst Person in the World (formally marked coming-of-age chapters), and Slanted (candid exploration of internalized whiteness).

We hope Ugly Feelings will push back back against the limited, often flattened representations of Asian and multiracial Asian identity in film and television - especially of young women. In a media landscape that tends to favor clean narratives of empowerment or assimilation, we’re interested in the messier middle—the in-between spaces where identity is contradictory, uncomfortable, and unresolved - especially when working through questions of racial privilege in White/Asian mixed race identities. This story doesn’t want to redeem its characters or make them legible but rather give them the freedom to be angry, confused, performative, or even cruel—and asks the audience to sit with that discomfort. 

Ugly Feelings explores the emotional reality of racial ambiguity in mixed-race identities and cultural longing in a voice we rarely see onscreen. We believe there’s an urgency in creating space for flawed, stylized, emotionally volatile explorations of Asian identity - ones that feel riskier, messier, and more honest. 

Credit: Pinterest

We hope to raise our goal of $10,000 through a dedicated audience on Seed & Spark as part of the AAPI Renaissance Rally as a starter budget to adapt the stage play and assemble a passionate team of collaborators to begin pre-production work in Summer of 2025. We’re committed to preserving that complexity through every layer of adaptation—casting, performance, visual language—and by assembling a team that reflects the world we’re portraying prioritizing the hiring of producers, creatives, and crew, especially in casting, design, and editorial, who identify as Asian and/or of multiracial descent.