“Soft Power” was inspired by playwright and librettist David Henry Hwang’s experience of being stabbed near his Brooklyn home in 2015.
His assailant was never apprehended, and some believe the incident was an anti-Asian hate crime. “All the Asian Americans I know, we’re very conscious of feeling a more hostile environment,” Hwang says of the recent rise in anti-Asian violence. “It started last spring. You would just get a different vibe from people. I got yelled at in a doctor’s office. I was having a regular checkup, and someone in the waiting room yelled, ‘Have you been to China?’” Hwang is hopeful that the success of filmmakers like Jon M. Chu, Lulu Wang, Chloé Zhao and Lee Isaac Chung is a sign that Hollywood finally has “the willingness to look at Asian American stories as not only marginalized stories but as stories that have universal appeal.”