Actress Constance Wu on what it's like working in Hollywood as an Asian-American

— -- "Fresh Off the Boat" actress Constance Wu is speaking out about her experience in Hollywood.

"'Fresh Off the Boat' is the first Asian-American television show led by [an] Asian-American [family] in over 20 years," she recently told Allure magazine. "I'd always booked television work, but I'd always been in the supporting role, the best friend or the assistant to the white person. And I was grateful and happy for that. I wasn't forced to think about it, because I was placated to the point of satisfaction."

"Fresh Off The Boat" is a sitcom that follows a Taiwanese family that moves from Washington, D.C., to Orlando, Florida, to open a restaurant.

She continued, "Once I was in the lead role and other people started making such a big deal out of it, I realized I was previously blind to it. I thought, I should read stuff by people who have thought about it more than I have. It was quite freeing [to discover that] the self-blame I had internalized my whole life had a language and a community that I hadn't previously had."

Wu, who is Taiwanese-American, grew up in Richmond, Virginia. "The community in which I grew up was pretty white," she said. "The storybooks you got at school featured white children and an animal or animals, and as you got older, the novels you were assigned were about, like, the problems of white boys and their dogs."

The actress said she thinks many people fail to understand the difference between the "Asian experience" and the "Asian-American experience."

"I think often they lump the two together and that when I talk about Asian-American narratives, that they can cite 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' or 'Mulan' as proof of concept, when it's a different experience. We are told we should be placated by those stories, even though they aren't our stories," she said.

The Asian experience is often thought of as a storybook fantasy, Wu said.

"A lot of times, people think of Asian culture as some mythical world, instead of modern people with modern occupations with modern problems, modern tools and modern occupations," she said. "Like, we're not all just talking Taoism and kung fu — some people are just trying to get over their breakup with their boyfriend, and they're Facebook stalking."