James Sie
Novelist and actor James Sie cooks. It may be a hobby, but he’s elevated it to an art form. Long before everyone was posting their pandemic boules, Sie’s Instagram account already looked like a celebrity chef’s, peppered with photos of his husband, writer and singer Doug Wood, and their son.
Sie takes the same care and time with this hobby as he does with his professional work. Cooking, like art, requires practice and planning along with an equal amount of willingness to surrender to the unknown, whether that’s the vagaries of publishing or a temperamental oven. Ultimately, it requires the strength to let go and the flexibility to work with what you have.
When we talked, Sie had just finished the final edits to his second novel, All Kinds of Other, and had a new voice over project, the video game Ghost of Tsushima, ready to launch. We looked back at his career so far, and the fluidity and openness to change that mark it.
“When you're cycling through anxiety and peace and anxiety and peace, these are just landscapes that you're going through. Eventually you'll go to another landscape.”
Being between projects during the Great Pandemic Pause and the summer of unrest can be a blessing or a curse, depending upon your outlook. James Sie finds himself pondering just that.
“I’m such a slow writer,” he says. “And I need things to kind of occupy a space in my mind for a while to work things out before I put them on the page. And there's so much crowding my mind these days, you know what's in the news, what's happening and what will happen, that it's really hard to create this space that's needed for me to, to create. And I feel like I need to be okay with that. That maybe this is a time for reflecting for observing what's around me, and the fact that maybe I don't have as much of a voice right now is okay because I'm listening to other voices. I think that's one of the great gifts of this horrible pandemic is that because we are all locked down and there is nowhere to go, we can we can look more closely at issues.”
Where many artists ( your friendly narrator included) flirt with panic during these pauses, Sie’s response is more measured and mindful.
“The world is ever-changing,” he says. “There's only the now. There is no ‘what comes up,’ because you can't plan on anything. It's just the now … it’s okay to be where you are. If you're not creating at the moment, that's just where you are now. It doesn't mean that it's going to be forever, that you've lost something. It just means that, at this moment, you’re supposed to observe.”
This openness to change is a hallmark of Sie’s career. Having studied both creative writing and acting in college, James found an opportunity to pursue both early on, working with Chicago’s Lifeline Theatre, adapting literary works for the stage and performing them. His adaptation of Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins won a Joseph Jefferson (Jeff) award.
“I allowed myself to explore”
The move to Los Angeles to pursue film and television was his first opportunity to pivot. “Being a person of color, being someone who's Asian, at the time there wasn't a lot out there, acting-wise. It was, you know, a delivery boy, Yakuza mafia person which I'm not that great at. So there weren't the opportunities that there are now … when I came out, I had never done voice over. I was actually redubbed in one of my movie roles, which is very ironic,” he laughs. “One of my first big movie roles was in US Marshals, and I played the baby faced prison prisoner who tries to stab Wesley Snipes. And I was so excited I got this role, and when I went to see it on the big screen — we were at Grauman’s, it was very exciting, and I'm with Doug, and I'm with my sister. And all of a sudden, I see myself and out of my mouth comes … this Bea Arthur voice. I was so mortified.”
Fortunately, the animated series Jackie Chan Adventures was seeking a soundalike for Chan, and James landed the gig. “If I had stayed within my tunnel vision of, ‘no, I need to be an on-camera actor. I need to succeed in this,’ I might have shuffled off that opportunity, because it was voice over. Instead, I allowed myself to explore that area, and all of a sudden it blossomed.”
With a voice over resume including the Kung Fu Panda television series, as well as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Final Fantasy VII, The Lion Guard, King of the Hill and more, it’s safe to say the exploration paid off. This summer, he can be heard in two projects, the new game Ghost of Tsushima, and in the gorgeous League of Legends animated piece Kin of the Stained Blade.
Of all his voice over roles, one modest part has become the most iconic, especially over this summer. James voiced the unlucky Cabbage Merchant in the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender, which has enjoyed a renaissance since reappearing on Netflix. The put-upon merchant, shouting “My cabbages!” after the protagonists repeatedly and unintentionally destroy his cart, has become a favorite among fans. When we spoke, Sie had just finished signing a stack of Funko POP! figures of his character.
“It blows my mind and that it’s resurging now,” he says. “It’s great, and I think the good thing is that I'm not looking for it. I never expected it, and so when it comes up it's just this delightful surprise, but it's not something I am hungering for. It's just a little delicious dollop of pleasure for me … I think it's also this idea of not expecting things. Being good with where you are. And then when these things happen, you can take pleasure from them, but you don't have to attach to them.”
Return to Writing
Sie’s return to writing marked another major career shift. His debut novel, Still Life Las Vegas, published by St. Martin’s Press, is a beautifully wrought coming-of-age story that explores abandonment, first love and the complicated intertwining of family and identity. It was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Fiction, and gained praise from writers Augusten Burroughs and Gina Frangello, among others.
With gorgeous graphic novel sections and illustrations from Sungyoon Choi, it also plays with form, experimenting with traditional narrative and visual storytelling.
“I wanted to have a graphic element component, because I think that you really look at things differently, you process things differently, with a graphic novel, and I wanted to see if you could fuse both prose and graphic novel together,” he explains. “I had seen it in children's books but I had never seen it in adult fiction.”
No matter an artist’s depth of care and craft, a finished work always holds some surprise. For Sie, he only realized after it was released that Still Life Las Vegas was ultimately about … him.
“This is so stupid, but all along I’d been saying, ‘oh you know it’s got nothing to do with real life,’” he explains. “But it's about this mother who disappears and the son is trying to find out what happened to the mother. It wasn't until the book was published that I was like, ‘oh, this is about me, about something that I'm working out,’ because at a very early age, my mother left. She divorced, and I never saw her again. And it's pretty obvious that this is what was going on, but I did not allow myself at the time to think of it that way. I had to put it into mythology, the mythology of the book. And it's interesting because in the book, there is a narrator, who is a graphic novelist, who is thinking about his mother. And that's kind of meta because he is commenting on the story that we're reading. Then I realized after I'd written it and it was published that there was another layer which is me creating this thing in order to explore the ideas of abandonment, of family mythology, of what we know versus what is true, and how you can never know what is true. And so you have to create your own mythology in order to just move on in life. So, it was just very odd that I had not allowed myself to acknowledge that this was something I was going through.”
His next novel, All Kinds of Other, is due out early next year from the HarperCollins imprint, HarperTeen. “It's about two boys in high school,” Sie says. “One who is cisgender and one who's transgender, who fall in love. And them having to confront the expectations everyone has about who one should love.”
“There was a genesis of this,” he adds. “There was a boy I had met who inspired me, who made me do more research about transgender issues, and made me realize how little I knew, and how incurious I had been about the issue. ‘Oh yeah, Caitlyn Jenner. Okay. I'm gay, so I don't have to really investigate the T of LGBT because I'm adjacent to the T. We all have the same issues, right.’ What I realized in researching was that I knew so little, and it was criminal that I didn't investigate.”
“I think there's something to be said for the artist’s gift of empathy and creative empathy,” he says. “I know that I am not speaking as a spokesperson for the transgender community. I am writing this story that has queer characters in it. And I have to do the work. I have to do the research I have to do the interviews. I need to have people of that culture. Read the work to make sure that the blind spots that I'm sure I have are addressed. But at the same time, I feel like we as artists need to see the other and write about the other in order to create some kind of bridges of communication between cultures. And if we're so afraid of even looking at a different culture because of worrying about appropriation, then we cease to empathize.”
Sie’s willingness to acknowledge his own blind spots and to work to address them is another extension of the fluid, open approach that has kept his career constantly fresh and joyfully unpredictable.
“Going from creative mode to creative mode is a function of not being too rigid, in what is there, what can be,” he says. “Take what you're interested in, and if it leads you somewhere, then go with it, because you don't know what could happen, what the possibilities are. Be alert and alive to what is out there, the possibilities.”
