Hand Her the Keys

Ashley Park took Broadway, then Paris. Now, the actress heads to Beijing for Joy Ride, this summer's raunchiest R-rated buddy comedy.

- Madeline Leung Coleman

ASHLEY PARK WONDERED if she was a bad person. If maybe she was getting things she didn't deserve. She'd always been a hard worker, a schedule filler, what with theater and dance and choir and a cappella and piano and, why not, sousaphone-all of which had stopped when she was diagnosed with leukemia at age 15 and ended up in the hospital for most of her sophomore year. Before cancer, she'd tried out for her high school's production of High School Musical and did not get Sharpay. After cancer, she tried out for Thoroughly Modern Millie and got Millie. She was thrilled, but she was conscious of how she'd changed. She was used to being seen as "the Asian girl." Now she was also "the sick bald girl." She wore her wig and tuned up her Charleston and thought, Everybody's being forced to be nice to me.

Then she got the lead again in senior year, as the tragic Vietnamese woman Kim in Miss Saigon. A group of white girls from choir whom she'd thought of as close friends complained to their parents, then the parents complained to the school: It was unfair to choose a show that favored some people who happened to look the part. This was liberal Ann Arbor, so no one quite said it out loud. What was clear to Ashley was that they were done being nice to her. She pleaded her case and the show went ahead and she wondered what she'd done wrong: "When I was front and center, it was, 'Oh, look at Ashley; she's a diva.' I thought, Wow, I never want to be called that again."