“I never played the dad or the straight-man teacher. I was always there as the seasoning.”

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“i’m grateful for every minute of my time there. i learned about myself (bad with wigs). i learned about others (generous, vulnerable, hot). i learned that human error can be nothing but correct. i learned that comedy is mostly logistics and that it will usually fail until it doesn’t, which is the besssst,” he wrote.

“I feel like I was really bogged down the entire time I was there about the idea that there was no range in anything I did,” he went on. “I knew I was never gonna play the dad. I was never gonna play the generic thing in sketches. It’s a sketch show; each thing is, like, four minutes long. It is short and collapsed by necessity, so therefore it plays on archetypes.”

“These archetypes are also in a relationship with generic things, and there is a genericism in whiteness and in being a canvas to build upon. I came in pre-stretched, pre-dyed. People had their over-determinations on what I was, which was: ‘Oh, that’s just the gay Asian guy on SNL,’” he added. “So anytime I would try to work outside of that, it got completely ignored or it still got collapsed to, ‘Oh, he’s being gay and Asian as always.’”

“It was kind of the first time I felt in my bones someone who built this thing that made so many things possible for me…being like, ‘I need you.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m not going to turn that down,’” he added.

“I could hear it in his voice, the heartbreak of a man who could never be able to speak his truth… Bowen, we all love you and cherish every moment you gave us all,” someone commented.

“Having been the token woman on so many reporting teams, I get it,” one more user said.

“lol he was always in everything and was heavily featured. Dude wanted to be in the show more? lol,” another person wrote, while someone questioned, “So he wanted to be the STAR of an ensemble cast?”