ARTIST STATEMENT Making Tracks tells the story of how a people have long struggled to find a homeland. The journey began for me as an exploration into the rich and diverse history of Asians in America and how my own life fit into that context. Despite growing up as all-American as one can be, as an actor I realized that to most of America I still looked like a foreigner. I was often limited to playing the roles of "the gook," "the geek," and "the gangster." In the summer of 1993, after being accosted by a border guard who refused to believe that I was American, I began searching through history books, reading stories of Asian Americans before me: stories that through a privileged prep school and Ivy League education had somehow remained unknown to me. I discovered stories of Chinese laborers risking their lives to tie this country together, immigrants detained for years at Angel Island, and Japanese Americans who fought valiantly for their country while their families were locked away in internment camps. These were my stories too, I realized, and they belonged not only to me, but to all Asian Americans, and to all Americans. In 1998, I asked two friends to collaborate with me to develop the concept of a journey through history into a book musical: Woody Pak, a recent Julliard graduate who I met through a mutual friend, and Brian Yorkey, a classmate from Columbia University. We wanted the music to be rock because it was important to us that we reach out to young people-a generation distanced not only from these stories, but from the theater as well.