The World Thought I Was Too Small. For a long time, I believed it too.
At 1.49 meters tall, I was often the smallest person in the room.
Especially growing up in the Netherlands, where it sometimes feels like everyone is close to two meters tall. When you grow up visibly different, the world has a subtle way of reminding you of it. Not always in cruel ways.
Sometimes in small comments. Sometimes in jokes. Sometimes simply in the way people look at you , and slowly, without noticing it, you begin to believe the story that the world tells you.
That you are too small.
For a while, I even felt ashamed of it.
But something interesting happened when I stopped trying to hide it.
Instead of shrinking, I started building.
First through fight movement.
I trained in martial arts and eventually became a three-time Nunchaku-Do champion and a Ving Tsun Kung Fu specialist.
Martial arts taught me discipline, focus, and something even more important: power does not come from size.
Then through language.
I became fascinated with cultures and stories from around the world. Today I speak six languages: Dutch, English, German, Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese. Each language opened a new perspective on people, humor, emotion and storytelling, being put through church choir helped develop my voice to be able to portray iconic roles when voice acting
And then through performance.
I trained in theatre dance at the Amsterdam University of the Arts and later continued my acting training at RADA in London.
Dance, martial arts and acting all share something powerful: the body becomes the instrument of storytelling.
Over time, the things that once made me feel different started to form a unique combination.
A small Chinese actor.
A martial arts performer.
A theatre dancer.
A multilingual storyteller.
Those elements eventually led to international projects — from award-winning films to productions reaching global audiences, including the Netflix film Boxer and contributing to the world of Kung Fu Panda 4.
And here is the irony:
The very thing the world once made me feel insecure about became one of my greatest strengths as a performer.
Because cinema does not look for average. It looks for characters.
Sometimes that authenticity comes from the things that once made you feel different.
For me, that difference was height. At 1.49 meters, I may still be the smallest person in the room.
But on screen, size is not what defines a character. Presence is.
And I often think about something actor Peter Dinklage once shared about a poster his mother hung above his bed when he was a child. It showed a bumblebee and a simple message:
“According to all aerodynamic laws, the bumblebee cannot fly because its body weight is not in the right proportion to its wingspan. But the bumblebee ignores these laws… and flies anyway.”
I guess, in a way, I’m still learning to fly.