Dear Girls

by Ali Wong

  Copyright © 2019 by Ali Wong

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Wong, Ali, author.

  Title: Dear girls: intimate tales, untold secrets, & advice for living your best life/Ali Wong.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Random House, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019022835 (print) | LCCN 2019022836 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525508830 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525508847 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Wong, Ali. | Comedians—United States—Biography. | Women comedians—United States—Biography. | Television writers—United States—Biography. | Actors—United States—Biography. | Conduct of life—Humor. | Asian American women—Humor.

  Classification: LCC PN2287.W555 A3 2019 (print) | LCC PN2287.W555 (ebook) | DDC 792.7/6028092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019022835

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019022836

  Ebook ISBN 9780525508847

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Elizabeth A. D. Eno, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: David Curcurito

  Cover photograph: Stephanie Gonot

  v5.4

  ep

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface

  Chapter 1: How I Trapped Your Father

  Chapter 2: The Miracle of Life

  Chapter 3: Tips on Giving Birth

  Chapter 4: Why I Went Back to Work

  Chapter 5: Hustle and Pho

  Chapter 6: Snake Heart

  Chapter 7: The DJ

  Chapter 8: Mr. Wong

  Chapter 9: A Guide to Asian Restaurants

  Chapter 10: Bringing Up Bébés

  Chapter 11: Uncle Andrew

  Chapter 12: My Least Favorite Question

  Chapter 13: Bridin’ Dirty

  Chapter 14: Wild Child

  Afterword by Justin Hakuta

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PREFACE

  Why I’m Writing This Book

  Dear Girls,

  I have a secret that I never wanted anyone to know. And no, it’s not that I once slept with a homeless man (everybody already knows about that). Let me explain.

  When I got this book deal, soon after the release of my first stand-up special, Baby Cobra, a deep panic set in. I immediately regretted signing the deal because I was terrified of the task at hand. I almost quit, conservatively, eighty times over the course of a year. A month before the first draft was due, I was moments away from giving the advance money back to the editor with a batch of balloons reading:

  CONGRATULATIONS! I QUIT!

  Yes, I’d been scared of the workload of writing a book. But really, I was more concerned that once I wrote it and published it, everyone would find out my secret—one that only my family and closest friends knew.

  For three years, I was on the writing staff of the ABC sitcom Fresh Off the Boat. Every year, a producer-writer named Matt Kuhn would run a quiz before our annual staff trip to Vegas. It was meant to get us all excited about our brief escape from the fluorescent-lit office full of dry-erase boards, PC monitors, and bald white men in cargo shorts. One of my favorite questions was “Bronson Pinchot, the actor who played Balki Bartokomous from Perfect Strangers: dead or alive?” (spoiler: alive). The quiz was a mix of inside jokes and true, hardcore trivia.

  One of the final questions in my second year on staff was “How many miles to the moon?” According to Google, it’s about 238,900 miles. Every other staff member guessed somewhere in that ballpark.

  My answer was five billion miles.

  The looks on my co-workers’ faces when they saw my terrifying guess, written on paper so there could be no mistaking it, are seared into my memory. One person took off her glasses and scream-laughed into an Ikea throw pillow for about five straight minutes. Another person just stared at me, plastered with a look of deep, sincere confusion as to how somebody so dense could have managed to graduate from college and get a job, let alone perform the basic functions of life such as remembering to breathe and wipe from front to back. It was like a bomb had exploded in the room and people suddenly suspected that there was a wizard operating my brain for my entire life and they caught a moment when he was on lunch break.

  Some of my peers thought the answer was so ridiculous that I was just trying to be funny. But I wasn’t trying to be funny. I was legitimately trying to win the quiz and get the cash prize of five hundred dollars to spend immediately upon landing in Vegas on buffets and VIP tickets to Magic Mike Live.

  That day, my co-workers found out my secret: I’m a fucking idiot.

  There are some major and wildly concerning gaps in my knowledge and abilities. I have a very hard time distinguishing an Australian person from a British person unless I get a good look in their mouth. No matter how many times someone explains it to me, I will never understand when to appropriately use “whom” instead of “who”—it’s simply beyond my capabilities, sadly. My nephew beat me at chess in three moves when I was thirty and he was in preschool. Then I beat him in checkers (by cheating), I over-celebrated and gloated, and he gave me a look that said, “Wow, good for you,” and waddled to the child’s potty in his room to go poo. I do not know the difference between a crocodile and an alligator or a turtle and a tortoise or a sandwich and a panini. I believe it sounds like the ocean when you hold certain seashells up to your ear because you can take the seashell out of the ocean, but you can’t take the ocean out of a seashell. I know that’s not scientifically correct, but I’m too lazy to learn the real explanation behind the magic. I’m still not sure if Pluto is a planet or not, and I don’t understand what a secretary of state does or why it’s called a secretary (do they arrange FedEx pickups and have extramarital affairs with the state?). When a friend recently texted me that R. Kelly had been indicted, I had to google “What is the meaning of indicted?”

  And so, with this published book, I was understandably afraid of the whole world knowing this. I confessed this to Sarah Dunn, author of The Arrangement and creator of the ABC sitcom American Housewife. She told me, “Just accept that you’re not a genius. Once I told myself that, I was able to finally write.”

  I felt so much better after my talk with her and got comfortable with the fact that I’m not Tolstoy. I’m not Salman Rushdie. Then I realized something better: Nobody expects me to be Salman Rushdie, or even Padma Lakshmi. (Hi, Padma, if you’re reading! Love you on Top Chef! Quickfire queen!) And in all honesty, Salman Rushdie is boring and very difficult for the average person (me!) to get through without a teacher to guide one (me again!) through all the dense writing and big words. Also, up until recently, when I’d hear his name, I thought he was a type of fish.

  I am not Maya Angelou. I am not Malcolm Gladwell. People shit on Dan Brown, and I’m no Dan Brown. Hell, I’m not even that fat mustache guy who faked his memoir and got yelled at by Oprah. I’m a stand-up comedian that’s famous enough now to receive a free Nike tracksuit and get harassed for pictures when I go out to eat ramen. I’m a five-foot-tall girl from the San Francisco Bay who has always loved making people laugh. I got a 1200 on my SATs. I’m your mother. I
don’t write fancy. I don’t use words like “facetious” or “effusive.” I use words like “doo-doo,” “caca,” and “punani.” Once I embraced that, these letters were an absolute pleasure to write.

  The idea for this book is inspired mostly by a note from my father that began with “Dear Alexandra.” He had left it for me in a sealed envelope before he passed away. He had been battling cancer and depression for a while, and he knew he was going to die soon. In it, he told me he loved me and promised I would have a great life. He thanked me for exercising with him in the park while he was sick and couldn’t walk so well. I’m very grateful for the letter, but I wish he had written more about himself. There are so many questions I still have for him—about how he overcame all the challenges in his youth and about the person he was before I was born.

  And so I wanted to leave something for you girls for when I die, besides a collection of oversized glasses for you to sell on eBay. These letters explore a lot of the topics I wish my father and I had discussed (and some I’m glad we didn’t tbh). Then I figured, well, I should probably make money off them if I’m going to spend all this time writing them. I didn’t want to just leave you with my stand-up specials that feature me, pregnant with you, shouting all of my opinions and grodie stories at strangers.

  This book is also meant to address a lot of the questions I get asked by young people. Like, what is it like to be an Asian American woman in entertainment? How do you balance family and career? What is the key to being so tall and fabulous and knowledgeable about distances between planets?

  Two things: First, do not read this book until you are over twenty-one. You should not be allowed to know these inappropriate things about me if you can’t even buy beer yet. Second, if you have any questions after reading this book, you can always ask me, because I’m your mother and I plan on living until I’m two hundred. Also, because I’m your mother, most of this book will probably horrify you and you won’t want to ask me about it. That might be a catch-22, I’m not googling it.

  And if anyone else has questions, you have to wait until I get another book deal. Monetizing answers to FAQs is my new business model.

  CHAPTER 1

  How I Trapped Your Father

  Dear Girls,

  Your dad is the (if we are divorced by the time you read this, please skip to the next sentence) best, but I didn’t just find him overnight. In the fall of 2009, I had been living in NYC for a year and had been unlucky when it came to love and casual sex.

  Well, let’s just get right to it: I dated a series of men who had issues getting it up. It felt like a curse. Five guys in a row lost their boners in the middle of getting busy. Part of me blamed the Raynaud’s disease, a condition that was passed on to me by my father. I have extremely poor circulation to my hands and feet, to the point where, in the cold, they will turn blue and feel like pain icicles. So, especially in the New York fall or wintertime, my bare hands, much like the hands of Rogue from the X-Men, could suck the life out of a man’s erect penis.

  After the first two guys that I hooked up with in NYC went soft on me, I grew extremely self-conscious of my White Walker fingers. By the third time I started making out with a new guy, I made sure to simultaneously warm my hands up by furiously rubbing them together and breathing into them like a homeless character in a theater production, next to a papier mâché trash-can fire.

  I felt very good about this new method and used it on a man that I met through comedy friends at a bar. He lived in Coney Island. At the time, I was staying in SoHo, so he might as well have lived in Pyongyang. It took an hour and a half to get to his place by train, but it felt like three because we were both so horny.

  He was extremely stupid. I know I’ve confessed that I’m no genius, but this guy had a lower back tattoo of Chinese characters, didn’t know who Abraham Lincoln was (this is for real), and couldn’t stop talking about how The Crow was the greatest movie ever made (it’s good, however, Clueless is a masterpiece). But I hadn’t gotten successfully laid in so long and was very eager to flex my new technique, so I made my way to Trash Island.

  I’d thought the whole point of living far away in an outer borough was to afford yourself a nicer apartment with more space. This dude did have a queen-sized, four-poster bed, but…not in a good way. It was old and dusty and made me feel less like Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice and more like that weird sick kid in The Secret Garden who sleeps in a tunic and is allergic to the sun. He passionately threw me onto the bed, but a sudden, deafening bed creak rendered the mood DOA. I would’ve believed him if he’d told me that a hundred people over the past two centuries had spent their final days dying of scurvy in this rickety, termite-infested bed. His place was a shithole. But traveling to Coney Island is the New York subway ride equivalent of hiking Machu Picchu, and I’d reached the summit so I couldn’t back down now.

  On the train and all the way up until I grabbed his penis, I had been consistently rubbing my hands together to keep the blood flowing. And he stayed hard. My method was sound! We were ready to move to the next level and I was finally going to pork a man I met at a bar like those bitches did in Sex and the City. But as soon as he made first contact with my vagina—which Raynaud’s does not affect—his boner melted into a wet Cheeto.

  A total and oppressive silence filled the room. He didn’t even apologize, offer to eat me out, or make me a sandwich, which I felt was quite rude. I wanted to go home, but I was too poor to take a cab back and it was way too late and unsafe to take the train by myself all the way back to SoHo. So I slept in this stranger’s haunted Victorian bed for the rest of the night and left before I could learn his last name or get attacked by a ghost in a frilled puffy dress.

  Sex and the City had promised me much more exciting casual sex in New York City. Before moving there, I was looking forward to spending the night in an art gallery curator’s loft. Maybe his name was Demetri and he would make me post-coital French press coffee and poached eggs before I had to catch a taxi, in the same Vivienne Westwood dress and Manolo Blahnik heels from the night before, to my very important advertising job. Maybe Demetri was GREAT at eating ass and I would learn later at brunch with my sassy girlfriends that Demetri had, in fact, a reputation for being great at eating ass. Maybe he was known amongst power New York women as “the mASSter.” Maybe eventually the relationship would peter out because he was too good at eating ass and my ass would get raw and I would get sick of this one-trick pony. I would try to do missionary with him and then he’d just turn me over, move his head down my butt, and then I’d think, All this fucking dude does is eat ass. And from that experience I would create the perfect slogan for the new “Yelp for Single Men” campaign and my advertising agency would make me executive girl boss president person!

  Except I never got to sleep with anyone who earned more than fifteen dollars per hour during that first year in NYC. I’d consider myself a princess if any of the men owned a bed frame (even if it was full of bedbugs in powdered wigs). They never took me out on a date and all of them had roommates. That’s what happens when you spontaneously go home with a fellow struggling stand-up comic or, even worse, an improviser. (Please always say “fuck no” to those “yes and” motherfuckers.) At the time, I didn’t require or need to be taken out to dinner. But after five consecutive pudding penises, I began to want to get to know a man a little more before taking a chance on his performance abilities. There was a lot on the line: I would have taken a sixth soft dick as a sign to give up my worldly possessions, shave my head, and make Buddha my husband.

  What I really wanted was a boyfriend. The single life in New York was not just disappointing, it was lonely. Of course there’s a ton of cool stuff to do there, but I got sick of seeing the latest MoMA exhibit by myself, eating delicious thin crust pizza by myself, and watching a homeless man argue with pigeons by myself.

  On my first birthday in New York, I did three five-minute, unp
aid sets. One in Bushwick, one on the Upper West Side, and the last on the Lower East Side. I told nobody it was my birthday. I didn’t want people to feel bad for me, and I didn’t want to acknowledge, even to myself, that this was what I was actually doing on my birthday, because I would have cried. I had already spent two of my post-college years backpacking through Asia solo, so I felt like I’d earned my Cheryl Strayed self-reflection-journey points and was ready for meaningful, caring companionship. I also craved a steady sexual partner, who knew all of my spots and gained a dedicated arsenal of no-fail moves, like pouring Fun Dip into my pussy and then going to town with that little sugar spoon, or sticking a wet thumb up my ass when I announce that I’m gonna cum, which, in my experience, works wonders on men as well. It’s a bi-effective move that’s rock-solid. Is “bi-effective” a word? Please look it up and let me know, I refuse to google anything for these letters.

  It was exhausting, trying to train all of these new men who couldn’t stay hard. And I got tired of masturbating in my NYC loft, quietly and sans vibrator so as to not disturb my sixty-seven-year-old Russian landlady/roommate. The low rent she charged allowed me to be one of the only struggling stand-ups who could afford to live in Manhattan, and I wasn’t about to fuck it up with some loud-ass vibrator just because I was too impatient to masturbate Amish-style.

  * * *

  In the fall of 2009, my old high school friend Abby Goldberg invited me to her wedding. At the time, I was twenty-seven years old and she was my very first friend to get married. Her grandfather co-ran a major felt company. Yes, that’s what we mean when we say white people are beginning from a different starting line than everyone else. No matter how hard you study or work, you cannot compete with someone when their grandparents manufactured motherfucking felt, a material so iconic that even you two girls could recognize it by the age of one. Your Mickey Mouse ears wouldn’t exist without Abby’s family. It had never occurred to me that someone even could make felt; I must have subconsciously decided that, like a pen or a paper clip, it just occurs naturally.