Dear Girls

by Ali Wong

  The two-hundred-fifty-plus-guest Jewish wedding at a Napa vineyard was the most lavish nuptials I had ever been to. Most of the weddings I have attended since have a three-hour time limit on the free alcohol. The bat signal goes out to the guests that the open bar is about to close, and people savagely race to the bar, like those shitty-ass buffalos who trampled all over Mufasa in The Lion King, to get their last glass of complimentary booze to hold them over for the rest of the evening. This wedding had an open bar starting before the ceremony, well after the dinner, and the cocktails had all sorts of delicious, fresh-squeezed peach juices and tasted like decorative pillows from Anthropologie. The guests consisted mostly of Jewish people. So right away, I took notice of the only other Asian person at the wedding: your father.

  I thought he was very, very handsome and was excited to learn that he had gone to high school with the groom. Bingo! A fellow private school Asian American! I have always loved Asian American men (despite my pussy’s non-discriminatory, open-door policy), and I hope you end up with an Asian American man or woman as well. In fact, it would be wonderful if you could end up with an Asian American woman and don’t have to weather through any bummer boners. There are a lot of advantages to being with someone of your own race. The cultural shorthand makes it a lot easier. You don’t have to constantly explain everything or act like a smiling tour guide for Asian American culture or deal with dietary differences. I hate going out to eat Asian food with non-Asian people, especially dim sum, because there are so many dishes that they have so many questions about.

  “What is that?”

  “Ew, what is that?”

  “What the FUCK IS that???”

  “Is any of this organic?”

  “Why do all these entrees have eyes??”

  “Damn, you’re really gonna eat feet?!!!”

  I feel like what they’re really asking is: “Why is that not a sandwich?” My response over the years has evolved to: “It’s all pork and shrimp. Just eat it.” I didn’t drive all the way to this strip mall in Monterey Park or take the train all the way to Flushing to become your dim sum mentor. The worst is when non-Asian people call chicken’s feet or pig’s feet “nasty,” because they’re insulting the food I grew up on, that I’m excited to order and eat. My people used this food to nourish themselves and one another, and you’re calling it disgusting. I know I’m on a tangent—I think I have PTSD from when I was one of the few Asian kids in kindergarten and all the white kids made fun of my “smelly” and “weird” lunch. And now that we’re all grown up, those same white kids (I mean literally the same people) like to post pics of their chimichurri bone marrow dish, and I’m like, Bitch, you used to call me a fucking vulture for eating my meat to the bone and sucking out the marrow. Now you’re fishing for “Likes” with it??

  Non-Asian men I dated loved to brag about how “down” with Asian cuisine they were. One actually said to me enthusiastically, “I eat kimchi!” In my head I was thinking, Bro, that is the staple of Korean cuisine. That’s like me bragging to white people that I can identify with them because I eat bread. You would think that I would’ve dumped him after that, but he paid for drinks and I wanted to squeeze just one more free meal out of him because, truthfully, I love kimchi. And besides, a man who’s down to eat fermented cabbage is also probably down to eat butt after a long, humid summer day. Probiotics!

  Also, when you date a fellow Asian American, the hygiene standards are generally much more aligned. My Asian American friends automatically take off their shoes at the entrance of my home. But with other people I always have to police them right when they come in the door and remind them to do it the next time and basically every time they come over. They never remember! What do I gotta do? Tattoo “Take your damn shoes off” on their arm like in Memento? And when they ask why, my response is why the hell not? Sorry if I don’t want you dragging the gross shit you stepped on today into my clean home. I didn’t vacuum and swiffer my floors so you could spread crackhead doo-doo and rat placentas all over them.

  Asian men are also extremely attractive. I grew up in San Francisco where there were plenty of Asian men to choose from. There are Asian American women who proudly proclaim they do not date Asian men. They are not just snobs, but probably grew up way too isolated from fellow Asian Americans and believe the same stereotypes about us that mainstream America does: That we are boring; that we are great at STEM but not so great at anything involving creativity and actual excitement; that our men are robot nerds who have no idea how to find a woman’s clitoris. But I am an Asian woman with an Asian fetish for Asian men. Have you seen their cheekbones?? Asian men are basically those blue Na’vi people from Avatar, only without the magic sex braids (although there was one guy…). If you want a great example of what I’m saying, try searching Google images for “Daniel Dae Kim,” the actor from that TV show Lost. He’s so sexy that I had Netflix spend a bunch of money on a movie I co-wrote called Always Be My Maybe just to give me an excuse to kiss him. That guy looks like a statue, and girls, so does your father. I saw him at that wedding and thought he resembled Keanu Reeves. Not The Matrix Keanu. Not John Wick Keanu. I’m talking Speed Keanu.

  At the end of the wedding, I interrupted a conversation your father was having with an old friend so I could introduce myself. The only intel I’d been able to get on him at the wedding was that he was also living in NYC and very into health and wellness.

  Me: “Hi, I’m Ali, I’m an old high school friend of Abby’s. I heard you’re a vegan, I’m sorta vegan as well.” [Lies. I had salmon and beef that very night at the wedding!]

  Your Dad: “Oh really? Cool. This is an old high school friend of me and Scott’s, Kevin—”

  Me, not giving a fuck about Kevin and wishing Kevin would go away already: “So where do you live now? I’m in New York. I heard you’re living in New York too? I cook a lot of vegan food. Like amaranth. It helps keep me regular.”

  Your Dad: “Oh, that’s great.”

  Me, panicking that this is not going well: “Anyway, I love yoga too. Do you ever go to Yoga to the People? It’s like communist yoga. Donation based. Each according to his abilities. I love deep breathing.”

  Your Dad: “Me too. You know, Kevin and I haven’t seen each other in a long time so—”

  Me, with flop sweat going for a Hail Mary: “Yeah, I have very important old people to talk to as well. Abby’s grandma and everything. Listen, I’m a stand-up comic and why don’t I get your email so you can come to one of my shows if you’re free or whatever?”

  Your Dad, starting to turn away: “Yeah, sure.”

  It wasn’t great. But I knew that the only way to get him eventually was with my wit and humor because in terms of looks, he was a little out of my league.

  Soon after the Napa wedding, I emailed him an invite to a show that I was headlining at Gotham Comedy Club in NYC. If you can believe it, I was a way dirtier comedian then. I used to do a joke where I’d do an impression of an animated e-card. I’d hum “Row Row Row Your Boat” while doing “the robot” and making a cartoonishly happy face. Then I’d turn around, bend over, and pull my pants down to show the whole audience my bare ass, and say, “What’s crackin’?!”

  You know, smart people stuff.

  Sometimes I would pull my pants a little too far down, and I’m sure the audience could see my untrimmed pubes hanging from the other side, like some faraway tumbleweed. I didn’t really care if they saw it or not. I’ve always thought it’s much more embarrassing for people to see a giant zit on your nose than your bushy vag. Anyway, it was a very incomplete joke and basically an excuse to moon the audience. Another one of my early classics was: “Last night I mixed up the toothpaste with the K-Y Jelly, and I woke up with an extra white butthole.”

  It was a gamble inviting your father to that show but I already knew, since I had met him through a high school connection, that w
e had some sort of potential. If we did get together I didn’t want it to be just a one-night stand, and I didn’t want to surprise him later on with my crazy. I liked to get the message that I was an untamable spirit out right away. It’s like that old saying: If you can’t handle me when I show you my gaping butthole, you don’t deserve the rest of me. Or however it goes.

  Anyway, the risk paid off—your dad saw my ass and pubes on a stage surrounded by strangers and emailed me immediately after the show, telling me that he hadn’t laughed that hard in a while. In his email, he wrote, “My hands were buzzing.” It’s still one of the oddest things anyone has said to me in response to my comedy, and made me question whether he might have Raynaud’s disease too. But I took it as a compliment, because he invited me to have lunch with him.

  He suggested we meet at a restaurant that does not exist anymore because it never should have existed in the first place. It was called Home but it didn’t make me think of home. It made me think of drowning myself in a bowl of tom yum soup. It served pan-Asian cuisine and made Panda Express look like a Michelin-starred restaurant. I looked at Yelp and the pictures of the food all featured those carrots that are cut into rhombuses with ridges. Here’s a little piece of advice: Those carrots are always an indicator that you are about to eat some frozen shit food prepared by the dirty hands of people who could give two fucks about it. Sucker customers ordered, paid, and then picked up their food at the counter. It was cash only. And guess what? Your dad didn’t have any cash on him. It was only after he insisted I order first, didn’t pay for my food, and ordered his own dish that he realized his wallet was completely empty—that kind of empty where a puff of dust and disappointment wafts out. He laughed, asked to borrow money from me, and after I handed him the cash, made this joke: “I’m like Nicolas Cage in that movie The Weather Man!”

  Like every human on Earth except him, I didn’t get it. It was a reference to an obscure 2005 film starring Nicolas Cage and Michael Caine. I’m extremely confident that Nicolas Cage and Michael Caine wouldn’t have gotten the reference either. I had never seen it before, just like how I had never eaten at that filthy nutsack of a restaurant before. I guess one way to look at it was that your dad was introducing me to all sorts of new things? Daddy’s “joke” was referencing a scene where Nicolas Cage doesn’t have a quarter for a paper and his father, played by Michael Caine, tells him he is a grown man who should carry more than a dollar.

  I wore a dress and shaved my legs for this? I was hoping to show him a softer, more feminine side of myself. Daddy came to this lunch dressed in black Lululemon pants and an electric-blue Lululemon shirt with his yoga mat slung over his shoulder in a yoga mat case, like a Santa Monica trophy wife running errands.

  I would’ve accepted and maybe even embraced his outfit choice had the whole date not started with him not paying. I feel very strongly that men should have to pay, at least for the first date. Paying for the first date is to compensate for all the time and money women are expected to spend on themselves just to get ready for that date. It’s the same reason why men should be the ones to propose to the woman and buy her the ring. It shows initiative, which is so important for a woman like myself, who has had to jump-start so much in her own life. Paying for the first date sets a precedent that says, “I want to take care of you. I want to provide for you.” And no, I don’t expect a man to take care of me financially, but I want him to want to, to take the opportunity, to make the gesture of doing something nice and giving right away.

  Well, your father, choosing a terrible restaurant, borrowing money from me, and then outing himself as a Nicolas Cage fan, did not seize any opportunity to show that he was a man capable of making caring decisions. I don’t even remember what we talked about as I ate my plate of orange chicken lo mein from a red plastic cafeteria tray. I was in such a bad mood that I made a point to not hug him or say “see you soon” when it was all over.

  Neither of us made contact after that. I did not want him to call me again, unless it was to deposit $32.51 into my bank account. I was so fed up with these men in New York who just kept disappointing me via their penises and/or lack of chivalry. Was it really too much to ask to find one courteous man with a working penis in all of New York?

  Then I ran into your dad on the street, weeks later. He was in that same blue yoga top and black pants, with the same yoga mat slung over his shoulder. And I was reminded of how handsome he was, with that chiseled face and that sexy deep voice. And how he had such a powerful, gentle energy and was into health and wellness and how the main thing everyone said about him was that he was “wicked smart.” (People on the East Coast have the oddest slang. It’s hella strange.)

  So Daddy contacted Mommy once again.

  He took me out to lunch at a Japanese teahouse and declared at the beginning of the meal that he was going to pay since he owed me. I ordered the most expensive dish possible: the black cod bowl. For reparations. It was a much better restaurant and we had a much better conversation.

  He asked me: “If you could have any superpower, what would it be?”

  Right away, I answered: “To speak every language in the world.”

  His jaw dropped and he asked: “Are you joking? Are you kidding me?”

  Me: “If I was, that wouldn’t be a very funny joke.”

  Him: “Well, that’s crazy because that would be my superpower too.”

  We talked about living abroad in college, his work in the Philippines when he was a Fulbright scholar, and connecting to the countries where our mothers were born and raised.

  For our third date, I suggested we go to Yoga to the People, that donation-based yoga class in the East Village I had mentioned at the wedding. Since we were both into health and wellness, it was really nice to do that kind of activity together, and just see each other sweat through our clothing, and put all the pheromones fully out there before even getting intimate. It’s always challenging not to fart during yoga, but that day, I clenched my cheeks extra tight during happy baby pose. By that point I knew I liked him more than any of those dudes who had dead koala arms dangling between their legs, and decided to go in for the kill: I made him a vegan meal. Peanut noodles with spicy tofu and garlic Chinese broccoli. He was entranced. I had officially trapped his ass.

  On our fifth date, he finally took me out to dinner at a restaurant called Caravan of Dreams, also located in the East Village. Afterward, he walked me back to my apartment in SoHo and kissed me on the stoop. It was magical, which I know sounds corny but you two are still into Disney princesses right now, so don’t judge me. It wasn’t Harry Potter magical or turning a soft penis hard (and making it stay that way!) magical. This was real magic, a spark and a connection that I felt deep down inside of me. I can still see the sweatshirt he was wearing, which had a corduroy moose sewn onto it. On that grimy New York street full of trash bag mountains, it made me feel like I was in a ski lodge next to a fire, looking out at snowy mountains. It also made me feel like he needed some better clothes, besides that blue yoga top and this forest camel sweatshirt. He only ever wore those two things. He still has the moose sweatshirt, and I hope he never gives it away.

  A few years later, your father proposed to me on that exact same apartment stoop on Greene Street. Nearby, a homeless man was arguing with a pigeon. We both witnessed it together. And I knew I would never have to be by myself ever again.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Miracle of Life

  Dear Girls,

  Even before your father and I got married, I felt like it was time to start trying for a baby. I had family and friends go through expensive and grueling fertility treatments. Some were successful and some weren’t, but they all told me the same thing: that they regretted trying too late. I came from a family with four kids and my intention was to have four of my own. I loved growing up in a big family. Our dynamic was very similar to that of the Pfeffermans in Transparent, bu
t with less Havdalah ceremonies and more dried squid. The house was full of laughter, opinions, yelling, tension, and first-world problems. My dad would sometimes say things to my mom like, “Devil, get away, for I am God’s property!” And at my age, I still cannot find anyone, besides my siblings, who can relate to having a dad who would clap back at his wife like a crazy gold miner from the 1800s. In his defense, it’s a bulletproof line to use in a fight. What is the comeback to that?

  My father passed away when I was twenty-seven years old, and I couldn’t imagine having to deal with his death without every single one of my siblings. Without the four of us, my mom would have been all alone to deal with her grief, the logistics of the funeral (choosing a casket is very overwhelming), and then the rest of her life. Asian women live forever, and having kids is like a 401(k) for companionship. When you two inevitably become widows for the second hundred years of your lives, you’re going to need some progeny to care about you and, most important, to owe you.

  I try to imagine my mom’s life now without her children and grandchildren. Being an adult is scary, especially if and when you lose your lifetime partner. Her house is already borderline Asian Grey Gardens, but it would be exponentially worse if my siblings and I didn’t exist. We are the ones who hook up and fix her Internet, force her to get rid of the gigantic Encyclopaedia Britannica set, replace the green 1970s refrigerator, and throw away the expired antibiotics. We take turns listening to her ramble about all of the juicy Asian American elderly gossip (which basically consists of who is dead, and who should be but isn’t). The worst part about being the child of an immigrant is that you have to help your mother switch her cellphone plan. “Mom! For the tenth time, I’m telling you, DO NOT GO WITH CRICKET!!!” My white friends have to offer some amount of tech help to their aging parents, but for some reason, none of them are involved in their parents’ cellphone provider decisions. And as agonizing as that process and all of the other things I’ve done for my mother are, it’s nothing in comparison to what she has given me.