Dear Girls

by Ali Wong

  Even if I had wanted to stay at home and not work, I really couldn’t. Daddy’s family made Mommy get a prenup. A “prenup” is short for a “prenuptial agreement,” but what it really means is: “I still don’t trust this bitch.” So if Mommy had fallen out of the workplace completely, and Mommy and Daddy got divorced, Mommy would’ve been fucked SO hard.

  My parents trained me to always picture the worst-case scenario as some sort of immigrant survival tactic. When I was in the first grade, I went to my first sleepover. As I was excitedly packing my Garfield sleeping bag and Troll dolls, my mom looked me in the eye and told me, “Make sure nobody touches your bướm [This translates to “butterfly” in Vietnamese, which is a polite way of saying “pussy.”]. Nobody touches your bướm except for me when I wash you.”

  “Is somebody going to try to touch my bướm??”

  “I don’t know who is going to be at that house. A yucky uncle. A cousin. I don’t know. But if you let anyone there touch your bướm you will have a very bad life. It will be traumatizing and sad and stay with you.” Hey, Mom, you know what else was traumatizing and sad and stayed with me? Your terrifying warning about marauding bướm touchers!

  Intent on having fun but also protecting my bướm, me and my friend took a bath together and the mom offered to wash my butt. But I pictured having “a very bad life” full of sweaty nightmares and replied confidently, “I don’t wash my butt.”

  And then my friend told everyone at school the next day, “Ali doesn’t wash her butt! Her butt smells!”

  So as I signed that prenup, I imagined dedicating twenty years of my upcoming life to roasting chickens, grocery shopping, packing lunches, bedtime reading, soothing fevers, driving to soccer games, bath time, and planning, planning, planning…and in doing so, becoming entirely unqualified to do stand-up. When you take more than five evenings in a row off from doing stand-up sets, you risk becoming unfunny and out of touch. And then I pictured our future children finally going off to college, and Daddy finally feeling free to leave me for his Brazilian mistress, who was so much more pleasant and younger and tighter than me, his frumpy, cranky wife whose butthole and spleen he had already memorized. And the Brazilian mistress’s pussy was so good (she never had afterbirth pass through) that she was able to persuade him that I truly deserved nothing for all those years I sacrificed toward raising the children, and at the age of fifty-five, I would be back to living with an old Russian roommate in a studio apartment. No one would hire me, and they’d be right, because I actually wouldn’t be qualified to do anything at all. I would have to drink Kirkland Signature baby formula to stay alive while Daddy was on a yacht, eating sashimi off his twenty-two-year-old wife’s beautiful caramel ass.

  I was very motivated to make my own money because I signed a document specifically outlining how much I couldn’t depend on my husband. My father always praised “the gift of fear,” and that prenup scared the shit out of me. In the end, being forced to sign that prenup was one of the greatest things that ever happened to me and my career.

  Being a working mom is not easy and I constantly feel like I’m failing at both working and being your mom. There’s never enough time to write as much as I should, or spend as much time with you two girls as I want. On my second tour, I was gone for a short three-day trip. Mari was three years old and Nikki was one. When I returned, I rushed to both of you girls, hugged you, and professed, “I missed you so much.” Nikki just smiled and laughed, but Mari looked at the floor and replied angrily, “No, you didn’t.” It was like a knife to the heart. I felt guilty in that moment, but the truth is that I feel guilty all the time for not cooking more, for not reading more, and for not being there every single night to put each of you to bed. And I’ve given up on trying to be a great wife because that was kind of the point of trapping your dad with you two kids. But I feel less guilty about that.

  By the time you’re ready to marry, maybe there won’t even be humans working anymore because of robots and you won’t have to choose. Maybe in the near future, I can be a hologram comedian like Tupac at Coachella and perform in my living room for thousands of people simultaneously in Australia, Singapore, Mexico, and Mars. (Elon Musk has been trying to go there and I’d prefer he prioritize a simple speed train from San Francisco to Los Angeles, but whatever, it’s his life and brain, I guess.) Either way, I know what I have in common with stay-at-home moms: We are all just doing our best. And if it isn’t good enough for you, wait until you have kids and you’ll get it.

  CHAPTER 5

  Hustle and Pho

  Dear Girls,

  You can be whatever you want to be, but I’ll be worried if you want to do stand-up. And because stand-up is my life’s work, I have a lot of thoughts about it, and I’m gonna try to get them all in here.

  In 2012, I went on a very sad, unofficial tour. It did not have a name because nobody even knew my name. My main TV credit was playing a best friend with no point of view or defining characteristic on a very short-lived NBC sitcom based on Chelsea Handler. I was getting paid very little to perform in these post-apocalyptic clubs, in cities where I felt like the first Vietnamese person to ever land. To save money I avoided eating out, and just ate sardines wrapped in lettuce, the meal of choice for carb-conscious hobos. On one date, I headlined the last smoking club in America. The audience looked like they had lost their way to the $3.99 Vegas buffet and decided to just sit down, to get through a pack of cigarettes before continuing their journey to unlimited pudding. I was doing stand-up in a cancer chamber. On Saturday night, I had to do three shows in a row, not because I was popular, but because the smoking-allowed policy was popular. Emphysema was a bigger draw than me. When I returned to my Travelodge room on the ground floor, right next to the freeway, I couldn’t sleep on the squishy bed. My lungs felt like they’d shrunk to the size of an apple, and I was so scared someone was going to break into the room and kidnap the only Vietnamese person to ever set foot in St. Louis. I slept with my keys in between my fingers and prayed that the one time I helped an old lady cross the street would give me enough karma points to survive.

  After performing nine shows over five days in that tobacco basement, I finally got to go home. I had booked the first flight out Monday morning to save money, and also because I knew I would want to go home as soon as possible. But when I arrived at the airport, the security line was serpentine, because “the system went down” (which is the adult version of “the dog ate my homework”). By the time I got to the front of the line, my flight was leaving in twenty minutes. I put my suitcase on the belt and told them I didn’t want to go through the machine where you have to throw up the Jay-Z sign by making a diamond with your hands and place your feet on the yellow feet like a game of Twister. I had just spent a week performing in poison and didn’t want to go through that human microwave, furthering the risk to my reproductive system and the likelihood any future baby would be born with a mouth on its elbow. When you request that, security yells out “Female Assist!” so that a pair of hands can give a five-foot-tall Chinese-Vietnamese-American struggling stand-up comedian a pat down, to check that she’s not hiding a switchblade in her underwear. (Sidenote: If a small Asian woman manages to hijack a plane all by herself, she deserves to keep that plane.) Five minutes went by. Ten minutes went by. I started crying because I was missing my flight and had to be stuck in St. Louis for hours longer. Fifteen minutes. Twenty minutes. Finally, a husky and hostile woman arrived to feel me up with the backs of her hands. I stood with my arms out, legs spread, sobbing, “I just want to go home!”

  The act of doing stand-up itself isn’t that hard. Getting onstage in front of strangers, writing and performing jokes, and even bombing, is the easy part. It’s everything else surrounding it that’s so difficult. The road. Traveling. Spending hours on the Internet to book the cheapest flights possible. Eating a boatload of fried food with ranch dressing because there are no other options
. Fending off creepy-ass men. Steering clear of your idols and funny colleagues who you’ve learned tend to sexually harass women.

  And even at home, without the travel, it was always hard going out every night to shitty venues in shitty neighborhoods with shitty audiences and not getting paid for it. When you’re starting out, stage time is so valuable. Even now, I don’t get paid for a lot of sets I do locally at these bar shows, where the audience hasn’t bought tickets and I’m there to test out my latest joke about my butthole. They’re just there to have drinks and I’m there to workshop new material.

  I get so annoyed when people claim to be stand-up comedians but they’re actually comedic bloggers or vloggers. (Again, you can be whatever you want to be, but not a vlogger. Never a vlogger. Videoing yourself putting on makeup or unboxing candles is not a job.) It’s really not the same. Those people don’t put their body out there. Stand-up is extremely personal and requires you to leave your home and actually be on location. And the location is usually the back room of a Mexican restaurant in Carson. Or somebody’s dog-poop-covered backyard in Silver Lake. Or an abandoned Cheesecake Factory behind an abandoned Sears.

  But that’s what makes it worth it.

  * * *

  Females are just as funny, if not funnier, and definitely quirkier, than men, especially in everyday life. One of your aunties (friend aunties, not blood aunties) once warmed up a frozen tamale in between her thighs at work because the microwave was broken. Another one fell asleep with her vibrator in her underwear (the batteries were dead when she found it in the morning). And another one can queef on command. I once knew a lady who would water her plants with her period juice and talk to them, hoping they’d spring to life. Good pussy jokes are funnier than good dick jokes.

  But stand-up comedy is a craft that you have to hone. You have to constantly get out of the comforts of your home at night and go test out your material, at open mics, on the road. And most women don’t want to do that.

  Here’s my personal theory on why there aren’t more female stand-up comics: safety. When I go on the road, I have to get into a car with a stranger four times per day. From my house to the airport, from the airport to the hotel, from the hotel to the club, and from the club to the hotel. For a man that’s considered an adventure, full of potential man-shenanigans like in The Hangover. Best-case scenario is they wind up high on mushrooms getting blown by a stranger with a briefcase full of mob money and a foreign passport that doesn’t belong to them. Worst-case scenario is boredom, which means being on their phones, which they also love. For a woman, though, it’s four opportunities to get raped and/or killed. I got into the habit of walking at night, back to my car or to my hotel room, with keys in between my fingers, and always ready to scream and take a swipe at someone, just in case. You gotta want it really bad to constantly put yourself in those situations. You have to really love stand-up and embrace every shitty thing that comes along with it.

  You also greatly increase the chances of prolonged living with your parents. Lucky for you, I’m supercool so you’ll probably want to live with me. But when I started in San Francisco, living at home and being asked “Where are you going?” and “Can you pick me up from my colonoscopy?” and “Why are you doing stand-up comedy?” really ate away at my soul. I had to witness more of my parents’ fights, and since I was an adult, they’d pull me into those fights. I’d be forced to listen as they aired the dirty laundry of thirty-five years of marriage, throwing out jabs at each other like: “I told you to put zero sugar in my birthday fruit tart!” and “Nobody put a gun to your head and forced you to buy ten purple polo shirts!” It was like watching a bad off-off-Broadway play where you’re the only one in the audience and both the lead characters are played by your old-ass parents.

  Still, San Francisco was a great place to start. I didn’t know that San Francisco was a city that people moved to from all over the country specifically to start doing stand-up comedy, like my dear friend Chris Garcia (we’ll talk more about him later in this chapter), who moved from L.A. The beautiful thing about starting in a city like San Francisco, Chicago, or Seattle is that you get to live in a cool, progressive metropolis, where there are smart people and interesting things happening, but you can also hide away from the entertainment industry. You don’t have to worry about agents, managers, TV executives, showrunners, and casting directors watching and assessing you. A guy whose best friend is his bull piercing might be watching, but Shonda Rhimes isn’t.

  That’s not the case in Los Angeles because you never know who is in the audience. Even now, as an established comedian, it can be exponentially more painful to test out new material in Los Angeles. When I was pregnant with Nikki, I did a last-minute pop-up show with Dave Chappelle. Opening for someone like him is always challenging because the whole energy from the crowd was: “When is Dave going up onstage?” It was at a bar on Sunset Boulevard that I had never been to before, because it looked like the kind of place where A-list celebrities go to meet and blow cocaine up one another’s assholes. The lighting was very red and about one hundred people were packed into the small, intimate space. Right when I got up onstage, I noticed a man with huge black sunglasses sitting to my right, with his hood on, holding hands with a beautiful young blond model. It was Eddie Murphy. My number one comedy idol. And now the energy from the crowd wasn’t: “When is Dave going up onstage?” It was: “Holy shit there’s Eddie Murphy Holy shit there’s Eddie Murphy who gives a shit about anything else nothing matters it’s Eddie fucking Murphy!!!!” I intended to use the stage time to try out new jokes, but instead did ten minutes of my best material at the time, to complete and utter silence. And I knew Eddie Murphy specifically wasn’t laughing, because everyone knows when Eddie Murphy is or isn’t laughing. You could recognize his signature “HANH-HANH-HANH” goose honk anywhere. And that night, there were no geese. I couldn’t believe it. I ate it so hard in front of the man who made me want to start doing stand-up comedy, and wished in that moment that I was back in San Francisco.

  Nobody is great at stand-up comedy right away and it’s important to have room to experiment, find your voice and, most important, to fail. But San Francisco was particularly special at the time when I started. It was still weird and affordable. I had barista friends renting one-bedrooms in the Mission District for five hundred dollars. The same one-bedroom would probably cost you three thousand dollars per month now and be rented out by a nineteen-year-old tech nerd who was one of the first engineers at Grubhub.

  But when I was living there, San Francisco was an escape for people who hadn’t been accepted in their small towns for who and what they loved or believed. This was also one of my first jokes: “There’s a saying that people in New York have a lot of ambition and a lot of talent. And people in L.A. have a lot of ambition and no talent. And people who live in San Francisco go to Burning Man.” It had a high density of homeless people, hippies, punks, and people who like to go to gay bars rolled up in rubber carpet so people can stand on them while they masturbate (this is a real thing, never ask me how I know). There was always this eccentric and progressive factor to it. At the Folsom Street Fair, there were men dressed up as fluorescent naughty nuns who called themselves the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. San Francisco was insanely liberal but, for some, it still wasn’t enough. I remember people protesting outside Rainbow Grocery, a co-op that was known for its bulk bin selection and high number of trans employees, because it had sold cheese imported from Israel. And I’m all for standing up for what you believe in, but like, they sell organic goat curd yogurt and have a community bulletin board that’s covered in spoken word fliers. They’re not your enemy, liberals! The enemy is the person who told you crystal deodorant actually works.

  It was healthy to start in such a sensitive and progressive environment that felt kind of oppressive, because it deserved to be mocked and people loved it. You couldn’t do basic-ass trans jokes. It was a town of outside
rs and we’d laugh at the insiders and also at the super outsiders who were too eccentric for the outsiders. It made sense once you understood all the Venn diagrams.

  The first place I went to perform was the Brainwash Café on Folsom Street. It was run by Tony Sparks, who was known as the “Godfather of Open Mics.” This is probably the worst thing to be the godfather of, after strep throat. He was an extremely charismatic man, who vaguely resembled Dr. Dre but with a giant mole and vaudevillian laugh. The Brainwash was half laundromat, half café, full homeless shelter. The comics lined up at five P.M. to sign up for a three-minute spot for an open mic showcase that would start at seven P.M. For first timers, Tony Sparks had a tradition where he announced to the audience: “Okay y’all. This here is Ali Wong. And it’s her first time doing stand-up. So how about we give her—”

  And the audience, composed of bitter stand-up comics, exclaimed with him, “A lot of love!”

  And Tony Sparks smiled, cupping the back of his ear. “Say what?”

  This time louder, everyone repeated in unison, “A lot of love!”

  “I can’t hear you!”

  “A LOT OF LOVE!!!”

  And then all the bitter comics would temporarily be awakened from their depressed-ass state, clap furiously, and scream, in awe that they were part of an actual community with actual traditions. While I did my three minutes about K-Y Jelly, and the difference between extra virgin olive oil and slutty olive oil, Tony was right there to my left, laughing and clapping. And when I got offstage, he bent down to my ear and whispered, “You gonna be famous.” From that day forward, I would go up every single night at a different mic and try a million new jokes. I mostly bombed. It’s the only way to get good.