by Ali Wong
But instead, the program was 98 percent women. The three boys on it were Friend-Zone material (that’s the nicest way I know how to say they were ugly). So it turned into this power women–bonding experience where we all ate Spam musubi every day from the local 7-Eleven and drank Olde English forties every night. None of us got any ass because we were too busy inhaling kalua pig, white rice, and haupia and getting gassy from overeating. Somewhere in my closet, there’s a pile of pictures of us singing karaoke with puke on our shirts. My three roommates and I threw up and shat so much into our one toilet that the seat broke after two weeks. And instead of fixing it, we chose to just hover over the seatless toilet bowl for the rest of the program. That hovering was also the most exercise we got the whole time.
You might be wondering how eating, drinking, shitting, and puking so much could be considered a “valuable experience,” but being around all of those women on the program, with no men to impress, was so empowering. We were as boisterous as we wanted to be, without having to worry it would be too much for any man to handle, and we were having fun for ourselves. And it was from that summer on that I decided I should just live with this attitude forever, regardless if there were men around or not.
One of my roommates was Citadelle Bliss Priagula. Filipinos straight up have the best names. Here’s a fun formula for working out your Filipino name: Favorite type of candle + Favorite brand of body wash + Name of a dragon in Game of Thrones = your Filipino name. Mine is Citronella Dove Viserion.
Citadelle and I would stay up late talking ourselves to sleep. One night, we decided to have an epic staring contest. In our spaghetti strap nightgowns, we sat across from each other on our cheap twin dorm beds, with our eyes wide open. She tried flaring her nostrils and I was like, Bitch, please. I finally got her by inhaling deeply and then shooting snot out of my nose onto my lips. When in doubt, use your own bodily fluids to destroy your enemy. Your body is a well-stocked arsenal of goos and liquids—don’t be afraid to use it.
I gained ten pounds and it was the best summer of my life. The curriculum was so interesting and I was very fortunate to hear the great Haunani-Kay Trask speak passionately about her people’s right to get back their land, and how ready she was for the exploitation of Native Hawaiians via the tourism industry to stop. At the end of her speech, a fellow student raised her hand to ask: “My family is Japanese American and has been in Hawai’i for many generations. What can we do to support the sovereignty movement? What can we do to help?”
And Haunani-Kay Trask simply responded: “Get out.” And then she followed up by proudly and unapologetically stating: “I have zero aloha. None.”
The way she used humor and spoke with such strength, all while in her sarong and long hair flowing down to her elbows, really inspired me and influenced how I perform. I loved how she didn’t try to repress her beauty or femininity in order to appear more authoritative. In fact, she channeled it into this goddess-queen energy that made her come off as a captivating maternal figure fighting for her beliefs and her people. I had never been so moved by a single speaker.
Then I gained five more pounds because fuck it.
* * *
After that summer in Hawai’i, I went to Vietnam and gained ten more pounds. Clothing store employees wouldn’t even let me try on anything in their shops. I walked into one store to find some new clothes, and the young girl aggressively yanked a pair of pants out of my hands and said in broken English, “This: small. You: bigger.”
I gained weight for a number of reasons. The food was so good and basically free, so I would eat even when I wasn’t hungry. Back then, a bowl of pho was fifteen cents. Fifteen cents. Nothing is that cheap. A pack of gum doesn’t even come close. I once ordered a side of anchovies at a famous pizza place in New York and they charged me ten dollars. Ten dollars for anchovies, the pigeons of the sea!
It blew my mind how far the U.S. dollar could go; it felt like the entire country was on sale. And like my cheap uncle says, the best thing about Vietnam: “NO TIP.” No wonder why gross, loser American men love to go to Southeast Asia to feel powerful. “I’m an expat” is a very fancy way for these men to say “No one would fuck me in America” and “I’m a pervert who wants to sleep with as many Asian women as possible.” One of those guys once mistook me for a native Vietnamese woman and kept trying to seduce me in Vietnamese. He had a huge red beard, John Lennon glasses, and looked like he had spent his whole life eating and smelling like Fritos while writing a fantasy novel that he would never finish about queens and dragons. Over and over, he repeated “Chị ơi!” (which means “Hey lady!”) from a balcony as I shopped on the street. I wish I had screamed up at him, “Go away! I’m from the United States! You ain’t locking me in no expat sex dungeon!” But instead I just walked away as fast as possible, hoping he wouldn’t throw a fishing net on me and then drag me up into his spider’s nest of red pubes and SPF40.
It was so much fun to eat on the street, on a red plastic stool at a tiny table. I could tell myself whatever meal I ate didn’t really count since I was eating in a dollhouse. I couldn’t resist all the street vendors. I loved flagging down a woman riding a bicycle, with steaming orange, yellow, and green sticky rice on display behind her. And she’d repeat in a singsong tone what she was selling like a seductive siren from Greek mythology: “HOT STICKY SWEET RICE HOT STICKY SWEET RICE HOT STICKY SWEET RICE.” By the third announcement I’d be making it rain, begging her to wrap that rice in newspaper, sprinkle it with coconut shavings, and please give it to me already. I loved having a relationship with the people who made my food, and how low stakes it was to try new things.
Those street vendors were so ephemeral, like an occult gift shop that vanishes after selling you a cursed monkey’s paw. One of my favorite things to eat in the morning was soft tofu with caramelized ginger syrup. This woman would come around on her bike every morning in front of my house and sell me some. Then one day, she stopped coming and I heard she died. It was so traumatizing that from then on, I decided to eat every one of my favorite food items from my favorite food vendors, even if I was full. I was acting like a survivor in a post-apocalyptic zombie world who stumbles on a supermarket.
Writing about this is making me insanely hungry. It’s a miracle I was able to even get an education while being so focused on eating. Sorry to go on, but what I always miss about Vietnamese food from Vietnam is the wide diversity of noodle soups. Pho is kind of like the pad thai of Vietnamese food. It became the most desirable and commercial Vietnamese dish for mainstream America, because there’s nothing too scary about it. It wasn’t until I lived in Vietnam that I realized about thirty different kinds of noodle soups were far superior to pho. One of my favorites was miền lươn, which is essentially clear noodles with fried eels in a very tasty pork-based clear broth. This one vendor would set up shop on the same corner near my house every day at five P.M. I’d watch her walk to the corner, balancing one large pot of broth on one end of a bamboo stick, with another pot full of noodles, dishes, herbs, and eels. Whenever I went more than three days without eating at her stand, she’d ask me why and where I had been, like a jealous wife. All of the vendors just sold one thing. They didn’t diversify their menu to risk lowering the quality of the one dish they did really well. They were on the opposite of the Cheesecake Factory menu model where you can order a General Tso’s chicken with a side of borscht.
Every morning I ate trứng vịt lộn, also known as balut. It’s a fertilized duck embryo, served piping hot and, for your average American, Fear Factor food. It was tough to look at, I admit. The brown baby bird is full of visible veins and has feathers and a tiny beak. But I was sitting next to five-year-old kids on their way to school, and they were eating it, so I thought, Fuck it, if these first-graders can handle the feathers, so can I. I tried my best to watch and copy them as they confidently struck the eggshell and immediately sucked the dark juice out of the opening. I was
shocked at how delicious it was, how it tasted like a very concentrated chicken broth. And the yolk was so dense, buttery, and perfect when paired with this spicy green herb and a little bit of salt. I had been hesitant to eat it because it was the epitome of unprocessed food. It was practically still alive, but after that moment I became really intolerant of anybody who got grossed out by something other people in the world ate for breakfast every day. Just shut the fuck up and eat a duck baby.
Oh, I also got fat because it was too hot to exercise. I’d wake up with my upper lip dripping with sweat. At the time, there were no gyms in Vietnam. Old people did small movements in the park to corny-ass music but that’s not real exercise. That’s called not being dead. No one had kettlebells and it was rare to see a female run. Young women didn’t exercise to lose weight because they didn’t need to. They were all so skinny, to the point where you had to wonder how their guts fit into their bodies.
One day, I tried playing volleyball with this group of male Cambodian exchange students. But according to my friend who grew up speaking Cambodian, they spent the whole time calling me mean, childish names like “big head” and “fat glasses girl” (in their defense, they hadn’t seen my gigantic bush, so they had to work with what they had), so I left and never tried playing with them again. I also tried badminton but constantly lost patience with the timing of that slow-ass birdie. I tried running around Hoàn Kiềm Lake at six A.M., which was the only appropriate time to exercise since it wasn’t quite as hot. But running in the dark in a foreign country was scarier than being fat. I know they say “beauty is pain” but I don’t think they mean “beauty is getting robbed for your organs.” Plus, even in the dark, people could recognize that I was an American. So by my second lap, I’d be surrounded by five buff men, all desperate to practice their English. They’d tell me flattering things like “You have energy like a boy” or “You don’t look like you have American money.” (They didn’t understand that my vintage Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam T-shirt was very cool in the United States.) So instead of focusing on how to get my workout in for the day, I prioritized exploring and learning as much as I could. It made me see how much mental energy and time we spend on losing weight in the United States.
All the Việt Kiều (Vietnamese American) girls on the program, including myself, got called fat all the time. In Vietnam, strangers sitting on stools feel entitled to roast you as you walk by. One day, a girl named Phuong finally got fed up with it and responded to this guy clowning her with this horrible comeback: “Well, at least I’m not poor.” The American, privileged, guilty part of me was mortified, but the Pussy Grabs Back part of me (which is much stronger) was like, Go in on this dude!
There was constant tension between a lot of Việt Kiều girls and Vietnamese people. They all thought I was a robust Japanese tourist because I dressed in baseball jerseys and wore my hair in two buns. That meant that I didn’t experience a lot of the envy Vietnamese had for the Vietnamese American girls who they thought were so lucky to be born and raised in the United States. Sometimes I think they called us fat to remind us that we were no better than them just for having more money and speaking English. Also, it was a glandular thing, so shut the hell up, Quan.
* * *
My roommate, Asiroh Cham, was the only person on the program who lost weight. Her last name was Cham because, well, she was Cham. The Cham are the indigenous people of Vietnam, and her father, very smartly, instructed all the Cham people before fleeing Vietnam to change their last name to Cham so they could easily find one another in the United States. She told me that her father hated Vietnamese people and referred to them as “robbers.” And when I visited her extended family’s village outside of Hanoi, I could understand why he’d felt that way. His family was constantly being harassed by the police and asked for bribes.
Asiroh and I chose to do a homestay to help improve our Vietnamese, while everyone else lived in the dorms. With the exception of the one white guy on our program, all the other students grew up speaking Vietnamese. Many assume that because my dad was Chinese and my mom is Vietnamese that I am fluent in both. But instead, their ability to speak different languages canceled each other out so they only spoke English at home, because that’s the only way they could communicate. It made me resent my parents a little for not making more of an effort to pass on their languages to me and my siblings. But once you two were born, I realized that it would’ve taken so much work for them, in addition to raising four kids. Both your dad and I speak semi-fluent Spanish and put more focus and energy into not saying “fuck” instead of teaching you “agua.”
The family we stayed with had a nephew named Canh who was basically their servant. My mom says that this is really common, that every Vietnamese family living in a major city in Vietnam takes in a niece or nephew from the countryside to be their cook, house cleaner, and nanny, in exchange for food, lodging, and an education. Canh slept in a doorless room next to the entryway of the house, right next to five dogs. He cooked every single meal and put what he called “Ajinomoto” (that’s MSG) in everything. I’d stand next to him, waving flies away from the raw food, as he’d sauté tomatoes with fish sauce and garlic. Eventually, he’d always add meat or vegetables and my glasses would fog up from the savory steam. To this day, I still use tomatoes, fish sauce, and garlic as the base for most of my dishes.
Asiroh told the family she didn’t eat pork or beef, which Vietnamese people have a very hard time comprehending. Either you’re a “vegetarian,” which is a Buddhist monk who has no sex and shaves their head and lives in the temple and eats tofu with soy sauce and water spinach for the rest of their lives, or you’re a person who has sex or will eventually have sex and eats meat. Those are the only two choices of things to be. One day I was cooking with Canh (that sounds like a good TV show) and discovered that the family kept a large stock of boiled pork bones. They’d use pork fat as their cooking oil for everything, including vegetables, tofu, and soup. It certainly made everything tasty—you don’t have to be Vietnamese to understand that pork fat makes everything better (like Cardi B!). I am still addicted to bacon chocolate and bacon donuts and just plain bacon. But the family had interpreted Asiroh’s odd dietary restriction to mean she just didn’t eat “pieces” of meat. Cooking her vegetables in meat juice seemed fine to them. And as a result, Asiroh had constant diarrhea.
As I kept moving the notches up on my belt, I grew to envy Asiroh’s chronic diarrhea. We joked that she was constantly sitting atop a “Not-So-Crystal-Geyser.” But then we both got diarrhea after eating at a famous Hue restaurant called “m Phủ,” which means “Hell” in Vietnamese. Everyone studying in a developing country should, at some point, get explosive diarrhea. It’s incredibly humbling and such a bonding experience. I barely knew Asiroh before the program. By the end, we were like sisters with a profound connection forged in a cauldron of diarrhea foam. Sort of like the mother-daughter bond I have with you two. Any relationship built from the foundation of diarrhea will stand the test of time.
Even though the house we stayed in was very nice, in Vietnam, you cannot escape cockroaches, mosquitoes, and epic, frothy diarrhea. Now I see Asiroh at least twice a month. We show each other our C-section scars, raise our babies together, and always joke about how some people are blood brothers, but we are shit sisters.
* * *
The best way to learn a new language is if you start fucking someone from that country. That’s why Daddy speaks Spanish so well. He didn’t learn it from la escuela, he learned it from la panocha. He had many Mexican lovers when he “studied” abroad. None of the women on my program slept with a local. I’ve only heard of that shit happening for women who study in Europe or Africa. Asian-from-Asia men are generally not attracted to Asian American women. They all find us too fat and loud, and they think we dress like Bratz dolls.
I was hoping to find love with someone on my program. But again, it consisted of 98 percent women. I thi
nk this is common for study-abroad programs. Women tend to be more adventurous and you have to have your shit together to go abroad. There’s a lot of paperwork and fear of the unknown involved. One of the boys was another doughy white man (no thanks). And the other was a guy named Hai. From the moment I saw him, I was into it. He looked like the male version of me, which really turned me on. He wore tortoiseshell glasses, short-sleeved checkered shirts, cargo shorts, and colorful New Balance sneakers. I wanted to fuck a version of me that had a dick—the ultimate form of self-affirmation.
Hai spoke much better Vietnamese than I did, which also made him somewhat of an authority figure. No other woman on the program wanted him, because he was disgusting. He was so Jungle Asian that he rocked the infamous long pinky fingernail. I fear that the long pinky nail is going extinct. Many non-Jungle Asians wrongly assume that it’s grown to support a coke habit. Hai joked that instead of a finger, he had a free, reusable Q-tip.
Every day on the van ride to school, he and I would sit in the front together, next to the driver. One morning he was picking his ear and nose like a toddler. I screamed to everyone in the back, “Hai is picking his nose!” And all of the girls in the program yelled, “Ew!” “Stop it!” “Grow up, dude!” So naturally, he turned around and flicked whatever crust came out at whoever tried to dim his light. It was like the Garbage Pail Kid’s version of an Oprah giveaway. “You get a booger! You get a booger! And you get a booger!” He and I laughed so much about it that by the time I got to school my stomach was sore; I had never met anyone like him. I thought he was outrageous and hot.