Dear Girls

by Ali Wong

When I met your father in 2009, he was taking a year off from business school. After a string of losers, I was so excited to date someone from Harvard. Finally, somebody who owned a printer and a garlic press! The first time he invited me back to his apartment, I couldn’t wait. I assumed he lived in a spacious one-bedroom in the West Village, with some Moroccan poufs, an open-concept kitchen full of stainless steel appliances, and maybe even a Vitamix!

  Well, as it turned out, Daddy lived in a closet. No, he wasn’t gay. He lived in an actual closet in the East Village. You had to go through Daddy’s roommate’s room to get to Daddy’s room, because Daddy’s room was the closet of his roommate’s room. Immediately when you walked in the closet, there was a ladder to get to Daddy’s bed, which was a platform that only had space for his mattress and laptop. Underneath the platform was where he stored all of his belongings and got dressed. It was like a treehouse of ancestral disappointment. Since there was nowhere to eat in Daddy’s closet, we ate breakfast on the roommate’s bed after the roommate had gone to work. His roommate did healing work with very powerful magnets so we couldn’t have our cellphones in that room or our text messages and personal info would go to outer space. I acted like I was totally cool with all this, but in my head, I was like, Motherfucker, I thought you went to SIDWELL with Chelsea Clinton!

  But this adult man who grew up in a mansion with so much privilege never complained about these odd living conditions. He decorated it with Christmas lights and photos from his time in the Philippines, and made an altar by his bed. It showed me right away that he was a grounded person, someone who could make the most out of a shitty situation, and it really surprised me and made me wonder what else he had to reveal.

  Every time we hung out, I thought, Who is this guy? During the day we’d go to yoga together and eat hummus for lunch. Then at night, I’d come home to him after doing a stand-up show, and he’d be sitting in that closet watching an intense, violent movie on his laptop. He was so seemingly zen but then chose to unwind with Reservoir Dogs. Like, dude, what is going on inside of you? Is there possibly an Eyes Wide Shut sex party demon in there I don’t know about? Or a Barbra Streisand underground mall full of dolls? Because all of that would be kind of cool! All of his contradictory personality traits and interests just kept on revealing themselves to me, and kept surprising me. He kept me in a constant state of confusion and fascination that remains to this day.

  For my twenty-seventh birthday, I was really looking forward to your father’s gift. I told myself, Guys who go to Harvard Business School don’t fuck around. His peers know how to give great gifts to their trophy wives and I’m well on my way to becoming one, so I am totally ready for the Hermès box with the Birkin bag inside. But there was no box. There was no bag with tissue peeking out of the top. We sat down on his bed, in his closet room, as he gave me an envelope. It must be a gift card to Cartier! Even better! He’s letting me choose between rose gold and white gold! But there was no gift card inside. Instead, there was a blank card with these instructions: “Write down all of your goals.” Then he had me recite them back to him. And after every goal I read out loud to him, he replied, “So it shall be.” Like a cheap-ass genie, he gave me homework for my birthday. I shook the envelope upside down to see if there was anything else inside. At the time I would’ve preferred a Burberry fanny pack, something I could actually feel in my hands and show off to people. I remember writing things like “I want to go to the Montreal Just for Laughs Comedy Festival,” “I want to heal my rosacea,” and “I want to make a living off of telling jokes.” Looking back, each one of those goals came true. Sometimes I think he might actually be a genie and sometimes I think I might be a hardworking funny person and that shit would’ve happened anyway, and now his gift just seems prescient by sheer happenstance. But honestly, it was so refreshing to be with someone so dedicated to self-reflection and self-discovery. And despite having put anal beads up another grown man’s ass in a previous relationship, I had never experienced any activity that was so intimate. And straight up free.

  * * *

  In 2011, I got invited to do The Tonight Show to perform my very first stand-up set on late-night TV. Until that point, my only other TV appearance was when I guest starred as Christian Slater’s assistant on a Fox comedy called Breaking In. I was so excited because many people’s careers in comedy, such as Ellen DeGeneres’s or Joan Rivers’s, had taken off after a Tonight Show appearance. It was considered the best exposure that could lead to sitcom deals and instant success. But the problem was that the date they assigned me was Daddy’s graduation from Harvard Business School.

  I have missed many friends’ weddings, baby showers, bachelorette parties. But I’m very proud that I was smart enough not to miss your father’s Harvard Business School graduation. It wasn’t that hard of a decision, because I knew, in the end, he was more important. We had been dating for two years and it was already so obvious that I could never find someone else like him. Besides having a very fundamental emotional connection and physical attraction, your father and I are both the exact same amount of Asian. And I don’t mean that it was challenging to find another full-blooded Asian person (there are over a billion in China alone). Culturally, I was yearning for someone who matched both my love for authentic Asian cuisine and also grew up going to bar mitzvahs and Passover dinners. It was always a struggle to find a partner who matched my passion for saving money, taking risks, and being engaged in anything that was challenging but ultimately worthwhile. Someone who had a high threshold for failure and a zero-tolerance policy for shoes in a house.

  When I met your father, I was concerned that he was a little bit too much of a private school Asian. We West Coast Asians often have this assumption that East Coast Asians are not as evolved in their ethnic identity. That as a result of growing up around predominantly white people, they tend to be a little more ashamed of their race, overly excited to assimilate, and late in finding their place in an Asian American community. I also referred to these men as Lacrosse Asians. The few East Coast Asians I had met wore polo shirts and ate brie as a snack. When they saw footage or photographs of Japanese Americans being sent to internment camps during WW2, they thought: Ooh, I wonder where they bought those form-fitting khakis…

  And the truth is that he was a little too much of a private school Asian at first. When your father first met my parents, I told him to make sure to bring them fruit. He arrived at their house in cargo pants, a red Adidas jacket, and a backpack. When I greeted him at the gate, I was less concerned with his music-festival-attendee outfit and more curious about where the goddamn fruit was. He smiled and reassured me, “It’s in my backpack!” I led him upstairs to the kitchen, where my mom and dad were sitting next to their pistachio-green refrigerator, watching Judge Judy on their tiny Sony kitchen TV. They stood up, excited to meet the first guy I had brought home in years. As he answered questions about where he was born and went to college, I nudged him and whispered to him through a smile, “The fruit. Bust out the fruit.” And out of his backpack, he placed on the kitchen table two bananas, a plum, a red apple, and a satsuma. My parents didn’t even say thank you. They were too busy staring at the conga line of odd fruit, confused. I was like, Shit. Were East Coast Asians not raised to understand that you’re supposed to bring a giant sack of oranges, an orchid, or an overwhelming box of Asian pears? Bananas! Seriously?! Those are perhaps the most insulting part, because they are the carnations of fruit. Everyone knows they cost nineteen cents each at Trader Joe’s. I think they’re the only thing you can get for nineteen cents these days. One red apple?! Did he steal that from the lobby of a Howard Johnson?

  Before meeting me, he had never been to a Costco, which is like church for Asian people. He never bought anything on sale because he fell for that propaganda “You Get What You Pay For,” which is the most sacrilegious thing you can say to a Chinese person. And he didn’t love pork since he was a vegan. But I fixed all that. After a
little while, he understood the value of only buying things on sale and gave up eating all-soy everything. After the sixth time he watched me eat chicken pho while he ate noodles in broth (that was boiled broccoli stock), he was over it. I also sent him articles every day about how eating too much soy will make a man grow titties and cause dementia. Thank you, Internet, for making it easy for me to instill fear into my boyfriend for positive change. Now he has fully come home to his Filipino carnivorous roots. We fight over the dark meat of the turkey during Thanksgiving, share tripe, and eat our pig’s feet to the bone like injured wolves who’ll do anything to survive. I cannot imagine being with someone you have to battle over where to eat. All we do is eat Asian food and shop at Asian grocery stores on the weekend. And I appreciate that I don’t have to defend why a bean belongs in a dessert. Most Southeast Asian desserts consist of some beans, seeds, and tapioca swimming in coconut milk. You eat it with a spoon and it’s not a cake or a cookie, it’s magic.

  * * *

  My ex-boyfriend Chris Garcia once said about your dad: “You can never leave that guy. He’s shaman to ramen.” What he meant was that there’s no other living man who is the same level of hippie-dippie and Asian American, a man that shares appreciation for both the empirical and the supernatural while being Asian. Your dad was doing ayahuasca way before it was cool, and took me to do a ceremony several times. Ayahuasca is a psychedelic plant mixture that helps you heal and find answers to the questions that have been burning inside of you. At the time, I had very bad rosacea on my cheeks. My face looked like a cluster of erupting volcanoes. A shaman at the first ceremony in Tulum told me, “Your body is punishing you for thinking that you’re ugly.” I had gained a bunch of weight in NYC and was feeling down on myself, so he was right.

  During the ceremony, we took turns drinking a cup of medicine from the shaman. It tasted exactly like what it was: boiled bark and leaves. I sat crossed-legged, quiet in a circle with your dad and a bunch of mostly Mexican women, anxiously waiting to see the tie-dye come alive in my brain. But nothing happened. So I went up to the shaman for another cup of medicine. And another and another. I lay down and stared up at the straw roof of the yurt, feeling like this whole thing was a sham and that “shaman” really meant “sham man.” And as the shaman continued to sing songs in Spanish and play his acoustic guitar, I closed my eyes, and suddenly, streaks of the most beautiful colors began to shoot out like a fountain to the tune of the music. A double of myself appeared. Another Ali Wong with the same jet-black hair, glasses, and tan skin took my hand and guided me toward a barn, where she laid me down on a stack of hay.

  “Take off your panties,” she commanded.

  “When?”

  “Right now,” she answered as she smiled.

  “Why?”

  She climbed on top of me, pulled back my hair, and whispered into my ear: “Because I said so.”

  She proceeded to climb down, put her head between my thighs, and stuck her tongue in my pussy. As I moaned, probably out loud in front of everyone else in the yurt, some of whom were throwing up their past traumas (instead of getting head from me, like me!), the other Ali Wong crawled on top of me, still with her tongue in my pussy, but now with her pussy in my face. I recognized that same white heart-shaped birthmark on the inside of her left thigh, and kissed it lovingly as I made my way to her clitoris. We rolled around together and laughed, our lips moving around each other’s necks, biting each other’s double-pierced earlobes, touching each other, and complimenting each other’s features (which yes, were all just my features).

  “Your skin is so soft.”

  “I love how you look when your hair drapes over your breasts.”

  “Your hands smell like garlic.”

  “Yours do too.”

  “They always smell like garlic because I love cooking with garlic.”

  “Me too.”

  She made me laugh, and she made me feel beautiful and gave me a lot of pleasure. And throughout my hallucination, I still saw all of those beautiful spiraling and shooting streams of turquoise mixed with orange, turning into purple and red, riding the rhythm of the music. I smiled, tears streaming down my face, because I didn’t even know that this was exactly what I had come all the way to Tulum for. This hallucination actually happened, by the way. I’m not making it up for this book.

  Months later, my skin cleared up. Because I took antibiotics. But still! The self-love I gained after that trip was incredible. But please take antibiotics if you need to.

  During that first ceremony, I found a way to get over my physical insecurities. The second time I learned to accept my dad’s death. You never really get over the death of a parent. Ayahuasca ceremonies are not always fun—I cried a lot during the second one and experienced so much grief in my hallucination. I felt how much my father was suffering when he was sick, and why eventually he probably just wanted to pass. Losing him is still the hardest thing I’ve ever had to cope with. And if it wasn’t for your father encouraging me to take the time out to deal with it, I’m sure I would still be in a terrible place emotionally.

  The second hardest thing I’ve ever had to cope with was my miscarriage. Your father held my hand through the entire experience, and afterward, we made the most out of me not being pregnant, and went to do mushrooms in Ojai.

  In writing all of this out, it’s become pretty clear to me that your dad is basically my drug dealer who happens to have exquisite taste in ramen.

  * * *

  Sometimes I fantasize about what my life would be like if I had married Idris Elba. He would talk dirty to me in a British (or is it Australian?) accent in bed and almost crush me by accident with his beautiful biceps, and I would do a very good job of pretending that I cared about his DJing career. Any married woman who hasn’t fantasized about leaving her husband for Idris Elba is either lying or has extremely poor taste or is an Amish lady who has never watched The Wire. But then I snap out of it and realize that I wouldn’t have had you two if I’d ended up with Idris. I also wouldn’t have the career that I have now if it wasn’t for your father.

  My life changed dramatically after my first Netflix special, Baby Cobra, premiered. A lot of those jokes were inspired by your dad and his absurd and surprising behavior. Daddy continues to be my muse. He recently took me down an Adele YouTube wormhole that lasted an hour and moved me to tears while he supplemented the clips with all of these interesting Adele facts that I never knew. “Did you know that she wished she never watched the Amy Winehouse documentary?” “She supposedly is going to stop touring because she doesn’t like applause.” Unfortunately, there is no word for a man that is a muse, but there should be. How about we call him a “magnum”? Hopefully, that word and its association with the big dick condoms counterbalance the emasculating potential of being viewed as a male muse.

  It’s very uncommon for female comedians to tour with their children. But I wanted to bring both of you plus Daddy on the road because I didn’t want to spend any nights apart. None of that would have worked without him. He decided to sell posters after the show as a way of being with me while I did shows. After Baby Cobra, the first theater I headlined was in Boston, in the middle of winter. He set up his poster-selling station right by the door, where it was freezing cold, and he had to wear a giant Uniqlo down jacket with a hat and earmuffs. To prepare, he bought a bunch of tablets and square readers and got a ton of posters printed. He bought a packable dolly on Amazon and loaded it up with boxes to take to the venue. And in that first theater run, he sold enough posters to pay for Mari’s childcare for a month.

  You will never know true suffering until you fly cross-country with a baby or a toddler. First class is almost worse because there are so many entitled, cranky old rich people who think they’re paying to travel through the sky in a private, soundproof champagne bubble, when they are actually sitting in a section that is open for purchase to the general public. One
time, Mari was singing “How Far I’ll Go” from Moana because it’s the fucking jam and I feel like singing it all the time too. A sixty-year-old woman who looked like she shit caviar was sitting behind me and maliciously said “Shhhh!” at Mari while kicking my chair with her wrinkled foot. I stood up, turned around, and asked, “Are you kidding me?! She’s just singing. She’s a little kid.” With her giant green Dolce & Gabbana bag in her lap, she pursed her shriveled lips and said, “I know, I have two. And they have children who are much more well-behaved.” I don’t remember much after that. I went dark and said some words like “bitch” and “your grandkids are probably well-behaved around you because they’re scared of their evil old witch of a Grandma.” I would have said “old cunt” but Mari was there.

  Besides the inevitable altercations with fellow passengers on the plane, dealing with explosive baby poo in such a tight space is extremely challenging. The bathrooms have a changing table that folds above the toilet, so if you’re not holding both of your baby’s ankles in one hand like you’re about to toss them into a volcano as a human sacrifice, your baby will fall into that nasty blue plane water. You have to squeeze the new diaper and wipes in between your legs or underneath your armpits because there’s no surface on which to place them in that bathroom. And your dad changed all of Mari’s poo diapers on the plane while I binge-watched Veep and did my best to save my voice for that night’s shows. Anytime he complained, I again mimicked having the C-section by taking an imaginary knife in my hand and slicing it across my C-section scar. I still use that trick. I used it while writing this chapter when I had to concentrate and needed Daddy’s help with you two. I have no idea how much mileage I can get out of it, but it’s so good that, if it expires in ten years, I might have another C-section to renew my rights to be lazy. No baby, just the C-section.