by Ali Wong
It’s not easy for a man to be with a female stand-up comedian. Men are not accustomed to a woman being gone every night and hanging out with mostly men—men who are professionally charismatic. But Daddy never makes me feel bad when I want to do a show instead of staying home to binge-watch Narcos and getting asked a million questions about where everything is in the house. He’s very helpful, but he will never know where the lint rollers or your swimsuits are.
During the summer of 2018, I filmed the first movie that I starred in and co-wrote, Always Be My Maybe. It shot in Vancouver for six weeks. During the week, I was working fourteen-hour days. I didn’t want to travel back to Los Angeles on the weekends because I needed those days to sleep. So Daddy flew back and forth every weekend, going through customs, to be with all of us in our two-bedroom apartment in Vancouver. For me, getting to see the two of you while shooting that movie, even for just a couple of minutes, every day, meant so much. And it wouldn’t have been possible without him. He did that, and also went on tour with me after Baby Cobra, all while holding down a job as the VP at a multi-billion-dollar tech company based in Los Angeles. He never slept on planes and often went to bed late at night because he was constantly having to work on his laptop when he wasn’t in the office. Before, one of the things I really loved about him was that he was such a quiet, peaceful sleeper. He used to sleep like his heart was pumping natural Ambien through his body. I kept expecting to be called down to the morgue to identify him, only to have him wake up halfway through and be like, “Oh hi, I must have dozed off there.” But midway through the tour after Baby Cobra, he started snoring from extreme exhaustion, to the point where the bed would shake and I would end up under the desk of my room at the Boise Sheraton, bracing myself for an earthquake.
Daddy and I have an agreement that instead of all the household duties falling on one person, it rotates. Some days he comes first. Some days stand-up comes first. But you two girls always come first for both of us.
It’s easy to attend a women’s march or wear a #TimesUp pin or talk about how Janet Jackson shouldn’t have been shamed for revealing her nipple at the Super Bowl. But a true feminist husband doesn’t see a woman’s money, power, and/or respect as a reflection of his own lack of success. A true feminist husband embraces his wife’s ability to provide by celebrating her and stepping up. Doing 50 percent of the childcare and household duties is simply not enough when I’m on set twelve hours per day shooting a movie. Being a woman’s biggest cheerleader means breaking out of the tit for tat mentality when it comes to tasks. It’s not just saying “Yay YOU!” It’s taking out the trash, signing up the kids for after-school activities, packing lunch for the kids, taking them to the doctor when necessary, always making sure the minivan is full of gas, waiting at home for the exterminator, paying bills. Supporting a woman can be tedious and boring but so can being a working mom.
A reporter once asked me why I think progressive men who earn significantly less than their breadwinning wives still won’t quit their jobs to take care of their children. Why do they still hold on to their careers, even if taking care of the children would make more financial sense because the cost of childcare is higher than their net salary?
I think I know the answer to that now, and it sucks. Women are not expected to live a life for themselves. When women dedicate their lives to children, it is deemed a worthy and respectable choice. When women dedicate themselves to a passion outside of the family that doesn’t involve worshipping their husbands or taking care of their kids, they’re seen as selfish, cold, or unfit mothers. But when a man spends hours grueling over a craft, profession, or project, he’s admired and seen as a genius. And when a man finds a woman who worships him, who dedicates her life to serving him, he’s lucky. But when a man dedicates himself to taking care of his children it’s seen as a last resort. That it must be because he ran out of other options. That it’s plan Z. That it’s an indicator of his inability to provide for his family. Basically, that he’s a fucking loser. I think it’s one of the most important falsehoods we need to shatter when talking about women’s rights.
* * *
I feel like I’ve painted maybe too rosy a picture. Our marriage is straight up not perfect. Sometimes it feels like a task-driven relationship. Since I’m the messier one, at times it’s like he’s just listing off all the things I need to clean up or deal with. And it is true that he constantly has to put my gym bag into the basket or put my suitcase in the garage. The spaces that we don’t share, like my car or trailer, are abject disasters that look like crack dens. Once a week we have this argument:
Daddy: “Please do not hang your rubber dishwashing gloves from the kitchen sink.”
Me: “That’s the standard place to hang them. That’s where dishwashing gloves have always been hung since the beginning of dishwashing gloves. That’s like saying don’t put your toilet paper on the toilet paper roll.”
Daddy: “But they always fall down into the sink.”
Me: “Then just put them back. They’re rubber gloves that weigh less than a pencil.”
Daddy: “But it’s one more thing for me to do.”
Me: “I want a divorce.”
In our weaker moments, we’re constantly keeping track of marriage points. If he has a free day to hike solo while I’m at some sticky kids’ birthday party with Nikki strapped to my chest, making sure Mari doesn’t get accidentally smothered by ten-year-old boys in the bouncy house, then he owes me. That gives me license to sleep in until eight A.M. (that’s eleven A.M. for you people without kids). We go to couple’s therapy every Friday morning at nine A.M. because it’s cheaper than a divorce. There’s always something for us to talk about. One Mother’s Day, we went out to Din Tai Fung for brunch with both of our mothers and some friends. I paid for everything and then we went to the mall, where I gave our mothers carte blanche at Sephora. At one point, I punched Daddy in the arm and said, “Hey! You wanna kick in at some point? You wanna get the moms something? Get me, who is also a mom, something?” He replied, “Well, I don’t know what you want.” And I screamed, “We’re at a fucking mall. Tiffany is right there, go in and ask me if I want something and you’ll find out!”
When I was little, I used to pee in my pants from laughing. They kept a pack of underwear for me at school (which I hope, if I get more famous, will become the “Ali Wong Commemorative Underwear Initiative” and future generations of pee-laughers will be safe from the embarrassment of having to throw their underwear away in a school trash can during lunch). I thought it went away until very recently, when your father was trimming my pubes and making jokes about the volume of hair he had to slash through. Have you ever seen those documentaries of Amazonian tribes hacking away at the dense, impenetrable jungle with only machetes and their own will to survive? It was like that. I started laughing and then I started to pee all over his hands. That’s real love. I hope you can find somebody that you can be that intimate with, someone who will trim your huge bush (you do have my genes) and make you laugh that hard. In fact, your father also assists me in removing gray hairs from my head. While he uses my tweezers to pluck them, he always smiles and says, “I really love doing this. It makes me look forward to us growing old together.”
When cars pick us up to go to the airport, drivers who don’t know who I am will often call Daddy “Mr. Wong.” They engage with him mostly, ask him the best way to get to the airport, and look to him for instructions on what to do with the luggage. The same happens at hotels and restaurants. People who don’t know who I am always assume I took his last name. And it never bothers your father—he always says afterward that he’s proud to be Mr. Wong.
And whenever he does, I feel so lucky that I trapped him.
CHAPTER 9
A Guide to Asian Restaurants
Dear Girls,
In case I die suddenly, this is very important information I want to pass down to you, more cruci
al than money or love. This might be the most important lesson in this book. Being able to select a great Asian restaurant is a big source of pride for me. It’s what our family does together on the weekends. Life is too short to be wasting meals on bad food, and I would feel deep shame if I ever caught one of you eating at a gross Asian restaurant. I’d rather catch you trafficking cocaine into Thailand in any number of orifices than see you eating at a P. F. Chang’s. General rule of thumb: 99 percent of the clientele should be Asian. If you see groups of old Asian women there, that’s a very, very good sign.
CUISINE
GOOD SIGNS
BAD SIGNS
VIETNAMESE
• Opens at seven A.M.; closes at eight P.M.
• The back of the menu features advertisements for local dentists, lawyers, and real estate agents.
• All the employees wear open-toed shoes.
• There’s a Buddha by the cash register.
• There are red fake candles with incense burning.
• Waiters have long fingernails that may touch your food and that’s okay.
• Cash only.
• The name has a number in it (yes, I know this is already in Baby Cobra but it’s important, dammit!).
• Customers are eating pho with a fork.
• The waiters are white.
• They take American Express.
• They don’t serve tripe or tendon.
• They serve chicken breast.
• The name is some unfunny punny bullshit like “Pho Gettaboutit” or “What the Pho.”
CHINESE
• There’s a tank full of live fish in front.
• The waiters rock a maroon bow tie and vest.
• The bathroom has pearly pink opaque soap.
• It’s loud.
• Besides water, they serve Hennessy, imitation apple cider, and that’s pretty much it.
• The pork and shrimp will arrive right away, but it takes an hour to get a glass of water.
• There’s truffle oil in the dim sum.
• The dim sum is being served on trays.
• The waitstaff ask you “How’s everything going?” and says things like “Thank you,” “Nice to see you,” or “Did you leave room for dessert?”
JAPANESE
• Jazz is playing in the background.
• Japanese people singing covers of American songs is playing in the background.
• The toilet has a Toto Washlet bidet.
• There are strict rules on when to use soy sauce.
• There is mochi for dessert (not mochi ice cream).
• Hip-hop is playing in the background.
• They serve fake crab.
• It’s located in Malibu.
• Drake eats there.
• I’m not going to name the place that I’m really talking about because I don’t want the Malibu yakuza coming after my head.
• They add twenty ingredients to a piece of sashimi.
• The owners are Chinese or Korean.
KOREAN
• The waitresses cut your food with scissors without asking for your permission.
• There’s a greasy wall full of pictures of the owner with a bunch of Korean celebrities you don’t recognize.
• You need a Korean friend who speaks Korean to order for you and get the extra banchan.
• The chopsticks and rice bowls are metal.
• The waitresses feel entitled to pick up your baby and squeeze it.
• The windows have newspaper on them.
• The steamed egg in the banchan is not a gray color.
FILIPINO
• It’s an auntie’s or a lola’s house.
• It’s a business and not a family member’s house.
CHAPTER 10
Bringing Up Bébés
Dear Girls,
Even before you were both born, I put a lot of pressure on myself to be the perfect mom. I used to have so much resentment toward my own mother for not making my needs more of a priority. While most Asian mothers were known to be Tiger Moms, mine was more of a Koala Mom. (You’ve seen plenty of koalas at the San Diego zoo. They’re not fierce like tigers because they’re too busy chilling out.) She was never involved in my schoolwork, she sat me in front of the TV to watch the soap opera All My Children when I was four years old, and she thought the complaint “I’m bored” was the most spoiled, privileged thing a child could say. When my brother, as a teenager, confessed, “I’m depressed,” my mom clapped her hands in front of his face and screamed, “SNAP OUT OF IT!”—which, it turns out, doesn’t do shit for depression. Otherwise we’d all be clapping our hands in front of our faces all day. I always told myself that I would do my best to keep my children stimulated and be more compassionate whenever they were expressing emotion.
In elementary school, my mother would pick me up from after-school care and drive an hour and a half out of San Francisco to take me to the nearest Loehmann’s, which is a high-end version of Ross Dress for Less, and also a black hole for middle-aged women. I’m sure it will still exist whenever you read this—because, like the caretaker in The Shining, it has always existed. When I wasn’t being forced to sit in the communal dressing rooms where I had to witness women who, naked, looked like characters from The Far Side comics, squeeze themselves into the sausage casing of seven-year-old Dana Buchman and Donna Karan clothes, I was collecting fallen sequins from the floor on my hands and knees. I found it very therapeutic and a nice distraction from all the nude moms hoping to score some happiness and escape in these discount deals. Sometimes my mother would spend two hours there and then reward me for my patience with a cherry Slurpee from the local drugstore. I told myself that I would never take my girls shopping or to run other boring errands with me unless they were old enough to be interested in the clothes.
In elementary school, I constantly had head lice because my mother never bathed me or combed my hair. I thought it was normal since all of my other friends had lice, but realized later that the reason they all had lice was because I gave it to them. I was patient zero. My Jungle Asian mom thought it was perfectly normal, since she grew up with leeches in her backyard pond and had constant head lice in Vietnam. She would scroll through my head with her fingers, pluck out the live lice bugs, and we’d both watch with great pleasure as she’d smash them in between her thumbnails. Blood would squirt out of the lice bugs’ bodies and I’d squeal with excitement. My parents’ friends all commented that I was a pensive child, but I’m now pretty sure it was just because I was always scratching my head. So I told myself that I would also bathe my children on a regular basis.
My mom always brags that she never kept me to a nap schedule, let me eat what I wanted, avoided helping me with homework, and fed me formula. Then she always concludes, “Look, you turned out fine.”
But I’m not fine.
I have rosacea, insomnia, and a terrible habit of always assuming the worst when somebody unexpectedly knocks at the door. I panic and think, If I open that door the bad man is going to stab me in the eye, fill my body with sawdust, and turn me into a giant flesh puppet that he can make dance and sing like one of those goats in The Sound of Music. Whenever I feel any sort of pain in my body, I assume it’s stage-four bone cancer and have an internal debate about whether I’m willing to amputate my foot or not.
All of this made me determined to be a better mom. While I was pregnant, I read this book called
Bringing Up Bébé about French parenting. It made American parenting seem so unnatural and full of processed food. The logic seemed simple enough: French kids don’t snack and that’s why they’re not picky eaters. When it comes to mealtime, they’re actually hungry and will eat whatever is in front of them. French kids don’t throw food because, again, they’re hungry and know to respect food. My dear friend Aileen, who was a mother of three before I became a mother of one, saw that book lying on my nightstand while I was pregnant. She said, “Oh, you’re reading that book of lies,” and told me with great certainty, “You will feed your kids mac and cheese.” I thought, Wrong—I will be the kind of mom who prioritizes whole foods, and I will feed my children braised leeks and fish and butternut squash.
Then I became a mom, and I realized that Bringing Up Bébé was indeed a bunch of lies.
When Mari started eating solids, I tried to deprive her of snacks and she still threw my sautéed zucchini on the floor. That shit only works if you live in a society where everyone else is eating fennel from the backyard at set mealtimes. But once Mari saw other children eating goldfish and gummies at the park, I was finished. She’d beg them to share their snacks with her and their parents gave me an annoyed, keep-your-snack-panhandling-baby-away-from-us vibe. I kept trying to convince her that baby carrots were just as exciting, which is an almost impossible task. Baby carrots are great, but only compared to regular carrots or rocks. Mari would smack the baggie out of my hand and give me a look that said, Bitch, quit trynna fool me. Like Aileen had predicted, I gave in to mac and cheese before Mari turned one.
The best word to describe parenting is “relentless.” It’s a tennis-ball-launcher machine of tasks and mind puzzles and compromises and poo and pee and spit and barf with unlimited balls loaded. It’s always something. The tire pressure for the minivan is low so somebody needs to Yelp a place that will help this woman-child learn how to put air in her tires. We hear rodents scurrying in the attic so now we have to call the home warranty to call an inferior pest control company and still pay seventy-five dollars to trap the rat family so they don’t bite our human family. There’s no more toilet paper. There’s no more milk. There’s no more floss so now I have to use a strand of my hair to get that piece of chicken out from between my molars. My sisters are fighting and want to vent to me about it for an hour each, at least. But I have to go because now Nikki has a fever and is crying. Mari has a cut that’s not getting better. We have to go to the doctor for a second flu shot, this time for Nikki, but it’s already almost the end of flu season and she has a fever so she can’t get the shot anyway. Fuck, I forgot to pay the water bill. Somebody needs to shred the pile of Bed Bath & Beyond coupons sent to us with our address and names on there. What are the kids going to eat tonight? Ah, shit, the goddamn cottage cheese is expired. I think I got whatever Nikki has and now I have a fever, I have to go lie down. Fuck, now Mari is up with a fever, but is it from Nikki or is that cut really infected? Nobody here is qualified to decide if we need to go to the hospital. I really don’t want to go to the hospital. None of my friends that are doctors, pharmacists, or dentists are calling me back. Where are the AA batteries? The crab bouncy exer-saucer that I depend on to entertain Nikki so I can eat and breathe is out of batteries. WHERE ARE THE FUCKING BATTERIES? Fuck, I forgot that Father’s Day is tomorrow. Maybe I’ll just have the kids draw a bunch of squiggles on a card for him. They’re too sick to do anything, I’ll just draw it like they would and say it’s from them. Now the toilet is broken for some reason. Mari might’ve done that thing where she tries to flush the adult toilet by herself but doesn’t have the real torque to fully press down and hold it down for the appropriate time, so she just pushed on it halfway and now the handle is all loose and dangly. Is “dangly” a word? The toilet is overflowing! Nikki is crying hysterically but I have to deal with the toilet, where is the pacifier. WHERE THE FUCK IS THE PACIFIER? Now we have to schedule a parent-teacher conference but I am out of town that week; I’ll see if I can switch things. OMG nobody has checked the mail in a week. Now a collections agency is trying to get payment for some doctor visit that nobody remembers going to and that I am pretty sure I paid for already anyway, but I can’t remember, and I don’t have time to scroll through every expense trying to find it. Can someone please look through all of our payments for the past six months to see if one resembles it? Daddy just found one, but it’s like eighty cents less than the number on the collections bill. WHY? Keep looking, maybe it was a different one. Shit, I now realize I never received that new car seat I ordered on Amazon. I have to remember to ask Daddy to look at the cameras and see if someone stole the package off our porch. SOME MOTHERFUCKER STOLE THAT OFF OUR PORCH! There’s video footage of it! Is there a detective we can hire for like half the price of the car seat, to hunt down this thief!?