by Ali Wong
I had a plan to read to Mari constantly, because someone forwarded me an article threatening that if your child doesn’t hear five thousand words by the age of one, they’re definitely gonna turn into a prostitute. And even worse, an illiterate prostitute. So then I began to read Mari all those “first words” baby board books that didn’t have any plot. No beginning, no middle, no story arc. A lot of them would just go like this: Banana, boy, spoon, egg, everybody takes a bath. The End. Finally my mind got so numb from reading all of these dumb-ass baby books that I said to myself, “Fuck it, no more reading to the baby.”
By the time Mari was five months old, at the end of any day, if I held my finger under her nose and felt breath, I was a great mommy.
* * *
No one tells you how utterly disgusting motherhood is. On our first outing as a family of four, Daddy and I took you both to the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino. The admission is twenty-nine dollars, which is the price of thirteen hamburgers at In-N-Out. But when you have a newborn, your cheapness goes out the window because you’re willing to spend any money necessary to save your sanity. That day, we absolutely needed to get the fuck out of the house.
Nikki was only four weeks old, which meant I still had afterbirth leaking out of my pussy. In my preparation to ensure we had enough diapers, wipes, snacks, and extra outfits, I neglected to pack extra breast pads and pantyliners for myself. So my pantyliner quickly became soaked with old, brown blood, and the adhesive became not so adhesive. We were admiring the bonsai in the Japanese garden when I felt the pantyliner sliding out of my underwear. I rushed to the bathroom where there was a long line of Asian senior citizens in giant hats and Uniqlo ultra-light down jackets, prepping themselves for their morning group tai chi exercises. While waiting, my right boob began to throb painfully. I knew what was coming. I cupped my hand on my breast and in addition to being rock hard, my dress was soaking wet from the leaking milk. I pulled my dress to look down, and my boob was all veiny and looked like a close-up of somebody’s pulsating eyeball. If I didn’t empty my breast soon, I knew this could lead to a clogged duct and even worse, mastitis, which is an infection that causes a fever. One of my poor girlfriends got it and was on antibiotics for a month. Her pus-filled lump had grown to the size of a softball and had to be drained all the time.
I rushed back to you girls and Daddy, who were now in a field lined with naked marble statues. I grabbed Nikki out of her sleep and made her latch on to my breast, hoping she’d drain it right away. Flies and mosquitoes from the garden were gathering at my legs as she ate, and the afterbirth juice just continued to gush out and now soak the butt area of my dress, giving my already milk-soaked outfit an additional, sophisticated, bleeding-out-of-my-asshole look. Meanwhile Mari was rolling around in the park’s fertilizer and Daddy was chasing her, trying to get her to stop while fishing tiny branches and rocks out of her mouth. Nikki took a break from my nipple to stare into my eyes and have an explosive up-the-back poo-poo. As I sat her up to pat her back and burp her, she spit up all the milk she just drank onto my dress. My striped Topshop outfit was now fully a towel—full of spit up, poo-poo, milk, and uterine lining. More flies and mosquitoes gathered. I could see other pedestrians passing by in the garden, sniffing the air, wondering if that smell was fertilizer, me, or a dead body hidden in the garden.
When we returned to the parking lot, a man with a Bernie Sanders sticker on his Volkswagen Beetle pulled up next to our van and asked, “Are you leaving?” Gesturing to our giant double stroller and all the bags of snacks and supplies underneath it, I replied, “Yes, but it’s going to take us a couple minutes.” The driver, in his Grateful Dead shirt and beard, said, “Well, hurry up.” And then me, in my dress heavy and drenched with all of these bodily fluids, tired, fed up, sincerely asked my standard question: “Are you kidding me?”
“Yeah,” he said. “You’re not the only person in the world.”
I don’t remember what really happened from there. I kind of went black, like I had on that plane with Mari, and vaguely remember screaming things like:
“You’re a fucking piece of shit!”
“I hope you get kicked out of your local co-op!”
“No wonder you’re coming to this garden all by yourself! Your children must hate you! Why don’t you suck the 1 percent top of my dick?!”
And then that asshole yelled, “Fuck you!” and drove away while your father ran after his car, screaming all sorts of terrible ways he was hoping the man would die. “I hope you die, you fuck! I hope you get stung by a thousand bees, and your glasses fall off and you die like Macaulay Culkin in My Girl, you Phish-listening fuck!”
I don’t think your father and I have ever felt as connected as we did that day.
Because motherhood is disgusting, you spend so much energy cleaning up that you’re left with no time for yourself. So I gave in to TV pretty fast. When Mari turned one, Moana was very popular. Thank God it wasn’t Frozen. Moana is every feminist Asian American Pacific Islander’s dream. She doesn’t have a love story and is a strong-ass curious chief, providing for her people. And those songs are the shit. We also showed Mari a lot of Hayao Miyazaki films, like Ponyo and My Neighbor Totoro. I tried to stay away from the classic Disney princess movies. In addition to featuring a lot of unempowered women, those movies are just so white. White people and stories about white people are not bad, it’s just that when you live in America, everything is so inherently white. I don’t want you to grow up wishing you were white and having that inform all of your decisions later on in life. I want you to be proud of having black hair and Asian features.
Still, you can’t deny that, like goldfish and gummies, The Little Mermaid is fucking magical. I still feel sparkles in my stomach when I watch it. Despite Ariel wearing an ocean bra for most of that movie, and despite the fact that a man ultimately saves her from an evil plus-sized sea witch, and despite Ariel ditching her entire family for this man just because he’s a handsome prince, I gave in and showed The Little Mermaid to Mari on repeat. Those songs are also the shit. I’m a sucker for a drunk seagull best friend and since this is a safe space free of judgment: Ariel’s dad is kinda hot? I still find my feelings about King Triton confusing. He looks like Santa with abs and a tail.
* * *
Once I had Mari, all I wanted was my own damn mommy. I quickly let go of all that unnecessary resentment toward her. She came to L.A. whenever I asked and was so helpful. After parents welcome a newborn, most visitors come to just hold the baby while it’s sleeping. Nobody needs to hold the baby while it’s sleeping. It’s basically the only time you don’t need to hold the baby. But when my mom stayed, she’d change diapers, scrub the poo out of clothes and sheets, cook and wash all the dishes, and soothe Mari while she was fussy. She drove to Costco to get us toilet paper, groceries, batteries, and always made sure to fill up my car with gas. It was amazing.
And then Nikki was born two years after Mari, and my mom returned to Los Angeles to stay with Mari while we were in the hospital. Shortly after my C-section, Mommy and Daddy both ate some bad Chinese food. (We should have known better. The waitstaff asked us, “How are you doing today?” Bad sign.) At exactly six P.M. I started having frothy diarrhea and called to Daddy from the toilet, “Please grab Nikki!” who I could hear crying from our bedroom. He shouted back, “I’m throwing up!” He then came into the bathroom to see how I was doing, and saw me with my panties at my ankles, throwing up into the sink. He started laughing, which made me laugh, and my body continued to betray me as I peed all over the floor.
While Daddy and I were curled up in fetal positions, moaning in our bed, my mom cleaned up all my barf out of the sink, wiped my piss, and held buckets under our mouths. She took care of Nikki at night, when Nikki was waking up every two hours to eat. My mom would prepare her bottle and then change her diaper. It was even more amazing. She was like a Vietnamese Mary Poppins. I take that
back. My mom would hate it if I called her that. She doesn’t believe in sugarcoating things and she would never feed any birds. When we were recently watching Mary Poppins Returns with Emily Blunt, my mom said, “That lady is really silly.”
“Who, Emily Blunt?” I asked. “Why? She married that fine-ass man from The Office who became Jack Ryan.”
“No, Mary Poppins.”
“What are you talking about? Mary Poppins is magical.”
“She’s unrealistic.”
“Well, it’s a kids’ movie.”
“She can fly and speed travel—”
“You mean teleport.”
“She uses her superpowers to nurture other people’s kids. She should use them to rob a bank.”
She had a good point.
Sure, my mom continued to give me unsolicited advice. She kept on telling me to just give the baby a bottle of formula instead of breastfeeding. She told me I was too uptight about the baby looking at the TV and showed Mari unofficial YouTube Boss Baby videos when I specifically asked her not to. She called my house a dirty hippie commune (there are a lot of singing bowls and essential oils). She constantly criticized my spending habits and questioned my every purchase and meal order. But she was there for me. So I just didn’t care anymore. It made me realize that the most important part of parenting, relationships, pretty much anything—is just actually being there.
My mom was never the type to write me long letters or birthday cards. We never got mani-pedis together, she never gave me a locket with our picture in it. She wouldn’t tell me I looked beautiful, help me shop for prom, or soothe me when a boy broke my heart. But she was there. She kept me safe. She did her best to make me tough. She fed me the most delicious home-cooked meals. For lunch, she’d pack me rare sliced steak over white rice and steamed broccoli. She sent me to private school from kindergarten through twelfth grade. She is still there for me. She will always be there for me, as long as she’s able. That’s a great mom. And she could give two fucks about that French parenting book.
I hope to be half as good a mommy to you as she was to me. I’m not promising that I’ll clean up your adult piss and shit, but I promise to do it for your babies at least. Or I’ll pay someone else to do it.
CHAPTER 11
Uncle Andrew
Dear Girls,
From kindergarten until eighth grade, I attended an all-girls school called Katherine Delmar Burke. It was tradition for the third-graders to participate in the annual California Pageant, an exciting evening where we didn’t have to wear our green uniform jumpers over white blouses. Students dressed up as important historical California figures and gave a small speech about their legacies. But since history is written by men, most important historical figures are men, and a lot of us little girls had to play men. This Filipino-Russian girl was Willie Mays. I don’t know why they couldn’t have her be Philip Vera Cruz or something, anything at least a little closer. We were all very jealous of the handful of girls who actually got to portray women, and wear fabulous over-the-top costumes that were most likely designed by friends of their well-connected parents. And I, whose parents had no connection to anyone important in San Francisco, played one of history’s greatest villains: Richard Nixon. Those few girls wore gowns with long matching gloves, and I got to be the guy who bugged a hotel and whose nickname was Dick.
My parents complained about the cost of the forty-dollar Richard Nixon mask. They didn’t understand why the manufacturer of those thin plastic Halloween masks that slice your face when they inevitably crack wouldn’t just make their own cheap version of a Richard Nixon mask. Instead they were forced to pay for, in addition to the overpriced private school tuition, a rubber mask of a disgraced president. It was the same one the surfer gang of robbers wore in the movie Point Break. So I guess the only good part was that it kind of made me feel a little closer to Keanu.
My brother, your uncle Andrew, figured out how to squeeze a little more value out of the mask. When he was twenty years old and home from college for the holidays, he put it on and dressed up in a vintage plaid suit. He stood in the kitchen, leaned against the pistachio-green refrigerator with his hands casually tucked into the brown-and-orange pockets, and waited for my dad to come home. My dad, already the type of person who was so paranoid of intruders that he never left the garage door open for more than three seconds after pulling in or out, freaked the fuck out when he saw this weirdo in the kitchen. He immediately went for a frying pan and, just as he was about to strike, my brother took the mask off and in between laughs, doubled over, raised a hand, and confessed, “It’s me! It’s me!”
My dad screamed, “OH FOR GOD’S SAKE, ANDREW!”
I was upset at Andrew for startling my dad and almost giving him a heart attack. Like I said, my dad was much older than all of my friends’ parents, and I was constantly scared of him dying. At the same time, I was laughing too. And this is sort of how my attitude has always been toward Andrew, seesawing between extreme distress and uncontrollable laughter, like a woman in a Victorian mental asylum.
As you girls both already know by the time you read this, your uncle Andrew is, um, a character? Out of his mind? Kooky? A man who has always had a place to sleep but behaves like he’s homeless? I grew up feeling like I could be anything because my very own brother was nothing like anything that had ever existed before. He was an Asian American boy constantly living somewhere between a music festival, a garage sale, and a nervous breakdown. His walls were lined with shelves of jazz records, hip-hop records, and vintage toys. My favorite was his metal, life-sized chicken that would walk and lay metal eggs. I’d play dress up in his closet, where he had an extensive collection of wigs, props, and used fur coats.
When I was in second grade, Andrew gave me the cassette tape for Eddie Murphy: Delirious, which sparked my interest in stand-up comedy. I’d listen to the tape over and over again, and obviously did not understand all the jokes. But I knew it was funny and wrong, and I loved it. Andrew introduced me to Pee-wee’s Playhouse and Miles Davis and The Autobiography of Malcolm X and I loved all of it. Plus, I became the only seven-year-old in my class who could properly use the term “motherfucker.” My brother was kind of like a middle school boy and also like a freshman at UC Berkeley in the 1970s.
When I was a freshman in high school I raided Andrew’s insane closet for a Halloween costume. A lot of girls were dressing up as schoolgirl Britney Spears or one of the Spice Girls. I chose to be the pimp from the movie I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, which at the time I thought was about the funniest movie I’d ever seen. I wore my brother’s long, black curly wig topped off with a wide-brimmed hat, plaid flared pants, sparkly orange turtleneck, black sunglasses, platform boots, and a fur coat, and walked around the hallways with a limp, committing to a need for my dad’s cane. I smelled like Goodwill but acted like I reeked of money. All of the male upperclassmen thought my costume was very cool while the head of admissions thought letting me, a girl who wanted to dress like a man from the seventies who prided himself on controlling prostitutes, into this prestigious liberal arts school had been a huge mistake.