by Ali Wong
In college, Andrew got in trouble constantly. He got caught with drugs at the airport. He got caught doing drugs at school. He had long hair down to his butt for the express purpose that people would confuse him with my sister Mimi from the back, which I’m sure was distressing for Mimi, and even more distressing for Mimi’s friends who thought they saw her on the street, and then were utterly terrified by the reveal. And for most of his life, he exclusively dated white women. Frumpy white women. Hippie white women. White women with grown-ass kids. Mentally unstable white women. White women white women white women. They all thought he was some sort of rare creature with his long, luxurious, jet-black ponytail, adventurous spirit, and terrible grades. Because he had grown up with three sisters, he was extremely comfortable with how complicated and gross women are. My sisters and I all trained him to be unfazed by dandruff, foot odor, and menstrual-blood-stained panties soaking in the sink. And white women really appreciated that. Asian American women never seemed to take an interest. Whatever quality in Andrew white women valued as “exotic,” Asian American women deemed “disturbingly weird.”
* * *
Growing up, I thought he and my siblings were the coolest people in the world. They took me out on dates with their boyfriends and girlfriends. On our family road trips to Monterey Bay or Los Angeles, they’d stack up all the suitcases in the back of the Volvo station wagon and put blankets on top to make a luxurious queen-sized mobile-home bed for me while the three of them sat in the back. If anyone had rear-ended us I would have flown directly through the front windshield but that’s basically every car ride for a child born before 1985. Those are some of my best memories. Me and all of my siblings together in one car with my parents, eating McDonald’s hash browns and listening to them banter with Joan Baez playing in the background.
Both of my sisters, Mimi and Julia, had attended the same all-girls K–8 school, Katherine Delmar Burke, before me. When I was there, teachers still talked about how Julia, my oldest sibling, was such a prodigy at impressionism at the age of twelve. She had painted a beautiful portrait of a melancholy woman in a white hat onto a stool, like a Joni Mitchell album cover you could sit on, and I did sit on it, proudly, every single day during art class. My other sister, Mimi, was known for being an incredible athlete. She was great at basketball, soccer, and volleyball. It’s shocking that my parents didn’t know she was gay. She was also extremely talented in metal shop. Again, shocking that, in addition to the knee brace she always wore and her huge collection of mountain bikes and drill bits, they couldn’t see all of the telltale signs that she much preferred pussy. Like Julia, Mimi also was a great artist. In high school, Mimi had made a beautiful stained glass window of a faceless Chinese woman dressed in green, playing the flute. It still sits in my mom’s living room today, and I will probably fight Mimi for it when my mom dies, even though Mimi was the one who made it. I hope to pass that faceless Chinese flute woman down to you girls. I’m trying to strategize right now how I can convince Mimi’s son that you two will need and deserve it more. Maybe I’ll just say, “Hashtag time’s up!” over and over even though it does not really apply.
My brother had a reputation for being super cool and popular, but he was also known for getting in a shitload of trouble. Looking back, I’m grateful that the one son in my family was not aspirational. It really freed me to do whatever I wanted. He didn’t trap me into any sort of success paradigm; whatever expectations that had existed crumbled long before I was born and that allowed me to make my own way. My parents didn’t tell me what to do or how to live because they were so occupied with the slow process of giving up on my brother. For example, I hated piano so much that I quit when I was in second grade. For most Chinese people, that’s like getting divorced after one week of marriage and a huge, expensive wedding. At my last recital ever, I played two notes of some boring-ass classical song and then just stopped, because I hadn’t practiced or learned it. But I still had the nerve to bow at the end, to confused and slow applause. When I returned to sit in between my parents to hear the rest of Mrs. Butler’s students actually play their songs instead of just flaunting their parents’ wasted money like I had, my mom and dad didn’t seem embarrassed at all. They simply did not care. They just sat through the rest of the performances, and my dad, always tired from his long and late hours at the hospital, fell asleep. On the car ride home, I said, “I wanna stop piano.” Instead of chastising me, my dad just said calmly, “Okay, Alexandra. That’s your choice.”
When I was in eighth grade, Mimi came out of the closet. My mom thought it was a phase and that she was just being seduced by lesbianism the way she’d been seduced by sports and metal shop and not shaving her legs or armpits. How on earth could her tallest, most beautiful daughter (with the second most luxurious ponytail after Andrew) be gay? Why would God do that to her? Soon after telling us she had a girlfriend, Mimi chopped off all her long hair, tired of people assuming that she was straight or Andrew. When I greeted her at the door, she asked me to go upstairs and tell my mother, so that my mother wouldn’t have a heart attack and die upon seeing my sister’s new Asian k.d. lang cut without warning. My mom couldn’t hide her disappointment, and then tried to be positive by expressing how great it was that hair grew so that Mimi could go back to being pretty and normal. She very openly hoped Mimi would one day get back together with her high school boyfriend, Nigel. Ten years later, Mimi arrived to a family dinner at our favorite restaurant, Ming River, with some news:
“Sorry I’m late. I just saw Nigel,” said Mimi.
My mom’s eyes lit up. “Oh really?! Wow, how does he—”
Mimi: “It was nice to see him, Mom. He got married a couple of years ago and has a baby now.”
My mother’s face fell as she said “oh” again, but not with the same excited surprise. Then she cried into a pink cloth napkin at the large round table for ten minutes, mourning the loss of her delusion that her daughter would eventually return to the D.
Because of my siblings, my parents did not prioritize academics and were more focused on keeping me alive and not depressed. Andrew had been diagnosed with manic-depressive disorder when he was in high school. Mimi had a tragic accident in college, when she went hiking and fell down a deep hole. She was stuck there overnight and had to get helicoptered out. At the local hospital they stitched up her leg without cleaning it thoroughly, and she got an intense infection and almost had to have her leg amputated. My siblings taught me that you could recover from failure. Julia was always so good at everything. She was great at piano, painting, and academia. She got into Harvard Law School and my mother told everyone and their mothers. But then Julia dropped out her first year. After that, Julia was very down on herself and seemed lost in her life. When I offered her some of my Flintstones chewable vitamins, she replied, “I don’t deserve to eat vitamins.” She tried cooking, teaching, and being a camp leader at my youth center while I went there, which was annoying. But she finally went on to get her medical degree and become a great pediatrician. Now she’s not practicing but is very fulfilled being focused on her kids. She’s right where she should be.
So by the time I came around, my parents were just happy if all their kids kept their limbs and weren’t emotionally stuck in the sunken place.
The movie High Fidelity came out when I was a junior in high school. John Cusack’s character goes through five different relationships. The statistics teacher asked us how we felt about it. Everyone except for me said they found it depressing. They all thought they were going to marry their high school sweethearts (so naïve!). Older people know that you have to go through multiple relationships to find the right one. You both will probably go through three to five serious relationships in your life before finding your person, if you’re even lucky enough. Older people found the movie relatable and uplifting because even though John Cusack’s character doesn’t end up getting married, he does end up in a relationship with a woman wher
e he can be comfortable and be himself. But I didn’t have to see High Fidelity to know this was true. I had witnessed it all through my siblings.
* * *
Andrew went to China for two years after college and returned as an extremely serious person. He grew up going to private school and made no Chinese American friends, and then spent two years surrounded by all Chinese people. There, Andrew studied acupuncture and backpacked through rural provinces. Your father’s theory is that Andrew became possessed by the spirit of a poor, old Chinese man who has not left his body since.
When he returned to the United States, he behaved like there was an impending war that we needed to hunt and gather for. At the end of any meal, he’d ask to eat the unfinished food on our plates. Sometimes he’d not just ask family, but friends or guests of the family who were also sitting at the table. He came down on me for acting so ungratefully toward our parents’ constant sacrifice and lamented how badly he had behaved in his youth.
All of a sudden, he’d inherited the extreme immigrant paranoia that everyone is out to get you. When my parents would go on vacation, my brother would blast classical music, turn on all the lights, and place stuffed animals in the windows. Like Kevin McCallister from Home Alone, he hoped potential thieves would be fooled by the silhouettes. He didn’t seem to realize that Kevin McCallister used human-shaped mannequins and had them move around. Andrew was betting on robbers being deterred by frozen outlines of my childhood Popples and Glo Worms. Then again, if I saw a grown man playing with stuffies while blasting a Wagner symphony, I certainly wouldn’t want to fuck with him.
To save money on food and shelter, he lived at home until he was thirty-five. He avoided paying rent the way I avoid paying for online shipping (even if it means putting a ten-dollar pair of undies that reads BOSS BITCH on the butt in my cart to bring my purchase over the fifty-dollar finish line). This is not uncommon for a lot of Asian American men, especially in San Francisco, where rent has been rising exponentially. They don’t so much love their moms as they love not paying rent. They are so afraid of spending money that they live at home until they get married. And no cooking can compare to their mothers’. “Free” is the secret ingredient that makes every meal extra delicious. The filial piety is transformed into arrested development. Never marry these men. This is where being with someone of your own race can backfire. You will always be in competition with your mother-in-law. Andrew is still not even fully moved out. He occupies several closets at our mom’s house, filled with artifacts from his various hoarding hobbies and get-rich-quick resale schemes. The profit margin on some of these resales was as little as twenty cents. His first one was records, just because he had thousands of them in his room and hidden in the fireplace. A person would have to live for a million years and never sleep to listen to all of my brother’s records from start to finish. My mom threatened to put them in a pile and burn them if he didn’t get them out of her house. But once he purged all the records, he moved on to collecting free books and reselling them on eBay. Then it was vacuum cleaners, orchids, rugs, and worm juice (ask him what that is, I really don’t know). His current obsession is cars. Every once in a while he’ll show up in Los Angeles and use our house as a pee-pee stop after picking up a ’97 Buick LeSabre he bought off Craigslist from Rancho Cucamonga.
But all of his hoarding has come in handy. For my baby shower, Andrew packed and drove a U-Haul of old baby gear, clothes, and books from him and my sisters. Sure, half of the books were from Goodwill and caked with furry mold. But the other half were great and both of you girls loved them. He planted all of the succulents in our backyard (they used to be in other people’s front yards before he stole pieces of them—thank you, Uncle Andrew!).
Whenever he comes to visit the house, he dilutes our soaps, installs gutters that only cause more problems, caulks stuff, de-caulks other stuff, and does it all without asking. He has lots of good intentions with poor execution. He’s like an eccentric, self-taught handyman that just kind of comes over and does things on his own. Sort of like Tim Allen’s character on Home Improvement, if he wasn’t trained at all and used to rock a sweet ponytail.
His daughter, my niece and your cousin, had been begging for a dog as long as she could speak. One day, Andrew called me to ask if he could come over. I assumed he had bought another 1984 Lexus in Calabasas off Craigslist and wanted to take a shit at our house and refill his Dasani water bottle before the long drive back to San Francisco where he could sell the car to make eighteen dollars. Instead, he came over with a dog named Astrid.
My niece had made it clear she wanted a puppy and Andrew’s wife made it even more clear that she wanted a small dog. Astrid was neither. But she did possess a very significant quality to Andrew: She was free. She had fled the 2018 Malibu fires and nobody could identify her owner. Andrew rescued her from a kill center where she was about to get euthanized. He didn’t know anything about how to take care of a dog and treated the adoption of this pet like he had won a goldfish at the local fair. He didn’t read anything online or ask my sister Mimi, a very seasoned dog owner, any questions. At Christmas, when we were all spending time at Mimi’s apartment in San Francisco, Mimi reminded him to never leave Astrid in her backyard alone. Andrew thought Mimi was just being anal and precious about her garden, and wanted him to simply keep a tight surveillance if Astrid pooed anywhere. All of a sudden, we heard Andrew screaming, “Heel, Astrid! Heel!” And a huge raccoon was on top of Astrid. It bit a hole through her ear and scratched underneath her eye. Andrew did not understand that a backyard is like a prison yard for animals.
My niece wept and was super angry at her dad for leaving Astrid out there by herself. I explained to her that taking care of a dog is a big deal, and kind of like having a new baby for the first time. I told her that her dad couldn’t possibly be expected to know everything, and tried to make her feel less bad about my neglectful brother. I said, “When I was a new parent, I left Mari sleeping in the middle of our queen-sized bed. At the time, she had never rolled over, so I assumed it was safe to leave her there while I went to the bathroom. As I was flushing, I heard a plop and then found Mari facedown on our bamboo floor, wide awake and hysterically crying. Luckily no bones were broken but that was a big lesson I had to learn. And I never left her or Nikki sleeping on an open bed again.” Then my niece looked at me like I was way worse than Andrew.
Despite all of his crazy, my brother has always been deeply loyal to my family. He inherited my father’s extremely non–Asian American quality of giving zero fucks about saving face. My brother idolized my dad so much and was absolutely devastated when he passed away. He hosted the funeral and just kept speaking way over his designated time, to the point where our minister had to intervene and ask him to stop talking. When someone that my dad hated unexpectedly showed up to the funeral, my sisters and I didn’t know what to do. My father had refused to speak to her for years. On the microphone in front of a hundred attendees, my brother looked at her and said, “You have to leave. You have to leave right now. We can have our own relationship, but my father never liked you and specifically said that if you were to ever attend his funeral, to have henchmen pick you up and carry you out.” After she refused to leave, my brother’s two very tall friends from growing up escorted her out. Right after, I told my dad in his casket that he would’ve loved what had just transpired. I said, “Dad, you would’ve laughed your head off. Andrew just kicked you-know-who out of your funeral in your honor! With henchmen! You would be so proud!”
And since my dad passed away, my brother has been a companion to my mom. He picks her up from the airport. He goes with her to weddings. When I was performing in San Francisco, he insisted on driving me to and from all my shows.
So even though I told you to never marry a man like him, don’t judge a book by its cover. Just because he’s bald and cheap doesn’t mean he’s not a good man. He allowed all of his siblings to fail because he had failed s
o frequently and so hugely. When you’re the only son, there’s a ton of pressure to be something great. And all that pressure turned him into a super fucking weird, crazy diamond.
I often now accidentally call my brother by your dad’s name. I know it’s gross and strange, but I think it’s because they’re the two men I feel most comfortable being a complete cunt in front of. I can tell Andrew to put the tricycle back in the garage without having to say please, and I love that. So I apologize for not giving you girls your own brother, because having a brother like Andrew has been such a special part of my life. My mother wasn’t as overprotective of me because of him. Sisters are great for being close to and having a friend and gossip partner. But my brother will always be one of my best friends, a person that I can trust to take care of and protect me. He’s a man who does things for me when I don’t even have to ask, even if he does them unbelievably wrong. (Andrew, when you read this, the sink in the guest room is clogged again.)
CHAPTER 12
My Least Favorite Question
Dear Girls,
A question I always get asked is: “What is it like being an Asian American woman in Hollywood?” I hate this question almost as much as I hate “What’s it like to be a female in comedy?” because nobody wants their identity and defining characteristics reduced to just race and gender. I resent that white men never get asked, “What is it like to be a white man in movies?” And what disappoints me even more is that the people asking me are always Asian American. It feels like they want to hear a titillating story about a meeting with a high-powered Hollywood executive, who sat me down in his office and said, “Look, we love you, Ali. In fact…we love you long time!” then threw rice in my face, forced me to watch Mickey Rooney’s scene from Breakfast at Tiffany’s on a loop for forty-eight hours straight, and kicked me out of his office screaming, “You’ll never make it in the white man’s world, you chinky ho! DU-NUH-NUH-NUH-NUH-NUH-NUH-NAAAAAAAH!” (That, unfortunately, has never happened to me.) Aspiring Asian American writers and performers never seem to inquire about what I think are more important and interesting topics like: