by Ali Wong
“You have no idea what it was like. Until very recently, every role I auditioned for required an accent.”
“God, that sucks.”
“Do you think I’m a monster? You must think I’m a fucking child,” she said.
“I think you are being honest, which I always appreciate, and I get why you feel that way. I don’t think you’re a child, I think you’re a human being who came up in this business at a shitty time.”
For her, that was the truthful but ugly answer to the question, “What’s it like to be an Asian American in Hollywood?” Don’t miss the one spot every ten years.
I’ll never forget that conversation because it made me realize how timing and my upbringing played such a significant role in shaping how I see myself and how I view my people. I have an unusual amount of Asian pride. My dad filled our house with Chinese stone carvings, antique furniture, screens, lamps, plants, and rugs. My parents exposed me to all the Wong Kar Wai films at a very early age and every year we attended the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival together. In that Chinatown alleyway youth center that my dad grew up in I developed my first crushes on Asian American boys. I looked up to Asian American teenage girls with their crimped black hair and perfectly plucked black eyebrows. I traded mixtapes with and learned pager code from people who were also raised to take their shoes off when entering a home and who didn’t smell like Kraft Singles.
But Rebecca grew up in a city on the East Coast, where she was extremely isolated from people who looked like her. That made her instinctively competitive when, all of a sudden, she finally was surrounded by women that looked exactly like her only because they were waiting to audition for the role of the wet-haired ghost from The Ring or Angry Waitress with Fake-Ass Accent #2. The “specialness” she was used to feeling from looking different vanished instantly. I also grew up feeling special because I was Asian, but for the opposite reason. Not because I was different from the people around me, but because I was the same as them, which filled me with pride and allowed me to avoid the “crabs in a bucket” mentality. (Also, we were in Chinatown and on Clement Street a lot, so I learned directly from seeing a lot of crabs in buckets.)
* * *
The other question young people always ask me is: “What advice do you have for a person like me, an Asian American woman wanting to get into Hollywood?” Here it is: Let go of seeing yourself as nothing more than an Asian American woman. Ask yourself who you are outside of that. Challenge yourself to get out of the community. Don’t just drink boba, do your laundry at home, take pictures of food, go outlet shopping, and talk exclusively to other Asian Americans. Even if you end up doing something totally unrelated to entertainment, I want you to take this advice, because I want you to become interesting, confident, and cultured women. Expose yourself to how other people in America live, how they think, and you will discover the universal struggles that connect us all, like how we all sleep in hotel rooms and pretend they’re not covered in the cum of a thousand dead lonely men. If you hang out with the same people, you will only be able to make those people laugh. Go to Burning Man. Travel to different cities in America. Travel the world. See concerts. Go to plays. Eat Ethiopian food. Introduce yourself to everything there is. When in doubt, go out. Not just for material, but to experience new people, new social situations, and unfamiliar surroundings. I used to hate going out, especially going out late. When I was living in NYC, Donald Glover invited me to one of the famous SNL parties that start at two A.M. and end at six A.M. I declined because I’ve always loved staying at home, getting in bed early, and the comfort of sitting on my own toilet. And I have a fear of being left alone at a party or someone feeling obligated to babysit me. But I should have gone. I was twenty-seven at the time, and I could’ve tried to trap fucking Donald Glover.
But don’t get me wrong—it’s also important to make friends with other Asian American people in entertainment. My two very best friends in the industry are Sheng Wang and Kevin Camia. I brought Kevin out to open for me on my first big tour and am currently bringing Sheng on the second one. Not only are they ridiculously funny, but both of them are like brothers to me. I have a brother, but I always wanted a twin brother because of the hit TV show Beverly Hills, 90210. I thought it would be so cool to have a built-in male best friend. A guy my same age who’d look out for me without any sexual tension. Sheng Wang is my Brandon Walsh. If you’re too young to understand that reference, then he’s my Ashley Olsen or one of those Winklevoss Facebook twins that are not as fun to look at as Armie Hammer.
Sheng is godfather to you. He was one of the first people to visit me in the hospital when I had each of you. I sharted very loudly in my hospital diaper, and he didn’t even say anything about it because he’s a good friend. He helped build your cribs and the rocking chair that I breastfed both of you in. Nikki projectile shat onto Sheng once. He lifted his feet up and screamed, “Did she get me? Did she get me?” And you did, Nikki. You nailed him. But he didn’t care. I think he kind of liked it, actually. But not in a creepy way. When the babysitter cancels, we always call Uncle Sheng. He regularly picks up Mari from preschool when we can’t, and has a car seat in his car, just for you guys. That is a real friend. And a real cheap way to get childcare.
When I first moved to Los Angeles, the comedian Bobby Lee picked me up from my apartment located at Crenshaw and Pico. When I got in his car, he said, “In all the years I’ve lived in this city, I have never been this far south in Los Angeles.” He drove me to a Korean restaurant called Soot Bull Jeep that smelled like charcoal and beef. The staff, which consisted of warm, fifty-something women, all said “Hi, Bobby!” in Korean when we entered. When we sat down, he told me, “I’m older than you so of course I’m going to pay for everything. So get whatever you want.” In Korean, he ordered enough food to feed five people and asked me about how things were going. Afterward, he dropped me back off at my apartment and didn’t try to kiss me or anything. I always remember that because he was light-years ahead of me and didn’t have to do that. This brother- and sisterhood with other Asian American people in entertainment—how they treat me and take care of me and demand other people respect me—has given me my community that keeps me protected. So I’m saying you need both—your community and what lies outside it.
My last piece of advice would be to focus not on the result, but instead, the process and the journey. Again, Asian people love predictable outcomes. But to succeed in a creative profession, you really need to love it. And if you love it and are great at it, and passionate about constantly becoming better at it, you will find success no matter what.
If not, you can always be a professional hoarder like your uncle Andrew (he would be so proud!!!).
CHAPTER 13
Bridin’ Dirty
Dear Girls,
At weddings, I cry whenever a bride walks down the aisle, even if I don’t know her that well. I cry for her because I can tell it’s the first time she’s had that many people look at her and watch her all at once. A wedding is an excuse to finally get a glam squad and peacock-feather the shit out of your inner goddess. It’s an opportunity to make everyone stand up for you. It’s a powerful feeling for the bride, and she’s experiencing it for the first and potentially last time. I cry not because she looks beautiful, but because she looks dramatically different. And she put so much effort into looking transformed, and I feel like it would be a disservice to her if I didn’t cry or yell out, “YOU LOOK GOOD, GURRRRRL!” Plus the expression on a bride’s face is always the same—a little embarrassed, a little shy, and truly happy that everyone is there with her. But it’s proud too. She knows she looks great. She knows she looks her best. Because she put a lot of planning, money, and people in misery to design it this way. Plus she’s excited to eat carbs and drink flavored beverages again.
But for me, it would’ve been my worst nightmare. Because of comedy, I’ve never had the desi
re to walk down an aisle slowly while three hundred people stare at me for two minutes, and not say anything. Usually when people all have their eyes on me in silence, that’s a bad sign. I am not used to performing without talking, or performing for free. And I was in no mood to entertain those nearest and dearest to me on my wedding day.
I was twenty-eight when your father proposed and by then all of my very best friends had gotten married. At the time, I was living in NYC, acting on an ABC medical drama where I played a quirky agoraphobic radiologist who was in love with the hospital’s plumber. I had to memorize dialogue like “If you use the tDCS I built you, the occipital lobe should demonstrate imaging of the new aneurysm, and we’ll be using transcranial magnetic stimulation, magnetic coils to stimulate your medial prefrontal cortex, which regulates the amygdala, where fear memories are processed.” When I wasn’t trying to cram all of this insane craniotomy language into my head while riding the subway, I was doing nine stand-up sets a night because I did not want to say these complicated-ass words I didn’t understand on camera for the rest of my life. The added task of planning a wedding was highly unappealing. I watched friends torture themselves (and me) over centerpieces and felt like I’d rather spend my nights doing those stand-up sets than pinteresting invitation fonts. There’s enough event planning I have to do in my professional life, and I wanted to make the wedding as simple as possible. So I went on the SF.GOV website and paid the fifteen-dollar registration fee to get married at city hall. It was very important that it was in San Francisco, where all of the Wongs live. None of my family had to get on an airplane. We didn’t have to pay for any decor because we already paid for the city hall decor with our tax dollars. It’s hard to beat the combination of consideration and value in one event.
Before the ceremony, we waited in line behind three other couples who were like us: too cheap and lazy to have a real wedding. In a room that looked like that underground bunker they found in Lost, we signed some documents that I did not fully read, registering us as a married couple. I still don’t know or remember if I checked a box agreeing to donate all of my organs to any government official of San Francisco if I was ever found mildly unconscious.
For the actual ceremony, we just invited our immediate family and one best friend each. My three nephews wore ties and my niece wore an eighty-dollar Tiffany-blue dress and blush. She was so excited, she arrived with her own bouquet. An elderly woman with a nose piercing and black graduation cloak officiated the five-minute-long ceremony. While all of my friends had met with the pastors or rabbis who married them multiple times before the big day, I had never seen this lady before in my life and forgot her name immediately after she introduced herself. At the end of the ceremony, which ended with “by the power of the state of California, I now pronounce you married,” I said, “Hey, can we say some vows?” She looked at me as if I asked, “Hey, can we sleep in city hall overnight and have you cuddle with us?” and firmly responded, “No.” My father-in-law, your grandpa, made his fortune by selling Wacky Wallwalkers—those little sticky octopuses that would come in your cereal in the 1980s. You’d throw them against the wall and they would eventually crawl down to the floor. They’re very symbolic and sacred objects to him, so naturally, he tossed a bunch of them at us at the end, in place of the traditional rice. Judge Moody made us clean it all up off the floor immediately afterward and rushed us out of the beautiful mid-century modern rotunda.
That evening, we all went out to eat at my favorite Chinese restaurant in San Francisco, R & G Lounge. In a small private room with two large tables, we feasted on a ten-course meal while everyone, except for the kids, gave speeches. It was nice to be able to just sit back, enjoy the speeches, and listen to everyone else talk about us. So, having found a work-around that actually worked, here is some advice on how to do a wedding right:
Get a Chinese banquet. A lot of Asian American kids are averse to the Chinese banquet because it does not provide the most idyllic ambiance. The waitstaff are dressed in maroon bow ties with matching maroon vests and the tablecloths are always pink. Most of my peers would rather get married in a rustic barn and put a bunch of tea lights in mason jars and cover everything in muslin and rosemary. The couple is eating by themselves at a distressed white desk for no reason. To me, a wedding is not an excuse to Instagram or drink Moscow Mules. Chinese people believe a wedding should be a profitable venture to favorably position the newly married couple for the journey ahead. A Western wedding that serves Western food typically costs at least a hundred dollars per person. Yes, the Western model is a buffet of photo opportunities, but leads to heavy spending and debt that could otherwise be spent on a house, one day of preschool, or a cool Japanese toilet that cleans itself. (Hopefully by the time you’re adults, all toilets will be Toto toilets. Hopefully writing that sentence will get our family a free Toto toilet.) Our banquet cost thirty dollars per person. Vietnamese people do the Chinese banquet even though they’re Vietnamese because they cannot resist the great deal. Our menu consisted of ten delicious and mysterious courses (such as sautéed geoduck clam with bamboo pith rolls and sea cucumber) and everyone left very full, and with a ton of leftovers. My niece, who was six years old at the time, giggled as her mother tucked a napkin into the neck of her satin dress, in anticipation of the salt and pepper crab arriving to her on the lazy Susan. She and my three nephews all screamed in delight as my mom showed them how to crack the shells by themselves for the first time. My best friend, Miya, was just silent for five minutes straight, focused on digging for any remnants of flesh inside the claw with her chopstick. Crab juice, crab meat, and crab shells were flying around the table, staining everyone’s suits and dresses, including mine, and nobody gave a fuck, because nothing was expensive. We were slurping, cracking, chewing, and laughing with the people we loved most.
Never have a destination wedding. The first one I ever went to required that we stay in cabins. I had to bring provisions. I packed things one should never have to pack for a wedding, like a compass and some iodine tablets. I was forced to spend Memorial Day weekend with a bunch of random alcoholics in their late forties because my friend in her late twenties married someone in his late forties. (Don’t do this please. It’s almost as bad as me catching you eating at a P. F. Chang’s.) I do not like how destination weddings rob you of your vacation weekends, which were everything to me when I was working as a receptionist. The worst was a wedding we went to in the Catskills. We had to take a train from NYC into the forest, and then rent a car just to get even deeper into the forest. The food was kosher and happened to have no flavor. There was one grocery store within thirty miles that served sandwiches. I have never eaten so many Italian subs in one weekend. I pounded subs, went to the reception, and then got my period at this cabin on top of a mountain, like some salami goddess of fertility. I needed a tampon, but that grocery store at the bottom of the mountain was closed by then, so I had to stuff my underwear with toilet paper like a savage, like a teenage girl ashamed of getting her period, too shy to ask for a pad. My least favorite song, the Black Eyed Peas frat boy anthem “I Gotta Feeling,” started playing while I was leaking all over my skirt and starving because the kosher dinner was awful. Nobody noticed me sobbing because all the guests were busy screaming “Tonight’s gonna be a good niiiiiiiight!” I hate that song because (a) it sucks and (b) it somehow plays every time I’m having a bad night.
Buy your dress on eBay. I tried on a BCBG dress in store that was way out of my price range before your father even proposed. So when I finally got engaged, I already had put it in my cart on eBay, where I found it used for a third of the price. And you best believe I bought it the very damn day I got engaged. It was $250 and by far the most I had ever spent on a dress at that point. I stepped on it right when we were walking up the steps into city hall. My heel ripped this big hole on the bottom. And instead of crying, I laughed. It was good luck, and I didn’t care because I hadn’t blown a fortune on it. It was ju
st for that day. And now it’s sitting in a box in the garage. So it’s there, if you guys ever want to play dress up in it, or, if you’re desperate for cash, resell it on eBay to some creepy male fan of mine so that he can put it on his hairy body and do impressions of me in front of a full-length mirror in his parents’ basement while whispering “I’d fuck me” over and over.
Get your hair done at a blowout bar. It’s $40 versus $500 for someone to come over to your house and do it. Do the math.
Don’t have a wedding party. I didn’t have any bridesmaids because, in the past, I had rejected so many of my friends’ requests to be theirs. Every time someone asked me to be a bridesmaid, I felt like they were asking “Hey, do you want to be financially burdened?” I caved in a total of two times. The first time I did it, I hardly participated. I didn’t even go to the bachelorette party. It made no sense to spend an entire weekend in Cabo San Lucas with a bunch of women I’d never met before. Again, I hate it when people rob me of my vacation weekends. I’m not trying to spend Memorial Day with a friend’s co-worker named Bethany who wears fake eyelashes every day and just downloaded a meditation app. Some brides are not a trustworthy hub for female friends. Some brides surround themselves with superficial twats or disturbing dweebs. There’s always some weirdo cousin with no social skills and a shady frenemy from the past who used to steal makeup, boyfriends, and clothes from the bride. And then I don’t understand why we’re celebrating with all of these dicks. And why are we wearing them around our necks? Unless we’re a tribe of kick-ass Amazonians and those penises are war trophies, I don’t want to wear them. I want a real dick before I get married. Not a sweet-and-sour-candy pretend-dick strung around my neck. One bride kept pressuring me to host and said, “You’re the best person to do it.” And I was like, “Oh, I KNOW I’m the best person to do it. I’m not going to do it.” The second time I was a bridesmaid was for my best friend, Miya. I was genuinely happy to do it since all of her friends were warm, smart, and fun. I delegated the shit out of them. I put myself in charge of dinner but the limo reservation, spa destination, and everything else was in the hands of these other responsible-ass women. It was a great experience overall but the speech was a stressful homework assignment. I felt a lot of pressure to be funny and moving and sweet. The stakes were very high because it wasn’t for money, it was for my best friend and the audience was not anonymous. If I ate it in front of her mom and her husband’s cute cousin who I plan to marry in the next lifetime, and then had to attend the rest of the wedding soaked in the shame of a bomb instead of leaving the theater like usual, I would have changed my name and moved to Vancouver.