by Ali Wong
UCLA offered students the opportunity to watch the latest movies for two dollars on campus and I always made sure to see them when I could. After I watched Hedwig and the Angry Inch, I went on to see it in the theater ten more times. I was so moved by the character Hedwig, who just wanted to be loved and was stuck performing in these shitty venues in front of six people (foreshadowing my time on the open mic circuit). She was damaged and talented and abandoned. I loved how Hedwig committed one hundred percent and gave her all to these shows, despite their obvious lack of mainstream appeal. During my sophomore year, John Cameron Mitchell, one of the co-creators and the original Hedwig, was judging a costume contest in West Hollywood. My college roommate Vanessa and I knew we couldn’t compete with all of the men in drag dressed as Hedwig.
First, we decided that we had to go naked to even get noticed. And then we quickly realized you can’t just win a costume contest by showing up naked. So that was out.
Then we had another idea. One of my favorite parts of Hedwig and the Angry Inch is the animation sequence that accompanies “The Origin of Love,” a song based on a story from Plato’s Symposium, about how we were all once two beings in one, and then got split up by jealous Greek gods. The song concludes that making love is when you find your other half. Vanessa and I decided to paint our bodies with iconic symbols and images from the song. We dumped $180 worth of latex body paint on our bedroom floor, which our other friend, Crystal, a very talented artist, used as her palette. With her hands, Crystal brushed blue and white strokes all over my body to symbolize water while Vanessa embodied fire. While she painted a huge yellow lightning bolt over my breasts, she casually said, “At first your boob is a boob. It’s like, wow, I’m touching another woman’s boob. And then after painting it awhile, it’s just a boob.” Crystal went on to paint a whale on my back, the earth on one of Vanessa’s boobs, and then an eye on the other.
After the sing-along movie screening, Vanessa and I went up onstage with all of these men who looked even better than the original Hedwig. The best one had Hedwig’s signature Farrah Fawcett blond wig, electric-blue eyeshadow, red lips, and denim romper with the grand cape reading in graffiti YANKEE GO HOME WITH ME. But thanks to Crystal, we managed to win the fucking contest and I kissed John Cameron Mitchell on the lips. I was in public naked with my nipples out, and even though I believe in #FreeTheNipple in principle, now, as a mother, I would still prefer MY daughters not free their nipples. Please focus on freeing dolphins and political prisoners instead.
I raged during the summers as well. Between my junior and senior years of college, I served food in the dining halls at Lair of the Golden Bear, a family camp for UC Berkeley alumni. I had grown up going to this camp for one week every summer, because my dad graduated from UC Berkeley. While I staffed there, they posted a weekly list of who had “groveled,” meaning who had hooked up, in order to keep any romance known to all and discourage people from getting too possessive and jealous in what was meant to be a summer of fun. I made an appearance on that list with eight different people. I wish making that list had been my job, instead of serving tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches from a cart.
The problem was that, because my whole identity was wrapped up in being “wild,” I couldn’t turn it off, even after college. In my late twenties, I hooked up with a yoga instructor that I met at a bar. He looked like a young, punk-rock Clint Eastwood with jet-black hair. I know that sounds frightening but google-image “young Clint Eastwood” and I promise it will make you forget all about that whole empty chair speech he made as an old man. We had drinks on our first outing. When we went back to his friend’s place where he was staying and started kissing, I immediately pulled away and warned him, “Hey, I’m on my period.” He stood up, pulled down his pants, and said, “Well, then let’s make a fucking mess, Ali.” He didn’t care about his penis looking like a weapon used in a murder. But I was too scared because we had just met. On our second outing he made me a vegan dinner (that’s where I stole that move!) and we definitely took it all the way that night. At the time, he was just visiting SF, and was living on the side of a mountain in his aunt’s cabin. After he left, I missed him, his cooking, and his penis so much that I flew to the Midwest in the middle of winter to visit him. At night he made me crabs, and in the morning he made me pancakes and bacon. We did yoga and had lots and lots of sex. On the second day at the cabin, I said, “Boy it’s pretty nutty I came all the way out here after just meeting you. You’re not crazy, right?”
He smiled and shook his head.
And then I laughed and said, “Great, well, I guess it’s too late anyway. If you’re gonna kill me nobody will be able to stop you.”
Then, when I moved to New York to pursue stand-up, he came to pick me up and help carry my two huge suitcases up the four flights of stairs, to my very first New York apartment: a crusty Bed-Stuy shithole. He’d visit me intermittently, giving me a great sense of comfort and home in a very lonely time. When I moved again in the city, his childhood friend worked at a diner around the corner and we talked about how hard it was living in NYC. We had pleasant small conversations about her dear friend and she’d always offer me a free slice of apple pie.
One day she yelled to me in panic as I was walking past the diner. “Ali! Have you seen our friend?! You don’t know this but he has multiple personality disorder and he’s gone missing!”
I replied, “Oh my God…Can…Do I still get free pie?”
I tried to help her out but the only thing going through my head was, Well, good thing I’m alive! He could’ve so easily cut me up into a million pieces and used me as fertilizer for the cabin’s garden. I wouldn’t have even blamed him—that’s how stupid meeting someone you don’t know on a mountain is.
* * *
I fantasized about having a mother who was also raised on Sesame Street, Happy Meals, and John Hughes movies. Maybe she could ask me white mom questions like “How are you feeling?” or say white mom things like “I love you to the moon and back.” We would share the same first language. She could help me pick out a dress that I actually liked, instead of the dress that was most discounted. We would understand each other and not fight as much.
But I recently saw that hipster movie Lady Bird and realized white chicks have issues with their mothers too. Yes, it took me that long to realize it.
So all I can do right now is hope that our relationship, especially when you two are teenagers, will be better than mine was with my mom. We get along great now that I have kids, but those early years were really painful. As long as you don’t get maimed or contract life-threatening STDs, I accept that some shit is going to go down.
Please know you can talk to me more than I was able to talk to my mother. We have the same first language. We will have read the same books, like Corduroy and Charlotte’s Web, and have a much more shared experience of growing up. It’s already so wonderful that Mari demands to watch Hayao Miyazaki movies every time we get into the minivan because I love Ponyo and My Neighbor Totoro too. I hope you also like the Harry Potter books and hiking and s’mores and Sixteen Candles (even though the Long Duk character is an abomination). I want to be a confidant for you little ladies. I’ll give you makeup tips if you want them (really, I just have one: Never use a black eyebrow pencil or you’ll look like you have caterpillars crawling above your eyes).
For International Day at my school, I decided in sixth grade to dress up in my mom’s old áo dài, that traditional Vietnamese silk dress that has a collar, long sleeves, and is worn with pants. Well, in sixth grade, I couldn’t even fit my arm into a dress my mom wore when she was eighteen years old. She loved bragging to her friends and family afterward about how she was so skinny in her youth that even her twelve-year-old prepubescent daughter couldn’t squeeze into her past silhouette. I’ve saved a box of my dresses, in hopes that you girls will take an interest in them one day, and because since we all grew up eating ch
eese and croissants from Costco, you’ll probably fit into them. I promise things get way better after your teenage years. I look forward to us being adults together. I can’t think that far ahead, and I know things never turn out how you think they will, but I’m hopeful.
AFTERWORD
by Justin Hakuta
Dear Mari and Nikki,
Your grandfather once told me that when I find the right opportunity in life, all of my prior random experiences will suddenly fit together and make sense. This is what happened when I met your mother.
My path to the illustrious Alexandra Dawn Wong began early, in Washington, D.C., in the 1980s. I was the middle of three boys, Uncle Kenzo was the oldest and Uncle Akira the youngest. We grew up on a steady diet of Japanese BB guns, The Far Side comics, Fist of the North Star anime, and Street Fighter II on Super Nintendo. Uncle Kenzo brought home albums like Nas’s Illmatic and A Tribe Called Quest’s Low End Theory. We lived in Cleveland Park in an Art Deco home, separated from the political world that surrounded us. Everything about my childhood primed me as a match for your mother.
Thanks to your brilliant lola, we were also fed a steady diet of traditional food from Capiz, Philippines, home of the folkloric vampire-like spirit known as “aswang.” We emerged from music, video games, film, and the mix of Japanese and African American culture we consumed in our rooms to dine on her version of Filipino adobo. I watched her cook juicy chicken thighs, chicken drumsticks, small pork ribs, and tender chunks of beef perfectly marinated in soy sauce and vinegar until they transformed into deep brown deliciousness. Your mother had a similar childhood experience savoring the tapioca soup and pork your grandma Wong cooked for her in San Francisco. Even our palates were primed for connection.
On weekends your grandparents took me and your uncles to eat and grocery shop at Lotte Plaza Market in Virginia, a Korean grocery store where my staple was a piping hot bowl of beef udon. Your great-grandfather Hajime was a big believer in traditional Chinese medicine, and in turn your grandfather sourced medicines like bitter reishi tea and powdered deer antler to help alleviate my asthma and eczema. This a prelude to your mother and my openness to holistic medicine.
Heavily influenced by Uncle Kenzo’s affinity for hip-hop, which led him into graffiti, DJing, and mixtapes, in high school I immersed myself in the local rap scene and I freestyled in ciphers filled with beatboxers, emcees, and singers, ever the odd Asian in the group. Thanks to my extensive music collection, a CD burner, AOL hip-hop chat rooms, and your grandfather’s office mailroom, in the nineties I built a thriving rogue online business selling bootleg custom hip-hop CDs that enabled me to forgo summer jobs (until I realized it was illegal and stopped). I was imbibing a diverse mix of pop culture and traditional Asian sources that would later enable me to connect deeply with your mother: my love for Wu-Tang Clan matched by her love for Souls of Mischief.
Like both of you, I grew up in a household with a celebrity: my dad, your grandpa Ken. In the eighties and early nineties, he was known publicly as Dr. Fad. Grandpa Ken grew up in Kamakura, Japan, home of beautiful Buddhist temples and murasaki imo (delicious, purple sweet potato) soft-serve ice cream. As your mother wrote, in the eighties he brought the Wacky Wallwalker, a sticky rubber octopus toy, over from Japan and sold more than two hundred million of them. Everyone I knew had one of these toys. He was a very successful businessman, and was also the host of the popular kids’ invention show, The Dr. Fad Show. The show was so popular in the nineties that Grandpa Ken was asked—donning a white sweatshirt with colorful Wacky Wallwalkers stitched all over it—to be a guest on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. He even had a cartoon Christmas special about Wacky Wallwalkers called Deck the Halls with Wacky Walls that aired on NBC in 1983.
I didn’t realize it back then, but, similar to your mother, Grandpa Ken was one of the few Asian American faces on television at the time. Later in life, I would come to realize how empowering it was to have a father who lived his passions and didn’t let the fact that he was the only Asian person in the room hold him back. Watching your grandpa Ken defy racial and career norms to build his own creative universe ranging from toys to television and art, your uncles and I directly experienced how full the world is of creative opportunity. There was no bamboo ceiling for us. We were free to carve our own paths as individuals, a drive and passion I later recognized in your mother when we first met.
I remember walking down the street as a family when I was around eight years old and two white teenagers started saying “ching, chang, chong” as they passed us. I remember being called “chink” in a football game in high school and the next kickoff sprinting toward that person and drilling them into the ground. Racism and stereotypes are unavoidable and not everyone will understand where you come from, but having Grandpa Ken, similar to your mother today, embrace being an Asian entertainer on TV with such fearlessness, a pioneer on the airwaves, taught me pride and showed me that representation matters. This is why I buy you Asian Barbie dolls and children’s books with faces that look like yours: because I want you to grow up immersed in role models that look familiar, so that you too can be inspired and live in a world of creative possibilities. By the time I met your mother, I was able to draw from my childhood experience with Grandpa Ken to recognize and support the unique path your mother was forging for herself.
I remember when I was about six years old I was playing by myself next to the living room with a mix of G. I. Joes, Thundercats action figures, and oxtail bones from a delicious soup your lola made that I had eaten clean, washed, and then used as spaceships. Grandpa Ken was walking by and saw me playing. He stopped and watched me for a bit, then asked me if I wanted him to draw something for me. I eagerly nodded yes, and he grabbed a blue marker and proceeded to draw a simple but effective fighter jet. I loved the drawing, but even more so I loved that I had his undivided attention for those few precious moments. There are, of course, challenges to having a famous parent. To be famous is to be in demand. As children of a famous parent, we then have to compete for their time and attention along with everyone else.
Famous parents are part of the family, but they are also part of a much wider tapestry of relationships made up of the people they impact. We have to share them. Your mother, like your grandfather and all other pop culture celebrities, often struggles with balancing the pursuit of her career and craft and spending time with us, and she’s right—it is tough. I know how to be your mother’s balancing half, and how to be your father, because of how I was raised.
It was crucial for your uncles and me that your lola was the consistent parental presence who helped ground our family, strapping the nebulizer mask on my face at three A.M. when I had asthma attacks and cooking us food that nourished our bodies and helped us establish a connection with our mother countries. Your lola had dreams of becoming a lawyer someday—she even worked as a recruiter for the World Bank—but with Grandpa Ken’s fame and three young boys in the house, she decided to leave her job to hold down the home front. And she did it with flying colors. Because someone needs to ground a family when fame is so intoxicating. I learned how to navigate the limelight of your mother’s fame from growing up in my house where your lola was the grounding force. Now it is me, and your grandmothers, aunts, uncles, and cousins, who ground the family when fame takes over.
There are people who can root you, and then there are things you can do on your own to ground and balance when the winds of celebrity pick up. I learned young how to be with myself even when my father was focused on his career, away for business, and being pulled in a thousand different directions. I immersed myself in practices like meditation, journaling, fasting, and entheogenic ceremonies, not realizing that my interest in mindfulness and self-exploration would, over time, help me find my own way in life, individuated from your grandfather’s success. I was also unknowingly preparing myself to be the subject of your mother’s future jokes.
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Your mother and I met at a vineyard wedding in Napa Valley, California. The day started out cloudy with a light drizzle, but as the wedding ceremony began, sunbeams cut through the parted clouds as if some sort of cosmic cooperation was in effect. I was wearing a yarmulke, a Jewish ritual head covering, and serving as an usher, helping people find their seats. I remember seeing your mother for the first time. She was wearing a dark blue dress with colorful birds printed all over. She was walking with a guy friend from high school, and I remember being instantly curious and attracted to her. I watched from afar as she and her partner walked into the rows of fruiting grapevines, clearly engrossed in their conversation, and I thought, Why don’t I ever get to meet women like that? She approached me later that night while I was catching up with an old high school friend and invited me to one of her shows in New York, where I was also living at the time.
Fast-forward to a few months later and I am at the Gotham Comedy Club in New York City. Your mother is headlining the show and I am with a group of friends, wearing my favorite Marvin Gaye–print black T-shirt not knowing what to expect. Your mother walks onstage in a yellow T-shirt and black baggy MC Hammer pants and delivers an extremely filthy, downright hilarious set that brought on full-body shakes of laughter for me. I honestly don’t remember laughing that hard before. She showed off her camel toe, pulling her black pants tight to emphasize the detail. She pulled down her pants and mooned the audience, her butt crack daring us not to laugh. This was my first live stand-up comedy experience and my first time seeing your mother perform, and I felt like I had been hit by a bulldozer of raunchy joy. I was elated and knew I wanted to get to know her better. I emailed her the next day to ask her out to lunch.