Top Quotes: “Dear Girls” — Ali Wong

“Male friends of your father have told me that it makes them uncomfortable that I’m professionally funny. They get angry at me for not laughing at their dumb stories about their wives. ‘She makes a fuss when I put all my stuff in her purse and I’m like, look how many shoes you put in my closet! Hahahahaha!’ At a wedding, one of them came up to me and said, ‘Hey Ali, my life is so bossy, she always gets on my case for not putting the toilet seat down. I’ll put down the toilet seat once you put down that People magazine!’ I just want to shake these men by the shoulders and say, ‘You will never be funnier than me and that’s okay. Don’t worry, you still have a bigger dick than me!’”

“I’m definitely not going to take classes when I retire. What is the point of learning how to speak French like a second-grader when you’re gonna die soon? ‘Ou est le cemetery? Je suis une old-ass person who shouldn’t be learning a damn new language!’”

Study Abroad

“I gained ten pounds and it was the best summer of my life. The curriculum was so interesting and I was very fortunate to hear the great Haunani-Kay Trask speak passionately about her people’s right to get back their land, and how ready she was for the exploitation of Native Hawaiians via the tourism industry to stop. At the end of her speech, a fellow student raised her hand to ask, ‘My family is Japanese American and has been in Hawai’i for many generations. What can we do to support the sovereignty movement? What can we do to help?’ And Haunani-Kay Trask simply responded, ‘Get out.’ And then she followed up by proudly and unapologetically stating: ‘I have zero aloha. None.’ The way she used humor and spoke with such strength, all while in her sarong and long hair flowing down to her elbows, really inspired me and influenced how I perform. I loved how she didn’t try to repress her beauty or femininity in order to appear more authoritative. In fact, she channeled it into this goddess-queen energy that made her come off as a captivating maternal figure fighting for her beliefs and her people. I had never been so moved by a single speaker. Then I gained five more pounds because fuck it.”

“After that summer in Hawai’i, I went to Vietnam and gained ten more pounds. Clothing store employees wouldn’t even let me try on anything in their shops. I walked into one store to find some new clothes, and the young girl aggressively yanked a pair of pants out of my hands and said in broken English, ‘This: small. You: bigger.’ I gained weight for a number of reasons. The food was so good and basically free, so I’d eat even when I wasn’t hungry. Back then, a bowl of pho was 15 cents. Fifteen cents. Nothing is that cheap. A pack of gum doesn’t even come close. I once ordered a side of anchovies at a famous pizza place in NYC and they charged me ten dollars. Ten dollars for anchovies, the pigeons of the sea! It blew my mind how far the U.S. dollar could go; it felt like the entire country was on sale. And like my cheap uncle says, the best thing about Vietnam: “NO TIP.’ No wonder why gross, loser American men love to go to SE Asia to feel powerful. ‘I’m an expat’ is a fancy way for these men to say ‘No one would fuck me in America’ and ‘I’m a pervert who wants to sleep with as many Asian women as possible.’ One of these guys once mistook me for a native Vietnamese woman and kept trying to seduce me in Vietnamese. He had a huge red beard, John Lennon glasses, and looked like he had spent his whole life eating and smelling like Fritos while writing a fantasy novel that he would never finish about queens and dragons. Over and over, he repeated, ‘Chi oi!’ (which means ‘Hey lady!’) from a balcony as I shopped on the street. I wish I had screamed up at him, ‘Go away! I’m from the U.S.! You ain’t locking me in no expat sex dungeons!’ But instead I just walked away as fast as possible, hoping he wouldn’t throw a fishing net on me and then drag me up into his spider’s nest of red pubes and SPF40.”

“It was so much fun to eat on the street, on a red plastic stool at a tiny table. I could tell myself whatever meal I ate didn’t really count since I was eating in a dollhouse. I couldn’t resist all the street vendors. I loved flagging down a woman riding a bicycle, with steaming orange, yellow, and green sticky rice on display behind her. And she’d repeat in a singsong tone what she was selling like a seductive siren from Greek mythology: ‘HOT STICKY SWEET RICE HOT STICKY SWEET RICE HOT STICKY SWEET RICE.’ By the third announcement, I’d be making it rain, begging her to wrap that rice in newspaper, sprinkle it with coconut shavings, and please give it to me already. I loved having a relationship with the people who made my food, and how low stakes it was to try new things. Those street vendors were so ephemeral, like an occult gift that vanishes after selling you a cursed monkey’s paw. One of my favorite things to eat in the morning was soft tofu with caramelized ginger syrup. This woman would come around on her bike every morning in front of my house and sell me some. Then one day, she stopped coming and I heard she died. It was so traumatizing that from the non, I decided to eat every one of my favorite food items from my favorite vendors, even if I was full. I was acting like a survivor in a post-apocalyptic zombie world who stumbles on a supermarket.”

“I prioritized exploring and learning as much as I could. It made me see how much mental energy and time we spend on losing weight in the U.S.”

“All the Vietnamese American girls on the program, including myself, got called fat all the time. In Vietnam, strangers sitting on stools feel entitled to roast you as you walk by. One day, a girl named Phuong finally got fed up with it and responded to this guy clowning her with this horrible comeback: ‘Well, at least I’m not poor.’ The American, privileged, guilty party of me was mortified, but the Pussy Grabs Back part of me (which is much stronger) was like, Go in on this dude! There was constant tension between a lot of the Vietnamese Americans and Vietnamese people. They all thought I was a robust Japanese tourist because I dressed in baseball jerseys and wore my hair in two buns. That meant that I didn’t experience a lot of the envy Vietnamese had for the Vietnamese American girls who they thought were so lucky to be born and raised in the U.S. Sometimes I think they just called us fat to remind us that we were no better than them just for having more money and speaking English. Also, it was a glandular thing, so shut the hell up, Quan.”

“My roommate, Asiraoh Cham, was the only person on the program who lost weight. Her last name was Cham because, well, she was Cham. The Cham are the indigenous people of Vietnam and her father, very smartly, in structed all the Cham people before fleeing Vietnam to change their last name to Cham so they could easily find another in the U.S. She told me that her father hated Vietnamese people and referred to them as ‘robbers.’ And when I visited her extended family’s village outside of Hanoi, I could understand why he’d felt that way. His family was constantly being harassed by the police and asked for bribes.”

“It made me resent my parents a little for not making more of an effort to pass on their languages to me and my siblings. But once you two were born, I realized that it would’ve taken so much work for them, in addition to raising four kids. Both your dad and I speak semi-fluent Spanish and put more focus and energy into not saying ‘fuck’ instead of teaching you ‘agua.’”

“The homestay family we stayed with had a nephew named Canh who was basically their servant. My mom says this is really common, that every Vietnamese family living in a major city in Vietnam takes in a niece or nephew from the countryside to be their cook, house cleaner, and nanny, in exchange for food, lodging, and an education. Canh slept in a doorless room next to the entryway of the house, right next to five dogs. He cooked every single meal and put what he called ‘Ajinomoto’ (that’s MSG) into everything. I’d stand next to him, waving flies away from raw food, as he’d saute tomatoes with fish sauce and garlic. Eventually, he’d always add meat or vegetables and my glasses would fog up from the savory steam. To this day, I still use tomatoes, fish sauce, and garlic as the base for most of my dishes.”

“Asiroh told the family she didn’t eat pork or beef, which Vietnamese people have a very hard time comprehending. Either you’ve a ‘vegetarian,’ which is a Buddhist monk who has no sex and shaves their head and lives in the temple and eats tofu with soy sauce and water spinach for the rest of his life, or you’re a person who has sex or will eventually have sex and eats meat. Those are the only two choices of things to be.”

Marriage

“Before meeting me, he had never been to a Costco, which is like church for Asian people. He had never bought anything on sale because he fell for that propaganda ‘You Get What You Pay For,’ which is the most sacrilegious thing you can say to a Chinese person. And he didn’t love pork since he was a vegan. But I fixed all that.”

“Ayahuasca is a psychedelic plant mixture that helps you heal and find answers to the questions that have been burning inside of you. At the time, I had very bad rosacea on my cheeks. My face looked like a cluster of erupting volcanoes. A shaman at the first ceremony in Tulum told me, ‘Your body is punshing you for thinking that you’re ugly.’ I had gained a bunch of weight in NYC and was feeling down on myself, so he was right. During the ceremony, we took turns drinking a cup of medicine from the shaman. It tasted exactly like what it was: boiled bark and leaves. I sat cross-legged, quiet in a circle with your dad and a bunch of mostly Mexican women, anxiously waiting to see the tie-dye come alive in my brain. But nothing happened. So I went up to the shaman for another cup of medicine. And another and another. I lay down and stared up at the straw roof of the yurt, feeling like this whole thing was a sham and that ‘shaman’ really meant ‘sham man.’”

“And as the shaman continued to sing songs in Spanish and play his acoustic guitar, I closed my eyes, and suddenly, streaks of the most beautiful colors began to shoot out like a fountain to the tune of the music. A double of myself appeared. Another Ali Wong with the same jet-black hair, glasses, and tan skin took my hand and guided me toward a barn, where she laid me down on a stack of hay. ‘Take off your pants,’ she commanded. ‘When?’ ‘Right now,’ she answered as she smiled. ‘Why?’ She climbed on top of me, pulled back my hair, and whispered into my ear: ‘Because I said so.’ She proceeded to climb down, put her head between my thighs, and stuck her tongue in my pussy. As I moaned, probably out loud in front of everyone else in the yurt, some of whom were throwing up their past traumas (instead of getting head from me, like me!), the other Ali Wong crawled on top of me, still with her tongue in my pussy, but now with her pussy in my face. I recognized that same white heart-shaped birthmark on the inside of her left thigh, and kissed it lovingly as I made my way to her clitoris. We rolled around together and laughed, our lips moving around each other’s necks, biting each other’s double-pierced earlobes, touching each other, and complimenting each other’s features (which yes, were all just my features). ‘Your skin is so soft.’ ‘I love how you look when your hair drapes over your breasts.’ ‘Your hands smell like garlic.’ ‘Yours do too.’ ‘They always smell like garlic because I love cooking with garlic.’ ‘Me too.’”

“She made me laugh, and she made me feel beautiful and gave me a lot of pleasure. And throughout my hallucination, I still saw all of those beautiful spiraling and shooting streams of turquoise mixed with orange, turning into purple and red, riding the rhythm of the music. I smiled, tears streaming down my face, because I didn’t even know that this was exactly what I had come all the way to Tulum for. This hallucination actually happened, by the way, I’m not making it up for this book. Months later, my skin cleared up. Because I took antibiotics. But still! The self-love I gained after that trip was incredible. But please take antibiotics if you need to.”

“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% of the childcare and household duties is simply not enough when I’m on set twelve hours per day shooting a new 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 don’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 worshiping 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 a 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. 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.”

“When cars pick us up to go to the airport, drivers who don’t know who I am will 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.”

Parenting

“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 not 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.”

“While I was pregnant, I read a book called Bringing Up Bebe 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 how to respect food. My dear friend, Aileen, who was a mother of three before I become 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 Bebe was indeed a bunch of lies. When Mari started eating solids, I tried to deprive her of snacks and she still threw my sauteed 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 tryna fool me.’ Like Aileen had predicted, I gave in to mac and cheese before Mari turned one.”

Being Asian American

“Another instrumental Asian value is bluntness. My parents always found a way of saying things that you weren’t supposed to. It used to embarrass me, but like the cheapness, now I’m so grateful for it. When my mom and I took a trip to Vietnam together shortly after my father passed, she came to lunch with Hai and six of our mutual friends. I hadn’t seen a lot of these people in so long and almost cried because I was so happy to be reunited in this beautiful country where we had all first met. When my mom greeted my friend Vinh, after not seeing him for many years, she noticed that he had gained a lot of weight and said to him, ‘Wow, Vinh, you look so prosperous.’ We all knew she meant, ‘You got real fat.’ But she said it with such a matter-of-fact, unapologetic attitude that it didn’t even offend him. All of our friends heard her and laughed because there was something so familiar and affectionate about her honesty. It just was what it was. Neither she, nor my father, nor me or any of my siblings could ever help but to speak exactly what was on our minds, no matter how inappropriate.”

“Again, this really used to bug the shit out of me. It was really embarrassing when my mom told one of my friends, ‘I want to see your nose job’ after she got a nose job. When I was in Vietnam, I traveled to Phu Quoc, an island known for making fish sauce. I returned to Saigon with a bottle for my aunt Nga hoping that she would be excited. When she tasted it, she looked up at me and said: ‘What can I say? It’s just not good.’”

“But now, I love that my family taught me how to be refreshingly rude and honest. It also toughened me up and prepared me for bombing and criticism, because I’d been humorlessly roasted by my family my whole life. People always tell me that they think stand-up is so hard. But it’s nothing compared to being hoorided constantly by the people who love you most and know you best. My mom used to say, ‘The tangerine skin is thick so you must have sharp nails.’ People like to praise Asian Americans as the model minority for their strong work ethic and good behavior. My Vietnamese mother did not give me either. But she made me cheap, tough, and salty, like a steak from Sizzler.”

“When Crazy Rich Asians first premiered, a very talented Asian American actress in her late 40s admitted to me that she refused to watch the film, and would probably never see it, simply because she was jealous that she wasn’t in it. As she looked down at her shoes, she confessed, ‘I just feel so left out.’ I told her, ‘It’s not your fault. You were made to feel that way. The lack of opportunities for Asian Americans in Hollywood conditioned you to feel insecure and envious.’ ‘You don’t feel that way?’ she asked me. ‘Well, you’re from a different generation, where the success of another Asian person drives you crazy because you were made to believe there was only one spot available.’ ‘You have no idea what it was like. Until very recently, every role I auditioned for required an accent.’ ‘God, that sucks.’”

“One New Year’s Eve when I was seventeen, I made out with thirteen boys and three girls. That’s basically an entire high school production of Oliver!”