Before leaving my apartment last Wednesday for one of Ali Wong’s stops at the Beacon Theatre for her Milk and Money Tour, I ran through the usual mental checklist: phone, wallet, a fresh three-ply face mask—check. Keys, which I grabbed by the 0.54-ounce barrel of pepper spray dangling off the end, also check. Back in college, I used to carry around the same model, complete with the four ergonomic divots indicating optimal finger placement, until I had to turn it over once at an airport, which was no big deal. Who cared? I’d never even bothered with a practice spritz. It wasn’t until this past spring that I felt the urgent need to replace it.
When reports of a virus originating in my mother’s hometown began circulating at the end of 2019, I remember thinking, wryly, Well, now I don’t have to explain where Wuhan is. That the virus came from the same place I kind of did would have been funny if the historic equivalence between disease and Asian people—I mean, yellow fever?—didn’t grow increasingly uglier in the nearly two years that have followed. Months before lockdown, I saw a friend tweet about getting confronted at a sauna about his ethnicity; when he said he was Chinese American, the man physically recoiled for fear of COVID. I thought, Hmm. But it was San Francisco—a world away. Then more localized headlines about the attacks came in: A bunch of disturbed Midtown types, I reasoned. A tweet about “chink virus” appeared on the timeline. I swiped past immediately: That’s just one awful guy.
Then, the mass shooting in Atlanta, which included the killing of six women of Asian descent, supposedly motivated by the shooter’s sex addiction. That morning in March, I woke up with the sense of resignation that comes when the nightmare you’ve long dreaded finally happens, along with multiple-paragraph texts from all kinds of acquaintances. One offered to bake me cookies. While well-intentioned, some made me want to throttle something. You saw this news, and you thought of ME? I wanted to scream. Was it because I was their only fucking Asian friend?
Then, a more shameful thought: Had I really dared to hope, even after all this time and all this therapy and all the generous acceptance I’d started finding among newfound Asian American circles, that people actually saw me as someone whose primary descriptor was not just “Asian woman”?
I’ll say this: I’ve spent most of my life trying to wriggle out from under the weight of that descriptor. Like, I actually didn’t know what the word “chink” meant until middle school in Dunlap, Illinois, when our principal explained how the mascot for a high school 20 miles south of us used to be the Pekin Chinks (they rebranded as the Pekin Dragons in 1981; times had changed!). By my teens, I was well-versed in contorting my speech, my crushes, and my lunch choices in ways that betrayed as little Chinese-ness as possible. I flicked this quirky piece of local history out of my mind, down the same chute where four years of Sunday language classes had been uprooted and disposed of like an invasive weed. I’d love to say I grew out of that self-erasing instinct once I grew up. But you tell me what the point of pouring bleach on my scalp every eight weeks is, if not to give a subconscious middle finger to all that dead giveaway of a hair color. You tell me what a career in media and publishing is, if not the ultimate way to wield a learned tongue like defensive weaponry.
Even at the Union Square vigil following the Atlanta shooting, I spent the entire subway ride trying to look nonchalant, hoping to fold myself smaller, to make my body unobtrusive to the eye even as I was headed to a place where I was supposed to physically assert my existence. It was so cold that my knees ached for days afterward, but I remember looking at the faces peeking out behind masks and coat hoods and feeling wonder, for a moment, amid the grief. I had spent the year locked down alone, which meant I had forgotten what being surrounded by fellow Asians actually felt like.
In early April, once it got warmer, two female Korean American colleagues and I got a careful outdoor dinner, where we compared our newly acquired self-defense accoutrements like some grim and significantly under-budget Charlie’s Angels. Between us, we had one tactical pen, one lipstick stun gun (with flashlight), and one brand-new SABRE flip-top defense spray that I’d acquired at a shop specializing in police and security guard uniforms. We shared the Uber home and texted each other when we were securely in our apartments, doors locked. Were we overreacting? Were we underreacting? The video of the Times Square attack was still fresh on all of our minds; a week later, it was replaced by footage of the one in Borough Park.
For the rest of spring, as I walked around my own neighborhood, schlepping seltzer and laundry, I realized that the inability to gather properly with each other distorted any sense of what was safe, what was overkill, and whether our bodies could emerge from any given day unscathed from the random whims of both the pandemic and heightened racism. It’s like that Ottessa Moshfegh novel, I joked to a coworker at one point. It’s our year of hate crimes and isolation. We tensely waited for something even worse to happen, until the arrival of vaccines—those damn effective miracles—finally brought us properly together. (And though it seemed like the attacks abated since, they’ve never stopped).
And so, on Wednesday night, I joined three friends—two SoCal Korean Americans, one Chinese American by way of Taiwan and Hong Kong—for bowls of soba on the Upper West Side before we filed into the Beacon. The mood there was decidedly ambivalent, as if everyone wasn’t sure how wary of each other we should be: At security, they took away my pepper spray and had us lock up our phones in gray cloth cases. A couple wearing lab goggles and N95s strode up the stairs. As if committing to an unspoken bit, the bar served lychee Bellinis.
As Sheng Wang (2 Dope Queens, Fresh Off the Boat) and Ramy Youssef (Ramy) warmed the crowd up with the good, expected jokes about Ted Cruz, the delta variant, and white people at large, I wondered what, exactly, I was looking to get out of sitting in a sold-out theater during a pandemic’s fourth wave. A happier sense of community, sure, but I was looking for guidance too—some kind of affirmation, or at least a teachable moment where I could direct my anxieties from the past spring. In our darkest times, comedians can serve as something like public intellectuals. I considered Dave Chappelle’s Netflix special addressing the death of George Floyd, or Jon Stewart’s tenure as the moral conscience of America post–9/11. Surely, one of the most famous Asian American female comedians would feel compelled to import some kind of larger meaning to all the recent horrors.
In 2017, I had watched Wong stride onstage at the Town Hall, smirking as she thanked the Asian women in attendance for bringing their white boyfriends. That had been funny—a little inside joke assuring us she knew her primary demographic. Maybe that’s what I wanted again this time: confirmation that Wong was not only still one of us, but an oracle through which our shared anxieties could be articulated and lovingly skewered. Looking around from our nosebleed seats, though, it didn’t even seem to me that her audience was even that Asian anymore. Maybe half, I estimated as we watched Wong slink onto the stage this time, each sneakered footstep weighted like its own punch line as she launched into her set, which turned out to be both everything and nothing like what I expected.
For fans familiar with Wong’s stand-up, the night was a logical continuation of what we’d seen in her two Netflix specials, Baby Cobra and Hard Knock Wife: well-paced stories and observations about the tribulations of modern womanhood, served up with a heavy smear of raunch and bodily fluids. Where Wong’s previous sets romanticized period sex and exposed the true body horror of pregnancy, this third act from Wong centered on the conflicting feelings she had about success, middle age, and monogamy. But if I was holding my breath for Wong to comment on hate crimes or racism, I might as well have waited forever.
Instead, for the rest of the evening, Wong focused on provoking equal opportunity shudders and belly laughs, often simultaneously—during one particularly vulgar bit about blow jobs, I actually covered my mouth in disgust—as she discussed the agony and physicality that comes with being a millionaire, a comedian, a mom, a wife, and a 39-year-old woman with a sex drive, all at once. An everywoman bit that had no use for overtly playing into a specific demographic (not even white-people jokes), primary descriptors be damned.
I was disappointed for a moment, and then I realized I was thrilled.
The quick hit of churchy catharsis I thought I needed had given over to something even better: the pleasure of witnessing a successful Chinese and Vietnamese American woman stalking around the stage decrying the complicated bedroom dynamics that come with being the household breadwinner. Each objectively gross sex joke, each intimation of her physical body as a bleeding, heaving, horny instrument of agency—it made us squirm in our seats, unable to look away. The way Wong could modulate her voice, I decided as my friends and I leaned forward, touching our elbows together and bumping knees, was part of the magic. As Wong shifted from taunting bleats to straight-faced narration and then back into the hushed tones of someone about to tell a story that was either really scary or really dirty, she’d stand back proudly, clearly relishing our collective shivers. As if she knew she was here to shock us back to life.
After the show, the four of us walked to the subway, reprising our favorite jokes and shielding our faces from the light evening rain. In my bag, I felt for my keys; their heft, now 0.54 ounces lighter, felt strange. But I was too busy following along a conversation about potential weekend plans to overthink it. We stood and compared routes back to our respective neighborhoods, trying to find the one that would let us stay together as long as possible before we’d eventually peel off on our own. Get home safe, we urged over the din of the incoming trains. See you Saturday.
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