Ali Wong Quotes

The answers to making it, to me, are a lot more universal than anyone's race or gender, and center on having a tolerance for delayed gratification, a passion for the craft, and a willingness to fail.

Just accept that you’re not a genius. Once I told myself that, I was able to finally write.

You have suffered enough." That became my mantra for motherhood from there on out. You have suffered enough. If you can make it easier, make it easier, and don't feel guilty about it.

I also understood why my mom wasn’t into processing her feelings, and how she was taught to just get over tragedy. To survive, she had to believe things like depression and allergies were a choice.

My dad would sometimes say things to my mom like, “Devil, get away, for I am God’s property!

Being in a relationship will inevitably offer up uncertainty, risk, and challenges. Find someone who is willing and able to come up with creative solutions as issues arise and takes leaps for you when called for.

My mom was never the type to write me long letters or birthday cards. We never got mani-pedis together, she never gave me a locket with our picture in it. She wouldn't tell me I looked beautiful, or soothe me when a boy broke my heart. But she was there. She kept me safe. She did her best to make me tough. She fed me the most delicious home-cooked meals. For lunch, she'd pack me rare sliced steak over white rice and steamed broccoli. She sent me to private school from kindergarten through twelfth grade. She is still there for me. She will always be there for me, as long as she's able. That's a great mom.

I don’t use words like “facetious” or “effusive.” I use words like “doo-doo,” “caca,” and “punani.” Once I embraced that, these letters were an absolute pleasure to write.

It made me realize that the most important part of parenting, relationships, pretty much anything is just actually being there.

My dream of having four children was replaced by utter gratitude that I was able to get pregnant three times, and give birth to two beautiful girls, who exhaust me spiritually, financially, and emotionally.

And then I threw up from all the anesthesia and my teeth were still chattering and they were telling me not to vomit so hard, otherwise my stitches would bust open. I said,'I don't know how to vomit softly.' That's like telling someone to shit perfume.

Hospital food is a funeral of flavor in your mouth.

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.

Then again, if our relatives had been able to Yelp America before coming over, they might have thought twice. Those reviews would have been mixed: “The opportunity is on point, but they kind of overdo it with the institutional racism and the guns. 3 stars.

There are a lot of advantages to being with someone of your own race. The cultural shorthand makes it a lot easier. You don’t have to constantly explain everything or act like a smiling tour guide for Asian American culture or deal with dietary differences.

I can see what a shock and how lonely it must have been when she went to the United States—from being surrounded by all these people who look like you, talk like you, accept your existence inherently, to living permanently in a place where all the opposites are true. When she first got here, a dentist took one look at her teeth and said she had "the mouth of a caveman." I used to think it was funny, like you might when you read that, but the truth is that American society, while being so rife with opportunity and so incredible in so many ways, also generally made her feel primitive.

I tried to stay away from the classic Disney princess movies. In addition to featuring a lot of unempowered women, those movies are just so white. White people and stories about white people are not bad, it’s just that when you live in America, everything is so inherently white. I don’t want you to grow up wishing you were white and having that inform all of your decisions later on in life. I want you to be proud of having black hair and Asian features.

But when I was living there, San Francisco was an escape for people who hadn’t been accepted in their small towns for who and what they loved or believed.

Therein lies the potent, challenging gift afforded to us brave, lucky few, fortunate enough to be roasted onstage night after night by your mother: that of self-realization through comedic ego destruction. Your mother showed me with her comedy how to let go of who I thought I had to be and allowed me to embrace a life rooted in my love for you girls.

A reporter once asked me why I think progressive men who earn significantly less than their breadwinning wives still won'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 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. That it's an indicator of his inability to provide for his family. 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.

In that sense stand-up is a lot like fashion. It demands innovation with every new show. And you're only as good as your last collection.

Before I packed up, my best friend told me how her friend had witnessed a rat giving birth on a homeless lady’s lap on the subway. And that single image pretty much sums up New York.

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.

When cars pick us up to go to the airport, drivers who don't know who I am will often 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.

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 worshipping 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 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. That it’s an indicator of his inability to provide for his family. Basically, that he’s a fucking loser.

For my twenty-seventh birthday, I was really looking forward to your father's gift...But there was no box. There was no bag with tissue sticking out of the top. We sat down on his bed, in his closet room, as he gave me an envelope...Instead, there was a blank card with these instructions: 'Write down all of your goals.' Then he had me recite them back to him. And after every goal I read out loud to him, he replied, 'So it shall be. '... And despite having put anal beads up another grown man's ass in a previous relationship, I had never experienced and activity that was so intimate. And straight up free.

Witnessing all of those hardworking female street vendors in Vietnam also made me understand why my mom felt so passionate about me and my sisters working. While we were in Vietnam together, she explained that the country had a history of always being in wartime, so women were expected to rise to the occasion of making money for the family. Vietnamese women were always ready to take over roles traditionally filled by men, Like A League of Their Own (but where everyone is Marla Hooch). I also understood why my mom wasn't into processing her feelings, and how she was taught to just get over tragedy. To survive, she had to believe things like depression and allergies were a choice. In a culture entrenched in wartime, those who chose to be unhappy or to refuse gluten didn't last long.

Still, you can’t deny that, like goldfish and gummies, The Little Mermaid is fucking magical. I still feel sparkles in my stomach when I watch it. Despite Ariel wearing an ocean bra for most of that movie, and despite the fact that a man ultimately saves her from an evil plus-sized sea witch, and despite Ariel ditching her entire family for this man just because he’s a handsome prince, I gave in and showed The Little Mermaid to Mari on repeat. Those songs are also the shit. I’m a sucker for a drunk seagull best friend and since this is a safe space free of judgment: Ariel’s dad is kinda hot? I still find my feelings about King Triton confusing. He looks like Santa with abs and a tail.

My last piece of advice would be to focus not on the rsult, 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.

When in doubt, go out. Not just for material, but to experience new people, new social situations, and unfamiliar surroundings.

It was really moving to experience being a foreigner in the country that your mother grew up in. And it’s empowering to be in a place where everyone looks like you.

...nobody wants their identity and defining characteristics reduced to just race and gender.

I think I have PTSD from when I was one of the few Asian kids in kindergarten and all the white kids made fun of my "smelly" and "weird" lunch. And now that we're all grown up, those same white kids (I mean literally the same people) like to post pics of their chimichurri bone marrow dish, and I'm like, Bitch, you used to call me a fucking vulture for eating my meat to the bone and sucking out the marrow. Now you're fishing for "Likes" with it??

These fans were excited to see your mother perform, but more than that it was as if she was taking her audience to church like a fiery, foul-mouthed preacher who offered up profane salvation. There was the new mom who was enjoying her first night out after giving birth a month prior. There are fans who dress up like your mother, imitating the outfits she wore when you were both in her belly There are mothers who bring their daughters. There are those who travel from across the country, and sometimes across the world. They talk about your mother being their spirit animal. Their eyes are lit up, their faces relaxed and smiling, their postures open and welcoming. Watching this magical effect on her fans keeps me manning the merch table to this day.

Studying in a developing/third-world country is way more intense and formative than studying in a first-world fancy country. It makes you so much more open-minded, adaptive, and confident. You become so much more real. When you have to shit on two little bricks into a hole the size of a tennis ball at an elementary school in the countryside, or sleep in a farmer's yurt after not bathing for five days, you become a much more easygoing person. It teaches you to value experience over material things real fast.

There are a lot of advantages to being with someone of your own race. The cultural shorthand makes it a lot easier. You don’t have to constantly explain everything to act like a smiling tour guide for Asian American culture or deal with dietary differences.

When I was in second grade, my dad hurt his back and started walking with a cane that had a gold duck’s head for the handle. I think gripping onto a lower life-form’s cranium for support made him feel a lot more empowered about getting old, like, I’m still doing better than this poor fucking thing. Now, support my weight, duck!

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 worshipping their husbands or taking care of their kids, they’re seen as selfish, cold, or unfit mothers.

A glowing green traced the movements of our limbs below the gentle surf. I imagined a scaly, bug-eyed eel with razor-sharp teeth had come from the deep to hunt for a late-night meal before realizing it was a luminescent algae emitting a subtle glow with each tread of the water. At one point, we returned to the beach to rest and came across a nest of hatching turtles making their first voyage into the water. We watched the sun gradually peek over the horizon, and I realized in this moment that I had your mother's deepest trust. Miles away from her comfort zone, she was willing to walk with me and explore the depth of a world I had grown to love. I, in turn, would need to trust her to the utmost as I stepped deeper into her world of stand-up comedy.

Asians like predictability. We like safety. We want to know that if we work hard, there will be a payoff. Downward mobility and the shame that comes with it is an Asian immigrant nightmare. And in entertainment, you very well might not make it despite all of those years you invested. There is no linear path to success, and no linear path to maintaining it even if you do achieve it.

That Boston show was when I began to see your mother through the eyes of her fans and realized her stage presence was more than the sum of its jokes. She was speaking to people's truths and making them laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. This was what our ayahuasca ceremonies were about: sourcing the most potent parts of ourselves and letting go of the rest. Your mother, I saw, had done just that. She was embodying experiences lie pregnancy and childbirth that are sacred to us as individuals, and celebrating these acts in a fresh new light. Asian cultures often teach us to be silent about our sexuality and filled with shame. Your mother breaks that up and transmutes pain and shame into power, like a mystical priestess.

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.

My mom visited me during my semester abroad. Getting to see her speak with comfort and ease in her native tongue, in the country where she was born, made me really happy. But it also made me sad—I had not previously known what a confident and funny person she actually was. But it was undeniable on her home turf. She suddenly became this beaming extrovert. It made me think about the hardships she faced when she came to the United States and how she must have built up a crazy thick shell to survive.

You might be wondering how eating, drinking, shitting, and puking so much could be considered a “valuable experience,” but being around all of those women on the program, with no men to impress, was so empowering. We were as boisterous as we wanted to be, without having to worry it would be too much for any man to handle, and we were having fun for ourselves.

I don't care how funny or beloved someone is. Take his ass down if he fucks with you.

The lack of opportunities for Asian Americans in Hollywood conditioned you to be insecure and envious... the success of another Asian person drives you crazy because you were made to believe that there was only one spot available." ...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.

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 of it.

seesawing between extreme distress and uncontrollable laughter, like a woman in a Victorian mental asylum.

I have extremely poor circulation to my hands and feet, to the point where, in the cold, they will turn blue and feel like pain icicles. So, especially in the New York fall or wintertime, my bare hands, much like the hands of Rogue from the X-Men, could suck the life out of a man’s erect penis.

And no, I don’t expect a man to take care of me financially, but I want him to want to, to take the opportunity, to make the gesture of doing something nice and giving right away.

Why don’t you suck the 1 percent top of my dick?!

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.

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 so 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.

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.

I loved having a relationship with the people who made my food,

Any relationship built from the foundation of diarrhea will stand the test of time. Even though the house we stayed in was very nice, in Vietnam, you cannot escape cockroaches, mosquitoes, and epic, frothy diarrhea. Now I see Asiroh at least twice a month. We show each other our C-section scars, raise our babies together, and always joke about how some people are blood brothers, but we are shit sisters.

That became my mantra for motherhood from there on out. You have suffered enough. If you can make it easier, make it easier, and don’t feel guilty about it.

One of those 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.

In the United States, when you get pregnant, the official policy is to make you go back to work immediately, only with some plastic wrap on the floor of your cubicle to catch the afterbirth still leaking out of your pussy.

I made plans to eat my placenta to prevent postpartum depression and not waste any of that valuable, free nutrition (if you haven’t picked up on it by now, I’m extremely cheap).

survivor in a post-apocalyptic zombie world who stumbles on a supermarket.

Unfortunately, there is no word for a man that is a muse, but there should be. How about we call him a “magnum”?

That day, my co-workers found out my secret: I'm a fucking idiot.

Bring a nice blanket, something soft and cozy that feels like the inside of an Ugg boot or a Care Bear’s vagina. Hospital bedding does not spark joy. The sheets have a thread count of three and there’s always some sort of plastic lining underneath to protect the mattress from all the new moms leaking juice everywhere.

Out. But when you have a newborn, your cheapness goes out the window because you’re willing to spend any money necessary to save your sanity. That day, we absolutely needed to get the fuck out of the house.

To survive, she had to believe things like depression and allergies were a choice. In a culture entrenched in wartime, those who chose to be unhappy or to refuse gluten didn’t last long.

I don’t know any Vietnamese person who doesn’t have an uncle with a gambling problem and an auntie that’s straight up greedy and evil.

Witnessing all of those hardworking female street vendors in Vietnam also made me understand why my mom felt so passionate about me and my sisters working. While we were in Vietnam together, she explained that the country had a history of always being in wartime, so women were expected to rise to the occasion of making money for the family. Vietnamese women were always ready to take over roles traditionally filled by men, like A League of Their Own (but where everyone is Marla Hooch).

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.

The answers to making it, to me, are a lot more universal than anyone’s race or gender, and center on having a tolerance for delayed gratification, a passion for the craft, and a willingness to fail.

Most of the weddings I have attended since have a three-hour time limit on the free alcohol. The bat signal goes out to the guests that the open bar is about to close, and people savagely race to the bar, like those shitty-ass buffalos who trampled all over Mufasa in The Lion King, to get their last glass of complimentary booze to hold them over for the rest of the evening.

One of my roommates was Citadelle Bliss Priagula. Filipinos straight up have the best names. Here's a fun formula for working out your Filipino name: Favorite type of candle + Favorite brand of body wash + Name of a dragon in Game of Thrones = your Filipino name. Mine is Citronella Dove Viserion.