Recess Interviews: Kristina Wong

Kristina Wong is a comedian and writer who has traveled across the country performing shows covering topics including laundry, suicide, cats and, soon, poverty in Uganda. Wong will make an appearance Saturday at the Triangle-Area Asian-American Student Conference held at Duke, giving a speech on stories empowering love and fortitude. Wong spoke with The Chronicle's Georgia Parke about her career, her creative process and her experience with mail-order bride websites.

The Chronicle: I’ve seen that you've done a lot of stuff at different colleges and you gave the commencement speech at UCLA… what would you say is different about performing on or speaking to college campuses—is it an atmosphere that you don’t get anywhere else?

Kristina Wong: What I guess is different is when I’m performing for live audiences in theaters they get a little bit more drunk. At colleges I guess they get drunk afterwards. It’s also the ongoing joke with a lot of comedians that performing at colleges, we keep getting older but the audience stays the same age….

Colleges are fun, though, and it's exciting to bring my brand of stuff to a campus because I think I didn't even know that the kind of work I do existed until I got to college. I very much don't work like a typical standup who gets on a mic. I work in real life situations...

The first project I did was my fake mail order bride website that I launched in 2000 as a college project. People looking for pornography found that site instead of finding porn. I was literally trapping my first audience.

TC: You mentioned that you didn’t really find your brand until you got to college, so would you mind talking a little bit about how that happened and how you ended up in this unique field of comedy?

"I could be waiting and waiting and waiting literally for years before I am allowed to be an artist and I don’t like that. I want to be able to have my voice whenever I want it."

KW: I lived in San Francisco. I would definitely say I was never encouraged to do anything like this but I knew it was something I wanted to do. I knew I didn't want to work in an office. I knew that my contribution to the world would be something more creative, not like doing surgery for people or building buildings for people. But all I had seen at that point in my life was the plays we performed in high school, like Neil Simon plays, and the only Asian-American literature was “The Joy Luck Club.” And that was I think for a lot of reasons why I’m now very critical of that art because it brings up that narrative, diminishes the identity for one reason or another, but I was like, oh my God, this is something, wow, this is amazing.

So I think I always imagined that I would probably be an actor. I never thought I was going to be someone who would be a comedian. I admired comedians and I admired what they were able to do but I think because I didn’t see a lot of examples of people like me doing it that it didn’t feel like something I could do. I was part of an Asian-American theater company who had lots of professional careers, we’re just not engineers and stuff like that. It was really kind of an incredible community—I got to write my own roles….

I began to look at artists who were doing things out of the box. Michael Moore was a big inspiration, he had a show called "The Awful Truth" where he basically pranked corporations.… It’s not the play that we think of as a play where an actor memorizes lines and it’s performed in a theater but it’s the skeptics that call attention to corporate injustice and things like that. and those are the kinds of things that I want to make in my work…. I don’t want to wait for theater to be open to me but I want to find ways to access people.

TC: You don’t see a lot of Asian-American women in comedy or in Hollywood in general so I wonder if you think maybe the door wasn't always open for you and you had to push your way through it?

KW: I can’t boast a lot of commercial success in my career. I feel most of my success has been working on the fringe. When I was in college, it was pretty nasty and stuff but it was really kind of a miserable endeavor. In general I think being an actor is miserable (she laughs). You get some traction and you are named as a great thing but you’re at the mercy of other people’s scripts and you go in and you’re up against other actors and it comes down to weird things like, maybe your face is funny-looking or your hair is too long. It's just not a fun thing and you can go crazy. I was like, this is really unempowering because I could be waiting and waiting and waiting literally for years before I am allowed to be an artist and I don’t like that. I want to be able to have my voice whenever I want it.

….For me that was the “a-ha” moment I had early on because I had to make my own work because I saw these roles by people who are bilingual or who are very sexy, and as sexy as I think I am I guess I am not. I’m like 5’8" and I go to calls where there are girls half my size and I don’t even know how that’s possible. Do you not have hips? I don’t understand. A lot of me doing my own work is because… I find it frustrating for any artist anyone who decides that they are an artist or claims they are an artist to be in a position of constantly waiting. For me I feel like I’m more interested in the performances that happen in every area of life. I love things that are meta. I love exploring these performances that we don’t know they happen like on the web.

One of the things I’ve done for many years is I show up at the Miss Chinatown pageant dressed like an ex-contestant… For me it’s about interpreting public space and also intercepting places that we don’t look at as performances. Very much like pageants are a performance of gender and something like the Miss Chinatown pageant is a performance of gender and ethnicity and me intercepting it and me showing up and saying that I’m an ex-contestant kind of reinterprets what their icon is of what an Asian woman is.

….I had been writing blogs and it was an old topic, and in the world of media, in talking heads news I was called into be an expert talking about this subject [“Why Everyone Wants to Date Asian Babes”] I was like, I don't want to talk about it, sit and talk about race like a professor. I’m not going to be able to get much said in a talk that’s four minutes that’s going to make an impact. So I thought rather than say that Asian women are the most desirable among all women—there’s a lot of weird stuff with that data because there’s only four ethnic groups with only straight people in the groups and no Native American and no middle eastern people—so it was already weighed in this strange way and I was like, I can’t even court this dumb framework…

"I need to get away from this and go to Uganda!"

This data was getting a lot of traction. It even made it to NPR. The only way I could really court this framework is to be the total antithesis of what a man looking for an Asian woman online is looking for… So I’m spitting, I’m loud, I’m putting on a viking hat, I’m basically gloating about how hot I am as an Asian woman and how someone wants it no matter what I do. For me that was the best way I could approach that versus a long dissertation about stereotypes and how bad they are, was just to scream and yell and take over space.

TC: It seems like that would be the best way to keep people’s attention.

KW: Yeah, there’s so much dumb news. To cut through it you have to be kind of an idiot.

TC: Would you talk a little bit about your next project, the "Wong Street Journal," and where that’s coming from?

Well, I played a show about depression and suicide for seven years and then my follow-up was a show called “Cat Lady,” which I thought was going to be a fun show about how I was turning into a cat lady, being on tour, doing the same show over and over again and it was… sort of looking at my life performing as a solo show artist with these guys who are experts on picking up women and go to bars every night, use the same lines every night to sort of perform a character version of themselves to pick up women. So that was my follow up show to “Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” and I went a little nuts working on that for three years. I was like, I’ve run out of my own life.

The other show I was doing was called “Going Green the Wong Way” and that was about how my car caught on fire. I was like, oh my God, I’m on repeat. New things here and there but I feel like I’m physically living these old stories of my life in front of people. I thought the best thing to do would be to do something totally out of my ethos, which you think I was somehow in a crazy place… like, “I need to get away from this and go to Uganda!”

I was interested in exploring something I didn’t understand, which was global poverty. As someone who is alway going year-to-year, “What’s my income going to look like this year?” but also trying to look at the whole scope of the world and how poor other people of the world are. I just wanted to understand that better so I went to Uganda.

And while I was out there I ran into some boys in the street. I was talking with them and they invited me—this was late at night and there are no streetlights so it’s really dark out and you have to take a flashlight to make your way around—and they were like, come to see our music studio. I was like, that’s weird. And for whatever reason I followed all these men into a room and it was a music studio and I ended up recording a rap album with them. It’s kind of incredible and a lot of people as I tell this story think it’s going to be that something awful happened. But it ended up being a great risk and invitation I took. I had a feeling it was going to be something good on the other end that it wasn’t just going to be the awful and horrible that is projected of that continent to the Western World.

"I wanted to see what would happen if I turned everything on its head."

The show is evolving and I think it’s going to be about poverty and I think in ways it will be about that, but it’s also about understanding American attitudes toward charity and why that is actually sustaining the poverty that we attempt to alleviate. We think about alleviating poverty like donating clothes or donating food or helping at the soup kitchen on Thanksgiving and its so much more about thinking in terms of cooperation and thinking of people being capable, not thinking about them being incapable. It’s about taking pity away from our regard for other human beings. It’s really investing in their ability to work.

What I saw around me never gets talked about enough. I never had a moment where I felt sad or I felt sorry for people. In fact, I felt moved by people. Why don’t we ever see this? It’s like we only see the commercial images of people who are starving and crying and covered in flies and have diseases, and the truth is there are a lot more people who are able and capable of working, they just don't have the resources to start a business or to get educated on the skills of farming or business that would help them develop themselves. I feel like that’s more what I learned as I try to figure out how to open a music studio with these guys… where I’m not just dropping off very expensive equipment and then watching it disappear. So that’s a longer conversation. I wish I had a better soundbite.

It’s about challenging the ways we understand other people, and also looking at institutionalized racism and how that is a factor in how we view continents…. For someone who has been writing a lot lately about privilege and has been writing a lot about things like race, I wanted to see what would happen if I turned everything on its head.