The Boundless Whoosh

Ali Wong crosses the stage toward the spotlight. The horizontal stripes of her tight dress amplify her big pregnant belly. She ambles slightly—subtly—just enough to stir memories of the weight of my own belly when I was seven and a half months pregnant. It's just enough to engage people who haven't been pregnant to project the imagined physical pains, the swollen ankles and sore backs of pregnant ladies onto Wong. The deliberate use of her physicality—at the moment she is introduced and the audience is open, expectant and taking in her burgeoning belly—becomes clearer over the course of the show. Our assumptions of prenatal unspryness are revealed and transformed as Wong's pregnant lady shuffle becomes a twerk (a move designed to achieve optimal egg fertilization) and then, later, a wildly energetic Cabbage Patch and Running Man.

In Baby Cobra, her 2016 breakout special, Wong is a magician: making us laugh—and squirm—engaging then transforming our assumptions of identity and motherhood. What she creates is an invention, an elegantly unfolding contraption built with our own expectations—a portal, moving us from a place we think we know to another boundless one—in an unexpected whoosh!

Dear Girls is structured as a series of letters to Wong's infant and preschool-age daughters, who "are prohibited from reading this book until [they] are 21 years old." While the pretense is a solid comedic setup for sharing stories about a bevy of flaccid lovers, ayahuasca insights, and anal sex, it's not only that. Before Wong's father died of cancer, he left her a letter. "I'm very grateful for the letter but I wish he had written more about himself. There are so many questions I have for him—how he overcame all the challenges of his youth and the person he was before I was born. And so I wanted to leave something for you girls when I die, besides a collection of oversized glasses for you to sell on eBay," she writes.

There is an Instagram feed (and book) called Mothers Before (2020). Scrolling through the pages and pages of photos posted by their offspring, you'll see girls and women, captured on film, from every decade: young women with their hair teased high at prom, singing in their bands, bikini-clad at the beach, in front of the Eiffel Tower, fixing motorcycles, with spoons stuck to their noses, smiling, laughing, or looking out into space. The images generate a sense of wonder as we are confronted with the perplexing evidence that a mother is a person, that a mother is a woman, who existed and lived her own life before we were, literally and figuratively, in the picture. That we are the center of our mothers' lives is a ridiculous, archaic, yet irresistibly sticky, idea.

What do we risk and what would we gain if our children knew all our stories? The premise of Dear Girls, like much of Wong's comedy, is an expression of many things at once: a comedic set up, a creative challenge, a heartfelt quest, a boundary to push against—and a way to extend a sense of generosity to the reader and write what is meaningful.

The stories in Dear Girls are wholesome at heart—tales of bad dates and her wild adolescence are nested between loving and comical stories of family, the one Wong was born into and the one she builds. Wong grew up in San Francisco, the youngest of four siblings. She was raised by a mother who immigrated from Vietnam and a Chinese American father, the son of a man who came to the United States at age eight to work as a houseboy. She grew up in a city she calls an "Asian Wakanda" with parents who made a point to champion the cultural contributions of Asian Americans—from Margaret Cho, to Maxine Hong Kingston, to Lou Diamond Philips. Springing from this Asian Wakanda, Wong builds on and surges beyond...