August 15, 2024 • 33 mins
In this episode of the NILC Freedom to Thrive Podcast, host Victoria Ballesteros sits down with the multitalented performing artist, writer, comedian and activist, Kristina Wong. From her early days at UCLA to becoming a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Kristina's journey is as unconventional as it is inspiring.
Listen in as Kristina shares anecdotes about her eclectic career, from her satirical website "Big Bad Chinese Mama" to her impactful work with undocumented Americans and formerly incarcerated individuals. Discover the origins of the Auntie Sewing Squad, a grassroots initiative born out of the COVID-19 pandemic, and how it led to her critically acclaimed show, "Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord."
Victoria and Kristina explore the intersectionality of Kristina's activism, her upcoming projects, and her thoughts on the importance of community and storytelling. This episode is a testament to how creativity and activism can come together to create powerful change.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
This is the NILC Freedom to Thrive podcast, powering pro-immigrant narratives, one story at a time.
I'm Victoria Ballesteros, Executive Vice President of Narrative at the National
Immigration Law Center.
Hi, Christina. Welcome to the podcast. Hi. What a beautiful story.
Oh, thank you. I remember drive-ins in San Francisco, too, but we did not watch Spanish movies.
(00:25):
Yeah. We would have been really lost. You might have needed the subtitles.
And yeah, drive-ins are just such a thing of the past, aren't they?
There is still one, I think, towards Orange County.
Yeah, I think there's two left in California, but it's so different.
You know, it's very different nowadays.
How are you? How's your cat? Everything good? My cat is on my lap right now.
(00:46):
Maybe I can pick him up and see.
I love it. I love it. What's your cat's name? His name is Happy.
He's currently biting my hand. Yeah.
He doesn't look happy at the moment. look at him he's like,
You're like attacking me. Get this on tape. So you're obviously a cat lover.
You're also a performing artist, comedian, organizer, playwright,
(01:12):
activist, politician, I think rap producer. Well, now former politician.
Former politician. And one time Ugandan rap sensation, yes. Oh my goodness.
But thank you for doing the research. Yeah, interesting and different creative
vehicles that you've worked in. To what do you attribute all of this creativity?
(01:33):
Not being able to find a good therapist, I think, or not being allowed to go
to a therapist when I was younger and needing some sort of outlet to work all my pathos out.
And so, yeah, because I couldn't find, I couldn't afford to pay someone to listen
to me talk about my problems.
I was like, well, I'll get an audience to pay me to listen to me talk about my problems.
(01:54):
And it's worked. Thank you for being the most unhealthy way to go about it.
Anything well that's taking something you
know a challenge and turning it into something that's obviously been very successful
for you yes now now it was an ugly write-up but yes i was listening to hector's
hector's last interview where he was describing sleeping in bathtubs i never
(02:15):
slept in a bathtub but i get it i've been there i have definitely had those
moments of my career where was,
yeah, just slugging, just slugging.
It's the struggle that nobody sees, right? It's not the glamorous part of the work.
What was that like for you, though, just, you know, in finding your way and
(02:36):
getting onto your path to where you are now?
Well, so, okay, so what I tell people is that sort of my first,
I went to UCLA, I graduated in 2000.
And at that point, the internet did not have the plethora of free pornography that it has right now.
And so my senior project, and this is when we still had dial up internet,
you know, and yeah, another blast from the past.
(02:59):
I know. And when you would, you would Yahoo search.
Asian women and you'd automatically find pornography like that's
the way the internet was organized and i and this
is also before search engine seos so my senior
project was a fake mail-order bride website called big bad
chinese mama.com and mama and i actually hand coded it like there was no wordpress
(03:21):
or you know there weren't these like even blogs were a fairly new thing and
it was a whole i had a harem of fake brides who were like my classmates and
it And it parodied the sections and actual Mail It or Bride websites.
And if you Yahoo search Mail It or Bride, it would be one of the top 10 search
results. So that was like my first project.
(03:41):
It's still there. I still pay for the domain name. Oh, my goodness.
Okay. You're going to get a flurry of activity now.
Yeah. Oh, flurry. Three visitors. You know, it's just, it's like flailing around
at the bottom of the internet right now.
But that was huge. This is a time before social media where the idea,
for the most part, most of our interactions at that point in time were somewhat in person.
(04:06):
We didn't have as many asynchronous interactions as we have now.
And so the idea that I'm asleep and some pervert in Kansas is trying to find
a picture of a naked woman and finds my angry sight was kind of terrifying. fine.
But that was like my calling card out of college.
And I basically would look at, I'd look myself up to see how I was doing.
(04:30):
And some college courses would be teaching me and I would invite myself to speak at their classes.
And I would drive for like a $50 honorarium all the way to Santa Barbara or whatever.
And because we did not have smart classrooms, then I had transparencies printed
out of my website that I would throw on an overhead projector.
Director wow and i would i would talk and those were my first performances
(04:50):
and then now i play colleges and you know
speak and i play for more than 50 bucks but like that's i just had it set in
my head that i really wanted to be an artist a performance artist and and at
that time in the late 90s there were a handful of asian american women who were
doing solo theater and i just sort thought,
(05:12):
oh, this could be a career.
So I was thinking Junichi Uehara, Jun Narita, Nobuko Miyamoto.
It was a thing. And enough so that I thought, okay, this could be a career.
I didn't realize how completely unsustainable it was, how hard it is to sustain,
(05:32):
and just how taxing it can be.
But here I am over 20 years later doing that thing that I set out to do.
Congratulations. I mean, you've really established yourself in a number of ways.
And so I'm interested about Big Bad Chinese Mama.
Your grandparents are immigrants from China, right?
Yes, yes. Came to the U.S. in the 1930s. So clearly some of that has factored
(05:54):
into your work or inspired a lot of your work or...
Sure, yeah. I mean, I definitely feel like.
There's, it's something to be said when the assumption is that you are the immigrant
or that your parent is the immigrant and, and, and how,
you know, I, I wasn't, I'm not fluent in Chinese, so I was never able to really
(06:16):
communicate fully to my grandparents.
And it was very painful. And there was a lot of history.
There's a lot of like these exercises. They tell kids like, interview your elders.
And I'm like, oh my God, like, and totally trigger them and get them upset.
Said. And they are talking.
And I mean, there's just a lot of secrets that are kept.
(06:36):
I won't say that we came as undocumented immigrants, but there was a lot of
creative paperwork with Chinese American immigrants of that generation.
There's a lot of relationships and relatives and marriages that were done more
for paperwork and to get people over here.
You know, what I'm describing paper sons, the phenomenal paper sons than not.
(07:00):
And so it's interesting because I didn't really, like for me,
it was very, there was a lot of people, a lot of Chinese Americans in San Francisco
who were of my generation who had other parents who were born here, but there also weren't.
And we have such a little, so little documentation about our diasporic history
(07:20):
that it's even and surprising to other Chinese Americans to know that I exist, right?
Like that, that, that there's such a thing as a third generation Chinese American
and, and sort of the popular culture assumption is that, you know,
we just got that fresh off the boat sitcom, right?
Like, we're, we're constantly just always arriving, and never here and around for a while.
(07:42):
Yeah. And so that was a lot to try to figure out how to make work about my identity,
but also respond to both this popular perception that.
I think it's shifted a bit, but that I'm not an immigrant, that I'm not the child of immigrants.
I'm also not hyper-sexualized or genetically inclined to be an overachiever,
(08:09):
though there was hella pressure to succeed academically when I was a kid. Right.
So it's just it's there. There were nuances that I felt like even within Asian-American
culture were were were hard to carve out for what my identity was.
Yeah. And that's really interesting that, you know, you're pointing something
(08:29):
out that I do believe is missing from the dialogue on immigrants and immigration
is that not everyone just got here.
Not everyone is coming in, you know, through the border.
Not everyone is at the border, the U.S.-Mexico border, I should say. Right.
And and that, you know, immigrants establish ourselves and have children and
their children have children.
And we've been here for as long as this country has been here.
(08:50):
Right. So, yeah, it's just it's missing, I believe, from the conversation.
But, you know, your work really does reflect, I believe, or you tell me if I'm
wrong, your heritage or even just some of the experiences that you have as a
woman, as a woman from, you know, a third generation immigrant person.
And I love the audacious names even of your work.
(09:14):
So there's things like Christina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord, and I want to know more about that.
Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Wong Street Journal, and then of course, Big Bad Chinese Mama.
What is the response in your family, in your community, and just more broadly
to this bold style that you bring to your work? Oh, well, there's no singular response, right?
(09:36):
And a lot of my early work, I mean, I was in such a bubble at UCLA,
which, you know, I feel very fortunate to be in a campus where there was such
diversity, but almost to the point that I think other students took it for granted
and began to eat on itself, right? Right.
Like that, that, that, that, that, that just because there were this many Asian
(09:57):
student clubs didn't mean that misogyny didn't have a way to persist within our clubs.
Like we didn't fight the way that I, when I go to the East Coast and visit those
colleges and meet those Asian American student unions, those kids are really
fighting because they are such the minority, both in the communities that the
colleges are situated in, but on their campuses.
Right. And they, and they really have to organize. They can't just be social clubs.
(10:20):
And I think a lot of my early work was sort of confronting what I saw as so
much anger in arts activism, which was like, at that point, there was a lot
of spoken word and all these spoken word poems,
performances I'd go to were people just like constantly yelling at people who weren't in the room.
(10:40):
For me, I was like, how do we...
That was what my website was, was like, how can we confront the people who aren't
in the room? Because right now we're just sort of yelling at people who are
already on the same side.
And also, how do we do this in ways that don't give us an ulcer and exhaust us further?
Because yes, okay, oppression made us mad, but now we're screaming mad on the stage.
(11:02):
Like, there's got to be a way to take power back. And so,
so much of my early work was like,
because when I sort of discovered that I was,
I didn't even know what, you know, Asian American studies really was until I
got to college and understand that movement and understand how it intersected
(11:22):
with other racial, you know, civil rights movements.
And, and, and, and I just had an ulcer.
Like I was just so stressed out because there's so many things to be angry at, at once.
And so I think that's where my pull to satire was to tricking people to, to, I mean,
tricking, you know, tricking the oppressor, not, not, I'm not like a scammer
(11:44):
that like to steal people's money or whatever, but like, but like how,
how do we find humor in these moments?
Because this is a long fight. yeah this is a fight of
endurance this this is a marathon it's not a sprint
and and so how do we take power back and and
and celebrate the slivers of joy that leak
through in these moments that to me is is is much more
(12:06):
powerful than you know exhausting ourselves oh and but you know believe anger
is necessary and it and lately when i was looking at you know the murder of
george floyd it was just like it wasn't like oh what's the joke we can pull
from this like there's some things are so angering that you have to express that.
But in terms of long-term survival, we need to also find ways to create our
(12:29):
own culture, not just constantly react.
Yeah, we absolutely do. And to your point, it's not a sprint, it's a marathon.
And the minute you finish that one marathon, there's another one right behind
it. So it just keeps going. Yeah.
I love that. I appreciate the emphasis on joy, on finding the joy.
And you've worked with a lot of different types of communities.
(12:49):
You've worked with the unhoused, you've worked with formerly incarcerated individuals,
you've worked with undocumented Americans.
What was that like, working with the undocumented Americans?
What was that collaboration like?
And did anything surprise you about that? That came as an invitation from the Dream Resource Center,
where they had seen a theater project I had done that had to do with statistics
(13:12):
with young workers and the specific,
just the spottiness in which young, and the precarity in which young workers
find themselves in terms of not being able to find consistent hours or enough
hours to qualify for health insurance and things like that.
And they were like, we would love to do something like that with our community.
And I, you know, originally I didn't feel.
(13:34):
Qualified enough because I'm not, I don't live that experience.
And it, but basically what it was, it was a theater workshop where we worked
towards creating our own show at the end of eight weeks and people drove in from the Inland Empire.
This is in Los Angeles, right? They, they drive like two hours to be part of
this workshop because some of them have never,
(13:57):
you know, found spaces to address their
status yeah and it was incredibly powerful and
really you know what so much of that theater stuff is is it's
not so much like how beautiful or you know how how well crafted our final theater
piece is though it was a beautiful piece but it's just so much about being in
community and creating with other people who share an identity that is so hard
(14:19):
to talk about and so we would do a combination both of learning and advocacy because some folks
weren't sure like one person who
was in the workshop was a longtime friend of mine i had no idea she was
undocumented her her her parents were able
to be naturalized her husband and her children are naturalized but for whatever
reason she's in this weird legal loophole and so so some of her some of the
(14:43):
reason why she was coming to the workshops was just because she was just like
ah what do i do and she drove like a long distance and and it was just really meaningful
for her to just connect with other people who were just in these weird paperwork
holes and had never been able to talk safely about their identity,
(15:06):
but also think about making work on it.
So some of these workshops would be split up on learning on what to do if an
ICE agent shows up at your door.
And I had thought, because I was privileged enough to be in the setting where
the folks I was meeting were, you know, a lot of them were very educated about
what to do in these situations.
(15:28):
And I remember saying to my one friend who was undocumented from Haiti,
she's since become a citizen. I'm like, you know, those red cards.
And she's like, what red cards? We don't talk about this.
So my knowledge of undocumented immigrants is all over the place.
Like in my mind, the ones that I would see were the ones who are very politicized,
very educated, and we're out there educating others.
But of course, there's this whole world of undocumented folks who
(15:49):
do not talk about it right completely keep it under the
radar are terrified about being deported as you know
as as reasonable concern but basically
there are you know there would be workshops and like which would be like acting
workshops what do you say when the ice agent is outside the door you slip them
a card these red cards that say like i have the right to not open the door and
(16:12):
i can't i don't know how my red car with me but but but
basically laying out your rights and reminding you what you can say and what you,
what you should not say. But also having conversations with unaccompanied minors
who are now adults who come over on their own and just hearing and sharing these stories and then.
(16:37):
Funneling it towards making work. Yeah.
Yeah. You highlighted being surprised at learning that your friend was undocumented.
And I always say, there are 11 million undocumented Americans in this country,
that people that are our friends, our neighbors, right?
You know, people that we maybe worship with and we just don't know.
(16:58):
And yeah, I think I appreciate you flagging that.
What was your work like with formerly incarcerated individuals?
What was that about? That I'm still doing. So I work with the API.
Yeah. I work with a group called API Rise. We are the only API focused organization
for, for formerly incarcerated, to support formerly incarcerated folks in Southern California.
(17:19):
And I found my way into the group because a few years before,
I was invited to be a guest at San Quentin Prison through their Restoring Our
Original True Selves, basically their Asian American Studies program in San Quentin.
And I remember when I was invited, I was like, oh yeah, sure,
I'll come. But I was terrified on the inside because I was like,
I've never been inside a prison.
Oh my God, if I bomb, they're
(17:43):
going to kill me because they may have done that before right
like just like every terrible thought and it
was one of the most profoundly human experiences of my life like i went in terrified
and i left going this is so weird that we have this that this is how we punish
people and and and you know that we have that these people are literally my
(18:06):
same age right that are also asian american.
And and they they're asian in such a different way than i understood what asian
american was And that they weren't, it's not that they were pressured to be
doctors and then they suddenly ended up in prison, but it just like their trajectory
is completely different.
And, but it was superhuman. And so I found myself in Southern California where
(18:28):
I live, making friends with the group API Rise.
And I went in not realizing how deeply involved I would end up being.
And at that point about six years ago when
I'd gone to my first meeting they there were
three folks who were coming home for the first time there was a welcome home
cake they were super emotional there was a mother and daughter whose son had
(18:50):
been locked up for about 19 years and he's still inside and I just had never
been around Asian Americans in this sort of context where it was just.
It's just so real. We never think about Asian Americans being in prison.
And I got a grant from the city of L.A. to do a storytelling workshop.
But then in the pandemic, we could not meet in person.
(19:14):
East-West Players are the largest and oldest Asian American theater in the country.
They were suddenly trying to figure out how to put together a virtual season.
Snehal Desai, who was the artistic director, was like, what are you working
on? And I'm like, I'm trying to figure out how to save my grant and do this workshop online.
He's like, OK, great. great, we'll add the show to our season.
And so suddenly, we have this digital theater show that we're making on Zoom
(19:38):
with formerly incarcerated folks who are in their homes, and it's on their season.
But you know, it actually was really interesting that we weren't going to like
a room in a church to rehearse and make a show that everyone was working from
home because the homes became a character in the show.
Like some of them were in their transitional houses during our Zoom rehearsals.
(19:59):
Some, some were in the homes they were arrested in.
And, and so, you know, some of them had their baby photos behind them because
they're in their family house.
Like, so just really kind of, you know, Zoom theater was like this new genre
that got invented in the pandemic.
And, but it ended up being really powerful in terms of, you know,
(20:20):
articulating these stories and putting them out there.
That is really powerful. There's power in telling our stories.
I believe every single person has a story to tell and there's a lot of power there.
And okay, so I want to know more about the Auntie Sewing Squad.
What is the Auntie Sewing Squad? Because I think that was also something that
came out of COVID, if I'm not wrong.
(20:42):
And that led you to being shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize in 2022.
The technical term is finalist,
finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama.
But yeah, tell me the story.
Yeah, so I've made like seven or eight solo shows at this point in the pandemic.
I was touring in a completely different show called Christina Wong for public office.
(21:06):
I actually ran for local office in Koreatown.
One served and created the show that was supposed to tour live up until the
2020 election, right? Right.
Like the idea is you'd be watching these ridiculous rallies, you know, in real life.
And then you go to the theater and watch my little ridiculous rally about what
it means to be in public office.
(21:28):
And I had the greatest premiere of my life in February.
I felt like I was inside my own HBO special. The audience was like on their
feet before the show was over.
And then March hits and my entire tour is canceled.
And I'm deemed non-essential, as most artists are. And I can't feel bad about
it because everyone is in this situation.
(21:48):
And the thing is about my shows is I sew my set pieces.
It's like this. It's this very charming Pee Wee's Playhouse aesthetic that I bring to my shows.
And I am like feeling sorry for myself going, why did I think that this was
my calling in life to do something that doesn't even exist anymore?
And then I see this article that hospitals are looking for home sewn masks.
(22:11):
And I go, oh, my God, I know how to sew. Because I'm also feeling guilty that
I didn't take on essential work as my calling, right?
Yeah, why wasn't I a doctor? But I was like, okay, I didn't become a doctor, but I can save a doctor.
And so I had this very Joan of Arc moment where I was like, I'm going to save
America, even though I'm looking around my house and I don't even have the correct
(22:35):
fabric or elastic, but I just make this very naive offer to the internet.
I will sew you a mask if you need one. And not realizing that's everybody because
we're not a culture that wore masks in March 2020.
But I just, you know, I've never
been the difference between life or death for anybody else. And yeah.
And every hour, the requests were building exponentially.
(22:59):
And I found myself bleeding through my pants because I was on my period, exhausted,
running to the post office like a soldier, trying to play God,
figuring out which of these requests can take my finite number of masks first.
And was like, I got to start a group because maybe there'll be someone else
(23:20):
who has leftover masks that can help fulfill these requests.
And didn't think that when I named it Auntie Sewing Squad, our acronym is ASS.
And I just thought this will be a two week thing because the government will
clearly step in to distribute all the masks that are, they'll clearly step in.
This thing went on for over 800 days. Oh, sorry. Sorry.
(23:44):
It went on for over 500 days, 800 aunties all over the country, 350,000 masks.
We suddenly, at one point we were helping purchase ambulances for Standing Rock.
We were, we were, we did like eight relief van drives to the Navajo Nation.
(24:05):
We were driving things to the border when there were fires because someone had
a gender reveal party and set half of California on fire.
We were, we, you know, we, we were getting things to farm workers.
Like we were like full on shadow FEMA.
And I was like,
I've never experienced any. I always thought in a crisis that I'd be the one running away.
(24:31):
And I was shocked. I was like, where did this come from? Like,
why am I being nice to people?
But more than that, I was like an army. I was an overlord, basically.
I was the overlord of a sweatshop.
And so that's where Christina Wong's sweatshop overlord comes from.
Was it was it was a jokey thing i
was making in the pandemic to sort of document oh like i
(24:51):
just never witnessed the things i kind of witnessed like that before and a lot
of it was kind of like i don't think as an artist i should be able to see most
of this like i should not know that this is what's happening at children's hospital
right now that masks are being stolen by employees right like and sold on the
black market like why why did i just get that information yeah right like Like,
I should not be talking to the heads of medicine on certain tribes,
(25:15):
right? Like, I'm just like, what?
You know, and so some of this was so unbelievable.
I just had to write it all down. And I was performing it from my house in the
pandemic to entertain the aunties while they were sewing.
New York Theater Workshop asked me to premiere it off Broadway as the first
live show of their season. I was shocked.
And it opened off Broadway. way it was like
(25:37):
the first show people most people saw when they
came back from the pandemic and then it was a finalist for the pulitzer
so you know easy baby steps everybody baby
steps just like that besides pulitzer i'm i'm oh my god it's so fancy christina
wong for nobel peace prize or something that's oh sometimes yeah some people
(25:59):
congratulate me on the nobel because they I get them mixed up and I don't correct them.
I just go, okay, why would you? No, it was a weird, it was a very tragic and weird few years.
But the one thing I did witness that I felt like was worth talking about in
a show, like a lot of people at the time were like, is this going to be your next show?
And I'm like, who wants to relive this? You want to relive this?
(26:21):
I don't want to relive this.
What I witnessed, I just never saw generosity the way I did.
I met all these in LA, you meet people because of what they have to offer you and what they do.
But in this situation, I still am learning what half those aunties do for a living.
But I just remember thinking at some point in the chaos of these long distance
(26:42):
drop-offs on the porches, I wish I had more relationships that were like this,
just not in the context of, oh my God, are we all going to die?
And that for me felt like the learning moment of the pandemic that I thought
we were all going to have at the end of this was that we would realize how interconnected we are.
We didn't. We became more divided, in my opinion. But I saw a glimmer of that
(27:06):
that is worth celebrating and worth reliving this pandemic on a stage for.
Yeah, I agree. We've sort of just moved on, right? We haven't actually processed
and talked about some of the good that was there.
Some of those beautiful things that came out that you've just described.
Yeah. Yeah. The care, the care was huge. The way we cared for each other was huge. Yeah.
And, and okay. So let's talk about hashtag food bank influencer. Yes. It's a new show.
(27:30):
So that actually stems a lot off of sweatshop overlord in the pandemic.
You, I talked about all All these, you know, vans we drove to the reservation
and supplies we were sending.
A lot of that came from our non-traditional food bank, World Harvest Food Bank
in Los Angeles, which is located just southwest of me.
And I am in Koreatown and this place is in Arlington Heights.
And their founder, Glenn Corrado, he gets a ton of stuff and he can't necessarily
(27:59):
always, you know, doesn't have the capacity to distribute it to everybody. body.
But I just love his food bank model because it doesn't require that you prove that you're poor.
You can go and you can volunteer for four hours and you can get a ton of groceries,
like way more than you could ever eat.
So forcing you to become a food bank for your neighbors for the next few days,
(28:19):
or you make a $50 donation and it's soon to be reestablished,
but you could use your EBT credits there.
So it's like a grocery store that looks like a food bank, but it restores is
dignity and i never when i
go there i feel like it's an episode of supermarket sweep i feel
like i've won the lottery there's just so much stuff that
(28:40):
like like all the stuff that gets returned at costco doesn't go back on the
shelf it gets dumped or it shows up at this food bank so i have i have appliances
you know from this food bank anyway i just became so obsessed with this place
i was and and and how important they were in terms of furthering our mutual
aid efforts that I was like,
I'm going to make a show about this food bank.
(29:02):
This is every show I do. I'm so naive. I'm like, I'm just going to do this.
And what it's made me do is do a deep dive on our emergency food systems,
on the sort of ironies of we have more and more food banks, but we haven't stopped
hunger because we keep going after hunger by throwing free food at things and
not changing the policies that keep funneling people towards poverty, right?
(29:27):
So Walmart actually gives tons of food to these anti-hunger programs,
but most of their employees are in food stamps, right?
So I can't unionize, right? So in making this show, I've uncovered this other
underbelly that that one.
In typical Christina Wong shows, it's going to be so simple.
(29:49):
And then it gets really complicated.
That's, that's sort of where that show is going. And so that will,
I'll be, I'll be performing a little bit at my actual food bank to bring people
into the food bank, but also theaters around the country.
I'll be premiering at ASU Gammage in April, 2025.
Oh, great. I look forward to, to seeing that. It sounds really interesting.
I'm going to put you on the spot with a question because as I'm hearing you
(30:11):
describe all of the different projects and, and issues and causes that you've
sort of gotten involved in either intentionally and directly or sort of because
they're so intersectional, right?
I see the intersectionality of the different issues.
What would you say to somebody who says, oh, I don't care about that or I don't
think about that because it doesn't affect me and doesn't- Oh,
(30:32):
those people are driving me crazy. I don't need to vote.
I don't think it doesn't affect me, right? It does.
Yeah. You use it like, you use roadways.
You use currency you are
in you are in a structure that has been laid
out because of a certain history and laws and
(30:53):
yeah we i mean if the pandemic taught us anything which it seemed to not have
is that we are all interconnected that we affect each other that no one lives
i wish i could live in that kind of bubble that you think you live in yeah but
i would also get them to think about like what is it that you care about and
and who is responsible for for those decisions decisions.
And why do you feel so powerless that you don't feel that you can have any change?
(31:20):
And yeah, I know voting can sometimes feel completely like the teeniest drop
in the bucket, but there are so many things that we can do to shift our communities.
And in a lot of the mutual aid work I found myself forced to do,
it was because these systems that you think we're supposed to step in and help
people weren't helping. And so we had to figure out how to help each other.
(31:44):
Yeah. So I don't know what gated community...
These people are living in. But someone is governing their life,
whether it's their HOA or, you know, American democracy.
And I'd ask them about what is it they care about? Why is it they think that
way? Yeah, I'd unpack that with them.
Thank you. Christina, where can people see more of your work?
(32:05):
You can read up about me on my website, Christina, with a K,
ChristinaWong.com and then MSChristinaWong on Instagram and X,
Twitter. I call it actually by its dead name.
Since Elon Musk won't recognize his trans daughter, I will call by its dead name, Twitter.
Twitter, okay. What's next for you?
(32:26):
Just working on this and I'm working on a podcast with Kern Kim,
who is one of our API Rise members.
And we're talking about the podcast is discussing the experience of being Asian
American and impacted by incarceration.
Restoration it's called that one will be called killing your
number that's the name of that podcast we're killing your numbers
yes because when you leave prison you lose
(32:47):
your prison number and you get your name back so that's a phrase it's a slang
that's used then i learned a lot of prison slang in this work yeah but that
we'll hopefully get that out in a few months oh nice congratulations final touches
on these episodes christina wong.com and killing your Your number is the name of the podcast.
And say your Instagram again, your Instagram handle.
(33:10):
Ms. Christina Wong. Ms. Christina Wong. Yeah. Thank you for joining us today.
I really appreciate your time. Yeah, thank you for having me.
For more immigration truths, visit us at nilk.org and freedomtothrive.com.
And make sure you subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes.
I look forward to continuing this conversation with all of you.
This is the NILC Freedom to Thrive podcast, powering pro-immigrant narratives, one story at a time.
I'm Victoria Ballesteros, Executive Vice President of Narrative at the National
Immigration Law Center.
Hi, Christina. Welcome to the podcast. Hi. What a beautiful story.
Oh, thank you. I remember drive-ins in San Francisco, too, but we did not watch Spanish movies.
(00:25):
Yeah. We would have been really lost. You might have needed the subtitles.
And yeah, drive-ins are just such a thing of the past, aren't they?
There is still one, I think, towards Orange County.
Yeah, I think there's two left in California, but it's so different.
You know, it's very different nowadays.
How are you? How's your cat? Everything good? My cat is on my lap right now.
(00:46):
Maybe I can pick him up and see.
I love it. I love it. What's your cat's name? His name is Happy.
He's currently biting my hand. Yeah.
He doesn't look happy at the moment. look at him he's like,
You're like attacking me. Get this on tape. So you're obviously a cat lover.
You're also a performing artist, comedian, organizer, playwright,
(01:12):
activist, politician, I think rap producer. Well, now former politician.
Former politician. And one time Ugandan rap sensation, yes. Oh my goodness.
But thank you for doing the research. Yeah, interesting and different creative
vehicles that you've worked in. To what do you attribute all of this creativity?
(01:33):
Not being able to find a good therapist, I think, or not being allowed to go
to a therapist when I was younger and needing some sort of outlet to work all my pathos out.
And so, yeah, because I couldn't find, I couldn't afford to pay someone to listen
to me talk about my problems.
I was like, well, I'll get an audience to pay me to listen to me talk about my problems.
(01:54):
And it's worked. Thank you for being the most unhealthy way to go about it.
Anything well that's taking something you
know a challenge and turning it into something that's obviously been very successful
for you yes now now it was an ugly write-up but yes i was listening to hector's
hector's last interview where he was describing sleeping in bathtubs i never
(02:15):
slept in a bathtub but i get it i've been there i have definitely had those
moments of my career where was,
yeah, just slugging, just slugging.
It's the struggle that nobody sees, right? It's not the glamorous part of the work.
What was that like for you, though, just, you know, in finding your way and
(02:36):
getting onto your path to where you are now?
Well, so, okay, so what I tell people is that sort of my first,
I went to UCLA, I graduated in 2000.
And at that point, the internet did not have the plethora of free pornography that it has right now.
And so my senior project, and this is when we still had dial up internet,
you know, and yeah, another blast from the past.
(02:59):
I know. And when you would, you would Yahoo search.
Asian women and you'd automatically find pornography like that's
the way the internet was organized and i and this
is also before search engine seos so my senior
project was a fake mail-order bride website called big bad
chinese mama.com and mama and i actually hand coded it like there was no wordpress
(03:21):
or you know there weren't these like even blogs were a fairly new thing and
it was a whole i had a harem of fake brides who were like my classmates and
it And it parodied the sections and actual Mail It or Bride websites.
And if you Yahoo search Mail It or Bride, it would be one of the top 10 search
results. So that was like my first project.
(03:41):
It's still there. I still pay for the domain name. Oh, my goodness.
Okay. You're going to get a flurry of activity now.
Yeah. Oh, flurry. Three visitors. You know, it's just, it's like flailing around
at the bottom of the internet right now.
But that was huge. This is a time before social media where the idea,
for the most part, most of our interactions at that point in time were somewhat in person.
(04:06):
We didn't have as many asynchronous interactions as we have now.
And so the idea that I'm asleep and some pervert in Kansas is trying to find
a picture of a naked woman and finds my angry sight was kind of terrifying. fine.
But that was like my calling card out of college.
And I basically would look at, I'd look myself up to see how I was doing.
(04:30):
And some college courses would be teaching me and I would invite myself to speak at their classes.
And I would drive for like a $50 honorarium all the way to Santa Barbara or whatever.
And because we did not have smart classrooms, then I had transparencies printed
out of my website that I would throw on an overhead projector.
Director wow and i would i would talk and those were my first performances
(04:50):
and then now i play colleges and you know
speak and i play for more than 50 bucks but like that's i just had it set in
my head that i really wanted to be an artist a performance artist and and at
that time in the late 90s there were a handful of asian american women who were
doing solo theater and i just sort thought,
(05:12):
oh, this could be a career.
So I was thinking Junichi Uehara, Jun Narita, Nobuko Miyamoto.
It was a thing. And enough so that I thought, okay, this could be a career.
I didn't realize how completely unsustainable it was, how hard it is to sustain,
(05:32):
and just how taxing it can be.
But here I am over 20 years later doing that thing that I set out to do.
Congratulations. I mean, you've really established yourself in a number of ways.
And so I'm interested about Big Bad Chinese Mama.
Your grandparents are immigrants from China, right?
Yes, yes. Came to the U.S. in the 1930s. So clearly some of that has factored
(05:54):
into your work or inspired a lot of your work or...
Sure, yeah. I mean, I definitely feel like.
There's, it's something to be said when the assumption is that you are the immigrant
or that your parent is the immigrant and, and, and how,
you know, I, I wasn't, I'm not fluent in Chinese, so I was never able to really
(06:16):
communicate fully to my grandparents.
And it was very painful. And there was a lot of history.
There's a lot of like these exercises. They tell kids like, interview your elders.
And I'm like, oh my God, like, and totally trigger them and get them upset.
Said. And they are talking.
And I mean, there's just a lot of secrets that are kept.
(06:36):
I won't say that we came as undocumented immigrants, but there was a lot of
creative paperwork with Chinese American immigrants of that generation.
There's a lot of relationships and relatives and marriages that were done more
for paperwork and to get people over here.
You know, what I'm describing paper sons, the phenomenal paper sons than not.
(07:00):
And so it's interesting because I didn't really, like for me,
it was very, there was a lot of people, a lot of Chinese Americans in San Francisco
who were of my generation who had other parents who were born here, but there also weren't.
And we have such a little, so little documentation about our diasporic history
(07:20):
that it's even and surprising to other Chinese Americans to know that I exist, right?
Like that, that, that there's such a thing as a third generation Chinese American
and, and sort of the popular culture assumption is that, you know,
we just got that fresh off the boat sitcom, right?
Like, we're, we're constantly just always arriving, and never here and around for a while.
(07:42):
Yeah. And so that was a lot to try to figure out how to make work about my identity,
but also respond to both this popular perception that.
I think it's shifted a bit, but that I'm not an immigrant, that I'm not the child of immigrants.
I'm also not hyper-sexualized or genetically inclined to be an overachiever,
(08:09):
though there was hella pressure to succeed academically when I was a kid. Right.
So it's just it's there. There were nuances that I felt like even within Asian-American
culture were were were hard to carve out for what my identity was.
Yeah. And that's really interesting that, you know, you're pointing something
(08:29):
out that I do believe is missing from the dialogue on immigrants and immigration
is that not everyone just got here.
Not everyone is coming in, you know, through the border.
Not everyone is at the border, the U.S.-Mexico border, I should say. Right.
And and that, you know, immigrants establish ourselves and have children and
their children have children.
And we've been here for as long as this country has been here.
(08:50):
Right. So, yeah, it's just it's missing, I believe, from the conversation.
But, you know, your work really does reflect, I believe, or you tell me if I'm
wrong, your heritage or even just some of the experiences that you have as a
woman, as a woman from, you know, a third generation immigrant person.
And I love the audacious names even of your work.
(09:14):
So there's things like Christina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord, and I want to know more about that.
Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Wong Street Journal, and then of course, Big Bad Chinese Mama.
What is the response in your family, in your community, and just more broadly
to this bold style that you bring to your work? Oh, well, there's no singular response, right?
(09:36):
And a lot of my early work, I mean, I was in such a bubble at UCLA,
which, you know, I feel very fortunate to be in a campus where there was such
diversity, but almost to the point that I think other students took it for granted
and began to eat on itself, right? Right.
Like that, that, that, that, that, that just because there were this many Asian
(09:57):
student clubs didn't mean that misogyny didn't have a way to persist within our clubs.
Like we didn't fight the way that I, when I go to the East Coast and visit those
colleges and meet those Asian American student unions, those kids are really
fighting because they are such the minority, both in the communities that the
colleges are situated in, but on their campuses.
Right. And they, and they really have to organize. They can't just be social clubs.
(10:20):
And I think a lot of my early work was sort of confronting what I saw as so
much anger in arts activism, which was like, at that point, there was a lot
of spoken word and all these spoken word poems,
performances I'd go to were people just like constantly yelling at people who weren't in the room.
(10:40):
For me, I was like, how do we...
That was what my website was, was like, how can we confront the people who aren't
in the room? Because right now we're just sort of yelling at people who are
already on the same side.
And also, how do we do this in ways that don't give us an ulcer and exhaust us further?
Because yes, okay, oppression made us mad, but now we're screaming mad on the stage.
(11:02):
Like, there's got to be a way to take power back. And so,
so much of my early work was like,
because when I sort of discovered that I was,
I didn't even know what, you know, Asian American studies really was until I
got to college and understand that movement and understand how it intersected
(11:22):
with other racial, you know, civil rights movements.
And, and, and, and I just had an ulcer.
Like I was just so stressed out because there's so many things to be angry at, at once.
And so I think that's where my pull to satire was to tricking people to, to, I mean,
tricking, you know, tricking the oppressor, not, not, I'm not like a scammer
(11:44):
that like to steal people's money or whatever, but like, but like how,
how do we find humor in these moments?
Because this is a long fight. yeah this is a fight of
endurance this this is a marathon it's not a sprint
and and so how do we take power back and and
and celebrate the slivers of joy that leak
through in these moments that to me is is is much more
(12:06):
powerful than you know exhausting ourselves oh and but you know believe anger
is necessary and it and lately when i was looking at you know the murder of
george floyd it was just like it wasn't like oh what's the joke we can pull
from this like there's some things are so angering that you have to express that.
But in terms of long-term survival, we need to also find ways to create our
(12:29):
own culture, not just constantly react.
Yeah, we absolutely do. And to your point, it's not a sprint, it's a marathon.
And the minute you finish that one marathon, there's another one right behind
it. So it just keeps going. Yeah.
I love that. I appreciate the emphasis on joy, on finding the joy.
And you've worked with a lot of different types of communities.
(12:49):
You've worked with the unhoused, you've worked with formerly incarcerated individuals,
you've worked with undocumented Americans.
What was that like, working with the undocumented Americans?
What was that collaboration like?
And did anything surprise you about that? That came as an invitation from the Dream Resource Center,
where they had seen a theater project I had done that had to do with statistics
(13:12):
with young workers and the specific,
just the spottiness in which young, and the precarity in which young workers
find themselves in terms of not being able to find consistent hours or enough
hours to qualify for health insurance and things like that.
And they were like, we would love to do something like that with our community.
And I, you know, originally I didn't feel.
(13:34):
Qualified enough because I'm not, I don't live that experience.
And it, but basically what it was, it was a theater workshop where we worked
towards creating our own show at the end of eight weeks and people drove in from the Inland Empire.
This is in Los Angeles, right? They, they drive like two hours to be part of
this workshop because some of them have never,
(13:57):
you know, found spaces to address their
status yeah and it was incredibly powerful and
really you know what so much of that theater stuff is is it's
not so much like how beautiful or you know how how well crafted our final theater
piece is though it was a beautiful piece but it's just so much about being in
community and creating with other people who share an identity that is so hard
(14:19):
to talk about and so we would do a combination both of learning and advocacy because some folks
weren't sure like one person who
was in the workshop was a longtime friend of mine i had no idea she was
undocumented her her her parents were able
to be naturalized her husband and her children are naturalized but for whatever
reason she's in this weird legal loophole and so so some of her some of the
(14:43):
reason why she was coming to the workshops was just because she was just like
ah what do i do and she drove like a long distance and and it was just really meaningful
for her to just connect with other people who were just in these weird paperwork
holes and had never been able to talk safely about their identity,
(15:06):
but also think about making work on it.
So some of these workshops would be split up on learning on what to do if an
ICE agent shows up at your door.
And I had thought, because I was privileged enough to be in the setting where
the folks I was meeting were, you know, a lot of them were very educated about
what to do in these situations.
(15:28):
And I remember saying to my one friend who was undocumented from Haiti,
she's since become a citizen. I'm like, you know, those red cards.
And she's like, what red cards? We don't talk about this.
So my knowledge of undocumented immigrants is all over the place.
Like in my mind, the ones that I would see were the ones who are very politicized,
very educated, and we're out there educating others.
But of course, there's this whole world of undocumented folks who
(15:49):
do not talk about it right completely keep it under the
radar are terrified about being deported as you know
as as reasonable concern but basically
there are you know there would be workshops and like which would be like acting
workshops what do you say when the ice agent is outside the door you slip them
a card these red cards that say like i have the right to not open the door and
(16:12):
i can't i don't know how my red car with me but but but
basically laying out your rights and reminding you what you can say and what you,
what you should not say. But also having conversations with unaccompanied minors
who are now adults who come over on their own and just hearing and sharing these stories and then.
(16:37):
Funneling it towards making work. Yeah.
Yeah. You highlighted being surprised at learning that your friend was undocumented.
And I always say, there are 11 million undocumented Americans in this country,
that people that are our friends, our neighbors, right?
You know, people that we maybe worship with and we just don't know.
(16:58):
And yeah, I think I appreciate you flagging that.
What was your work like with formerly incarcerated individuals?
What was that about? That I'm still doing. So I work with the API.
Yeah. I work with a group called API Rise. We are the only API focused organization
for, for formerly incarcerated, to support formerly incarcerated folks in Southern California.
(17:19):
And I found my way into the group because a few years before,
I was invited to be a guest at San Quentin Prison through their Restoring Our
Original True Selves, basically their Asian American Studies program in San Quentin.
And I remember when I was invited, I was like, oh yeah, sure,
I'll come. But I was terrified on the inside because I was like,
I've never been inside a prison.
Oh my God, if I bomb, they're
(17:43):
going to kill me because they may have done that before right
like just like every terrible thought and it
was one of the most profoundly human experiences of my life like i went in terrified
and i left going this is so weird that we have this that this is how we punish
people and and and you know that we have that these people are literally my
(18:06):
same age right that are also asian american.
And and they they're asian in such a different way than i understood what asian
american was And that they weren't, it's not that they were pressured to be
doctors and then they suddenly ended up in prison, but it just like their trajectory
is completely different.
And, but it was superhuman. And so I found myself in Southern California where
(18:28):
I live, making friends with the group API Rise.
And I went in not realizing how deeply involved I would end up being.
And at that point about six years ago when
I'd gone to my first meeting they there were
three folks who were coming home for the first time there was a welcome home
cake they were super emotional there was a mother and daughter whose son had
(18:50):
been locked up for about 19 years and he's still inside and I just had never
been around Asian Americans in this sort of context where it was just.
It's just so real. We never think about Asian Americans being in prison.
And I got a grant from the city of L.A. to do a storytelling workshop.
But then in the pandemic, we could not meet in person.
(19:14):
East-West Players are the largest and oldest Asian American theater in the country.
They were suddenly trying to figure out how to put together a virtual season.
Snehal Desai, who was the artistic director, was like, what are you working
on? And I'm like, I'm trying to figure out how to save my grant and do this workshop online.
He's like, OK, great. great, we'll add the show to our season.
And so suddenly, we have this digital theater show that we're making on Zoom
(19:38):
with formerly incarcerated folks who are in their homes, and it's on their season.
But you know, it actually was really interesting that we weren't going to like
a room in a church to rehearse and make a show that everyone was working from
home because the homes became a character in the show.
Like some of them were in their transitional houses during our Zoom rehearsals.
(19:59):
Some, some were in the homes they were arrested in.
And, and so, you know, some of them had their baby photos behind them because
they're in their family house.
Like, so just really kind of, you know, Zoom theater was like this new genre
that got invented in the pandemic.
And, but it ended up being really powerful in terms of, you know,
(20:20):
articulating these stories and putting them out there.
That is really powerful. There's power in telling our stories.
I believe every single person has a story to tell and there's a lot of power there.
And okay, so I want to know more about the Auntie Sewing Squad.
What is the Auntie Sewing Squad? Because I think that was also something that
came out of COVID, if I'm not wrong.
(20:42):
And that led you to being shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize in 2022.
The technical term is finalist,
finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama.
But yeah, tell me the story.
Yeah, so I've made like seven or eight solo shows at this point in the pandemic.
I was touring in a completely different show called Christina Wong for public office.
(21:06):
I actually ran for local office in Koreatown.
One served and created the show that was supposed to tour live up until the
2020 election, right? Right.
Like the idea is you'd be watching these ridiculous rallies, you know, in real life.
And then you go to the theater and watch my little ridiculous rally about what
it means to be in public office.
(21:28):
And I had the greatest premiere of my life in February.
I felt like I was inside my own HBO special. The audience was like on their
feet before the show was over.
And then March hits and my entire tour is canceled.
And I'm deemed non-essential, as most artists are. And I can't feel bad about
it because everyone is in this situation.
(21:48):
And the thing is about my shows is I sew my set pieces.
It's like this. It's this very charming Pee Wee's Playhouse aesthetic that I bring to my shows.
And I am like feeling sorry for myself going, why did I think that this was
my calling in life to do something that doesn't even exist anymore?
And then I see this article that hospitals are looking for home sewn masks.
(22:11):
And I go, oh, my God, I know how to sew. Because I'm also feeling guilty that
I didn't take on essential work as my calling, right?
Yeah, why wasn't I a doctor? But I was like, okay, I didn't become a doctor, but I can save a doctor.
And so I had this very Joan of Arc moment where I was like, I'm going to save
America, even though I'm looking around my house and I don't even have the correct
(22:35):
fabric or elastic, but I just make this very naive offer to the internet.
I will sew you a mask if you need one. And not realizing that's everybody because
we're not a culture that wore masks in March 2020.
But I just, you know, I've never
been the difference between life or death for anybody else. And yeah.
And every hour, the requests were building exponentially.
(22:59):
And I found myself bleeding through my pants because I was on my period, exhausted,
running to the post office like a soldier, trying to play God,
figuring out which of these requests can take my finite number of masks first.
And was like, I got to start a group because maybe there'll be someone else
(23:20):
who has leftover masks that can help fulfill these requests.
And didn't think that when I named it Auntie Sewing Squad, our acronym is ASS.
And I just thought this will be a two week thing because the government will
clearly step in to distribute all the masks that are, they'll clearly step in.
This thing went on for over 800 days. Oh, sorry. Sorry.
(23:44):
It went on for over 500 days, 800 aunties all over the country, 350,000 masks.
We suddenly, at one point we were helping purchase ambulances for Standing Rock.
We were, we were, we did like eight relief van drives to the Navajo Nation.
(24:05):
We were driving things to the border when there were fires because someone had
a gender reveal party and set half of California on fire.
We were, we, you know, we, we were getting things to farm workers.
Like we were like full on shadow FEMA.
And I was like,
I've never experienced any. I always thought in a crisis that I'd be the one running away.
(24:31):
And I was shocked. I was like, where did this come from? Like,
why am I being nice to people?
But more than that, I was like an army. I was an overlord, basically.
I was the overlord of a sweatshop.
And so that's where Christina Wong's sweatshop overlord comes from.
Was it was it was a jokey thing i
was making in the pandemic to sort of document oh like i
(24:51):
just never witnessed the things i kind of witnessed like that before and a lot
of it was kind of like i don't think as an artist i should be able to see most
of this like i should not know that this is what's happening at children's hospital
right now that masks are being stolen by employees right like and sold on the
black market like why why did i just get that information yeah right like Like,
I should not be talking to the heads of medicine on certain tribes,
(25:15):
right? Like, I'm just like, what?
You know, and so some of this was so unbelievable.
I just had to write it all down. And I was performing it from my house in the
pandemic to entertain the aunties while they were sewing.
New York Theater Workshop asked me to premiere it off Broadway as the first
live show of their season. I was shocked.
And it opened off Broadway. way it was like
(25:37):
the first show people most people saw when they
came back from the pandemic and then it was a finalist for the pulitzer
so you know easy baby steps everybody baby
steps just like that besides pulitzer i'm i'm oh my god it's so fancy christina
wong for nobel peace prize or something that's oh sometimes yeah some people
(25:59):
congratulate me on the nobel because they I get them mixed up and I don't correct them.
I just go, okay, why would you? No, it was a weird, it was a very tragic and weird few years.
But the one thing I did witness that I felt like was worth talking about in
a show, like a lot of people at the time were like, is this going to be your next show?
And I'm like, who wants to relive this? You want to relive this?
(26:21):
I don't want to relive this.
What I witnessed, I just never saw generosity the way I did.
I met all these in LA, you meet people because of what they have to offer you and what they do.
But in this situation, I still am learning what half those aunties do for a living.
But I just remember thinking at some point in the chaos of these long distance
(26:42):
drop-offs on the porches, I wish I had more relationships that were like this,
just not in the context of, oh my God, are we all going to die?
And that for me felt like the learning moment of the pandemic that I thought
we were all going to have at the end of this was that we would realize how interconnected we are.
We didn't. We became more divided, in my opinion. But I saw a glimmer of that
(27:06):
that is worth celebrating and worth reliving this pandemic on a stage for.
Yeah, I agree. We've sort of just moved on, right? We haven't actually processed
and talked about some of the good that was there.
Some of those beautiful things that came out that you've just described.
Yeah. Yeah. The care, the care was huge. The way we cared for each other was huge. Yeah.
And, and okay. So let's talk about hashtag food bank influencer. Yes. It's a new show.
(27:30):
So that actually stems a lot off of sweatshop overlord in the pandemic.
You, I talked about all All these, you know, vans we drove to the reservation
and supplies we were sending.
A lot of that came from our non-traditional food bank, World Harvest Food Bank
in Los Angeles, which is located just southwest of me.
And I am in Koreatown and this place is in Arlington Heights.
And their founder, Glenn Corrado, he gets a ton of stuff and he can't necessarily
(27:59):
always, you know, doesn't have the capacity to distribute it to everybody. body.
But I just love his food bank model because it doesn't require that you prove that you're poor.
You can go and you can volunteer for four hours and you can get a ton of groceries,
like way more than you could ever eat.
So forcing you to become a food bank for your neighbors for the next few days,
(28:19):
or you make a $50 donation and it's soon to be reestablished,
but you could use your EBT credits there.
So it's like a grocery store that looks like a food bank, but it restores is
dignity and i never when i
go there i feel like it's an episode of supermarket sweep i feel
like i've won the lottery there's just so much stuff that
(28:40):
like like all the stuff that gets returned at costco doesn't go back on the
shelf it gets dumped or it shows up at this food bank so i have i have appliances
you know from this food bank anyway i just became so obsessed with this place
i was and and and how important they were in terms of furthering our mutual
aid efforts that I was like,
I'm going to make a show about this food bank.
(29:02):
This is every show I do. I'm so naive. I'm like, I'm just going to do this.
And what it's made me do is do a deep dive on our emergency food systems,
on the sort of ironies of we have more and more food banks, but we haven't stopped
hunger because we keep going after hunger by throwing free food at things and
not changing the policies that keep funneling people towards poverty, right?
(29:27):
So Walmart actually gives tons of food to these anti-hunger programs,
but most of their employees are in food stamps, right?
So I can't unionize, right? So in making this show, I've uncovered this other
underbelly that that one.
In typical Christina Wong shows, it's going to be so simple.
(29:49):
And then it gets really complicated.
That's, that's sort of where that show is going. And so that will,
I'll be, I'll be performing a little bit at my actual food bank to bring people
into the food bank, but also theaters around the country.
I'll be premiering at ASU Gammage in April, 2025.
Oh, great. I look forward to, to seeing that. It sounds really interesting.
I'm going to put you on the spot with a question because as I'm hearing you
(30:11):
describe all of the different projects and, and issues and causes that you've
sort of gotten involved in either intentionally and directly or sort of because
they're so intersectional, right?
I see the intersectionality of the different issues.
What would you say to somebody who says, oh, I don't care about that or I don't
think about that because it doesn't affect me and doesn't- Oh,
(30:32):
those people are driving me crazy. I don't need to vote.
I don't think it doesn't affect me, right? It does.
Yeah. You use it like, you use roadways.
You use currency you are
in you are in a structure that has been laid
out because of a certain history and laws and
(30:53):
yeah we i mean if the pandemic taught us anything which it seemed to not have
is that we are all interconnected that we affect each other that no one lives
i wish i could live in that kind of bubble that you think you live in yeah but
i would also get them to think about like what is it that you care about and
and who is responsible for for those decisions decisions.
And why do you feel so powerless that you don't feel that you can have any change?
(31:20):
And yeah, I know voting can sometimes feel completely like the teeniest drop
in the bucket, but there are so many things that we can do to shift our communities.
And in a lot of the mutual aid work I found myself forced to do,
it was because these systems that you think we're supposed to step in and help
people weren't helping. And so we had to figure out how to help each other.
(31:44):
Yeah. So I don't know what gated community...
These people are living in. But someone is governing their life,
whether it's their HOA or, you know, American democracy.
And I'd ask them about what is it they care about? Why is it they think that
way? Yeah, I'd unpack that with them.
Thank you. Christina, where can people see more of your work?
(32:05):
You can read up about me on my website, Christina, with a K,
ChristinaWong.com and then MSChristinaWong on Instagram and X,
Twitter. I call it actually by its dead name.
Since Elon Musk won't recognize his trans daughter, I will call by its dead name, Twitter.
Twitter, okay. What's next for you?
(32:26):
Just working on this and I'm working on a podcast with Kern Kim,
who is one of our API Rise members.
And we're talking about the podcast is discussing the experience of being Asian
American and impacted by incarceration.
Restoration it's called that one will be called killing your
number that's the name of that podcast we're killing your numbers
yes because when you leave prison you lose
(32:47):
your prison number and you get your name back so that's a phrase it's a slang
that's used then i learned a lot of prison slang in this work yeah but that
we'll hopefully get that out in a few months oh nice congratulations final touches
on these episodes christina wong.com and killing your Your number is the name of the podcast.
And say your Instagram again, your Instagram handle.
(33:10):
Ms. Christina Wong. Ms. Christina Wong. Yeah. Thank you for joining us today.
I really appreciate your time. Yeah, thank you for having me.
For more immigration truths, visit us at nilk.org and freedomtothrive.com.
And make sure you subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes.
I look forward to continuing this conversation with all of you.
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