Making Sweatshops and Food Banks Obsolete: An Interview with Kristina Wong 

By Michael Sakamoto

Michael Sakamoto: So how did your new solo play, Kristina Wong #foodbankinfluencer, come about? 

Kristina Wong: It’s my eighth or ninth solo show. The last one, Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord, was both a real-life exercise that went on for 500 days of learning what mutual aid is and enacting it and also making community in the moment. In a weird way that in itself felt like a performance. On March 20, 2020, I started sewing masks and realized I needed help. A couple days later, I started a Facebook group called Auntie Sewing Squad because I desperately needed help for what I just thought would be a two-week stopgap until the pandemic crisis passed. It did not last two weeks, and as I was quickly trying to figure out the rules of how we were gonna do this, I didn't think the point was to sell masks, because I certainly am not a good enough sewist to charge money for this, and I wasn’t motivated by money in that moment. I was motivated by wanting the pandemic to end and people not to die. 

MS: You made masks for me! 

KW: Yes, so you know. We said if you want to support other people getting masks who can't afford to get them, send us some money, and that would pay for shipping. And it actually was quite effective. We had a surplus of money that we ended up redistributing to other groups that needed support. Everyone from the partners to whom we were getting masks to other mask-making groups. 

MS: I remember everyone was like, Kristina Wong and her crazy idea to start this thing, to calling it the Auntie Sewing Squad, to then there being an actual group of aunties. 

KW: It was crazy. It was first people I knew who could sew. Most sewing groups were organized regionally, which is actually the smarter way to do it than partnering with someone who lives in New Jersey when you live in LA, or sewing masks when you can't actually just drive by their porch and drop off materials. But I wasn't thinking clearly so I basically had my mother, who recruited her friends. She's in San Francisco, I'm in LA, and I remember very clearly someone was like, This is what mutual aid is. And I actually had to look up a video about it. I'd heard this term before and knew it wasn’t charity. But it's charity without the bureaucracy, without the galas, without the boards of directors, without getting in bed with the government.  

I have a lot of criticisms of the nonprofit world in general. A lot of that made its way into the new show in ways I didn't expect. One of the best things I ever heard is that every nonprofit should be trying to put themselves out of business. A homeless shelter should want to have no more unhoused people to house. But what happens is they start having charities, chasing contracts, and putting money into marketing and consultants to fundraise. And there was a moment when the Auntie Sewing Squad was so successful in just galvanizing so much unpaid support, that people said we should become a nonprofit, and keep sewing masks and other things people need. And I said no. We already devalue women's labor and so many other things.  

I've become really interested in mutual aid. And right before the pandemic, I discovered the muse for the #foodbankinfluencer show. I walked in by accident to World Harvest Food Bank in Los Angeles. To my eyes at that point, it looked like a grocery store. We were still in Trump's first presidency, and I was exhausted. I couldn't watch anything with subtitles, let alone plot. So I watched haul videos where people just basically tell you what they bought, or they buy a mystery box on ebay and open it up. That was all the plot I could handle. Somehow that algorithm led me to videos of people who were feeding themselves for $50 a month. And I had never really thought about how much I spend on food. I started going to grocery stores looking at food differently and wondering if I could be an influencer like that. Then I walked into this market, and there were no prices on anything, and carts preloaded with stuff. And I was like, this is the weirdest store. How much do things cost? And they're like, just put it on the counter, and we'll tell you how much.  

So I looked it up later, and it was a food bank. And I was like, Oh, my God! What was I doing in a food bank? Because while I made a show about food insecurity and food banks, I don't have my own dramatic stories, or at least that look like what I imagined. The picture of charity I grew up with in the eighties was Sally Struthers and Save the Children commercials.  

But I was intrigued seeing people with giant carts of food. You could make a $50 donation or volunteer there, and so I volunteered because in my mind at the time, it’s so scarce! I didn't want to take food from someone else. All these food banks are always advertising that they need food, and all this emphasis on hungry children, and so let me be additive and help. And when I went, there was just so much fucking food. My friend's brother joined me to volunteer, and when we left, we felt like we had robbed a bank.  

Also, my joke is the Chinese side of me that loves free shit was like, this is crazy! And Glenn, the owner and CEO, gave me all these things that had just been returned from Costco and Amazon that would have gone to the trash. It's like suddenly the world is so generous. And in a city like LA, where you don't know the name of your cashier.  

That food bank became a huge resource to keep our aunties and all our communities going. So they basically got tons of dead stock excess food that would go and rot in the pandemic. They were getting Girl Scout cookies because the Girl Scouts were not out in the street selling. They got Starbucks coffee because no one was going to Starbucks. They got all the stuff from the airlines because there were no passengers. And we were rerouting that to the Navajo Nation and stuff.  

 So when ASU invited me to be an artist in residence, the first thing I thought was, they're in the same state as the Navajo Nation, and Navajo organizers had been asked about being involved with the show, but because I feel their situation is so granular, it didn't make for interesting theater. But the Navajo organizers asked to get on the phone with Glenn, because they wanted to figure out how to make a similar food bank. And I thought, oh, maybe that will be the project: try to make a World Harvest on the reservation, and very quickly I realized I'm way too much of an outsider. You know, people just need to eat every day, and it's also not creative. 

 So the second idea was to work with a gas station market on the Navajo Nation, which is the size of West Virginia, but only has 13 full-service grocery stores. People are sometimes driving three-hour round trips to get fresh produce, and their only other options are gas stations. Imagine putting dinner together at a 7-11, which a lot of folks have to do: wait for a St. Mary's Food Bank truck or whatever to come by.  

 So Auntie Jermaine, who owns the gas station market we visited, doesn't make any money from it. She said that even when she drives fresh produce and other foods from Sam's Club, folks wouldn't buy it. It's like they had almost no education around how to prepare fresh food, so she stopped. She's tried to figure out how to keep that market open as a community service so people won't move away to the cities, but if there's no good food source, they're going to leave. 

 So with the idea of trying to keep that market open, we came up together with this crazy idea to sew a new interior. It's kind of a plain little gas station market, but what if we sewed replicas of Indigenous plants or a fabric replica of a sheep. Then Spam is sold next to it. And like, how can we think about sharepoints. Creating a certain theater inside this market that would steer people towards Indigenous foodways, and I would use my Guggenheim grant and encourage people to help sew this new interior and ask these questions. But then the market closed because of weather damage, and it still hasn't reopened. So basically, I got cornered into doing a solo play again. Every time I have a great idea and try to get out of the theater and make something like an installation, I end up getting pulled back in.  

 But I did go there with my friend, Badly Licked Bear, a great artist-educator and Native American, and we made a ribbon skirt sewing workshop. Because I still wanted to support Auntie Jermaine, and she suggested that. We rounded up donations of sewing machines, fabric, and ribbons and got to meet a lot of folks. And in that process I was getting a little worried, because I'm like, this is not about food. I'm learning almost nothing about food. We're just sewing and repairing sewing machines. But what I did witness at one of our locations was a pickup for a food bank that drops off food to them. And I also witnessed just sort of figuring out the logistics of who’s going to pick up food, and how we have lunch for everyone at a workshop because food is not a fast or convenient thing to get to.  

Those are the details that didn't entirely make it into the show, but that was the thinking. I found myself researching the history of food banks. I've never been on SNAP, though I think I qualified in my early twenties. I've since learned that lots of students and people with full time jobs are on SNAP. And now I wish I had applied, though I don't know that I would have gotten past the stigma of it. In college I had a lot of weird issues around food. I had no time to cook. I just remember at one point buying a Twix bar, thinking, this is a meal. And eating food from the Hare Krishnas. Like three bucks suggested donation, all you could eat. Say what you want about the Krishnas. They fed me, and they never made me come to a meeting. 

 I also had to reassess the term “starving artist”. At one point, I had just sort of assumed it. We're taught as young artists that that's this romantic kind of thing, and that it's supposed to be that way. But they never refer to starving lawyers or doctors, and those things exist in the same way. There's that sort of aspiration that comes with very idealized but low-income work. 

MS: Which I think also feeds into and gets perpetuated by a particularly self-sacrificing Asian mentality. 

KW: These things that make us normalize something unhealthy and that deter us from actually getting nutrition and help. I remember really resenting the term “starving artist” later on in my career and wanting to be defined by a profession. You know the difficult stakes in income procurement in my profession, so I want to be defined by how good my work is. Not like, oh, she's in this line of work that makes no money. 

 Also, I was trying to figure out how to talk about imbalance in the show. The format is a karaoke musical, and that’s because I was reading about food justice. I was like, I don't know how this becomes a show. It's just a really long research essay. And my friend and collaborator, Brian Feldman, suggested, because we had this pop-up event at the Kennedy Center, we could just do food karaoke, where we rewrite songs to be about food justice. And over the course of a week, I wrote seven or eight songs, and had some hooks where I distilled some heady ideas I had been learning about food politics and putting them to song. And suddenly it was like, oh, this is giving some sort of watchable shape to this content.  

So there's a song about food waste. It's Britney Spears’ “Hit Me, Baby, One more Time”, but rewritten as expiration dates or lies. A lot of that is we tend to waste decently good food. Not that we should ignore expiration dates altogether, but it's mostly a guideline. A lot of canned food lasts a lot longer, and a lot of stuff gets wasted because it doesn't move out of the factory at a certain time, so it misses the timeline to get on the truck to get to the grocery store to sit on the shelf to get purchased. So that's a lot of the stuff that ends up at World Harvest. 

 The frame of the show came in 2022, after the Pulitzer finalist thing. I got interviewed to be the book writer for Crazy Rich Asians, the Broadway musical. I watched the movie and enjoyed it, but it's not my dream to write that. I think I’m a bit too political, and I have no lived experience. Not that I'm required to have lived experience as a crazy rich Asian, and it would have been a nice paycheck. But anyway, I didn't get the job, and so the whole conceit of the show #foodbankinfluencer is that this is the American musical I was actually meant to write, about my love story with a food bank. 

MS: I'm assuming this is something you've discussed plenty of times before, because it's kind of your whole career. For one thing, you are literally all of your works that I'm aware of. And they all address very substantive, real-world issues, whether it's some political issue, or mutual aid, or food insecurity, or mental health. And they all relate through the stories of your own persona onstage, but also in your head when you speak about them for real. Many artists say real world issues are not their forté, or even if it is in their personal life, it's not in terms of their practice. But for you it’s always front and center, braided through, and inseparable. 

KW: A lot of my works have been able to succeed because they've leaned into the issue first, versus like, I'm the funniest fucking person you've ever seen just cuz I can make a joke about anything, even serious things. But like this food bank show. A lot of food banks have just found me via the topic first versus, oh, we just love funny Kristina Wong.  

Years ago, I had a moment where I just wanted to make a political work. I made a play called Cat Lady. I don't know if it was a failure, but it does get into more personal shit, and was basically about my cat at the time, who had a pee problem. And it was also about pickup artists, relationships, and stuff. And I could not get that fucking thing to tour. A lot of presenters said they couldn't really justify using resources on it. and I think I had just come out of doing Wong Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, which was about depression and suicide, and I got used to a career where people booked me because of topics, not because I was a comedic genius. 

MS: I think they think that too. 

KW: That'd be great. I would love that. But you know, in the interim, I do feel like I need to flash a bit of cred that I've done my homework because of some misunderstandings about what I've said and done with my shows. I remember doing Wong Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest at a college, and some guy who worked in the facility, my tech was telling him what the show was, and he was like, does she kill herself at the end? And I've also had people say I make fun of Asian women who are killing themselves, which I don't. 

 Even with this show, I allude to meeting with Saint Mary's Food Bank, but some people say thei think I’m mocking the poor. I think some people just see the lens of this is a comedian, and she's here to make fun of everything. So part of me sort of does need to feel like I did my homework while trying to not make it as boring as an organization's brochure, and not as if rich people can fix this problem by writing a check as these fundraising commercials make it out. It's trying to critique systems that got us to this place instead of looking at issues in a normally very paternalistic way. 

MS: Haters are gonna hate. 

KW: And there are a lot of haters. 

MS: Well, the more public and higher profile you are, this invites them. 

KW: What’s also rough, as an Asian American woman, I think for a long time there was an expectation that the narrative is about a mother with an accent and an immigrant story, and the tropes around what an Asian American story looked like. That it's gonna be sad and thoughtful and stuff. 

MS: For me, that’s about people, not just perception. It's them wanting to be right. Criticism often comes in the form of someone putting you in a box or whatever their weird assumptions and premises are, and then praising or criticizing you in order to prove their point. 

KW: Yeah. 

MS: As if who you really are and what you're really doing are immaterial. You're the type of artist and public persona whose work easily invites opinions and elicits feelings, and I dare say you do it on purpose because you’re trying to provoke conversation, discussion, reflection and critical feelings about all of the issues in this extremist US society. It's beyond cliché to say anymore that we even live in terms of sound bites. That's such a generic Gen-X thing to say at this point because so much of the world is this way now. The culture is atavistic. It eviscerates, and it eats away at everything it wants to be, and how you as an artist set yourself up to address this in your work is both your challenge and your achievement. 

Like you proving you did your homework is good, but you don't really owe them that. What you owe them as an artist is your experience, and I think we get into trouble, whether we're artists or researchers, scientists, politicians, journalists, curators, whatever we do, by proving our point “objectively”. It can be a trap because there's someone who can always try and disagree with how you frame your facts. But they can't disagree with your lived reality. 

KW: Yeah. Also, there's sort of a narrative we have in our head of Asian Americans when we see them. Like when I do Sweatshop Overlord, and I'm flashing the pictures of my mother and her friends and introducing them like soldiers. There's an inherent and old stereotype that Asians are non-threatening. The joke is Asian identity itself as non-threatening, so even more amusing when they’re mutual aid soldiers that are going to fight and be badass. 

 And so much of what I'm trying to confront with knowing all these facts is that this is not an awareness show. Awareness is for White people. Awareness is for charities, and I've been trying to drive this word out. I'm like, awareness of what? And then what? Like my one of my collaborators is API Rise, an organization made up of formerly incarcerated folks. We’re aware they exist, but awareness tends to appeal to people with means. But if you can help liberate people, then do it, right?   

I would like to think that my food bank show is not, “the people are hungry and give to your food bank.” I'm not telling you not to give to your food bank, but I would like to see people leave thinking that it's not just people with means who have the power to write a check and fix it, and to really recognize food banks are the shortest term solution that have now just become permanent parts of our infrastructure, because we're that broken as a world, and we haven't figured out how to collapse capitalism. I know that's a lot, but that's my thinking.  

 This is hard even just trying to explain to people what the show is. I just did a preview visit with a presenter, met with a bunch of donors, and they all, because they're donors, they were all very “Rah! Rah! Rah! Food banks! We should have gift cards to give to those less needy!” But to me, those are the worst things to suggest. I had to challenge them with how can we find solutions that aren't just about people with means saving people without means, because that's what “awareness” becomes. To me, mutual aid is rethinking entire systems of how we relate to each other. Everyone has power in mutual aid. 

MS: So, Asian Americanness, and the perception of it and the stereotypes, the tropes, and the reality. All that soup together.  

A lot of the issues you're bringing up, from appearing and not wanting to be perceived as a person of means talking about people who don't have it, those who are marginalized, at risk, or underresourced. And also the fact that we're often assumed to be that liminal entity, a liminal community, acting as a conduit for everything from helping people to being the wedge against other racially underprivileged or marginalized folks. Because of a White adjacency that many of us never asked for or wanted, but which, because it's also there for real to a certain extent, many Asian Americans and Asians will mobilize it for their own benefit. And so it's hella complicated.  

 So I'm curious about you as an Asian American, female, contemporary performance artist. How do you navigate that? Because I think as we get through successive generations of Asian America, the diverse, non-monolithic people of our community, as well as specifically artists, who are like, Who am I? Who can I be? Who am I projecting?, I don't know how a lot of folks have adequate time and energy to even learn our craft as creatives.  

KW: I don't know how much this has anything to do with it, but as I was trying to write Sweatshop Overlord, I was already rehearsing it without having an ending! That's how fast this shot out of the cannon to Off-Broadway. It was a very strange thing to figure out. How do you write about a community movement in a one-person play? Because part of me was like, well, the whole thing in a community movement is you don't make it about you. You don't take all the credit. But by nature, a solo show is all about you.  

 So Chey Yew, my director, who’s a fantastic playwright and gives great notes, would go through my scripting process. He's reading and going This is a fact, this is a fact, but where are you in this? I need to know how any of this affects you. And so on, which I think is a great note for solo artists. Like, it's okay to be selfish, or at least help us understand why we need to be, in a world that is always pushing us to be selfless. And it's tricky, because Sweatshop Overlord is about the pandemic. There's a lot of facts to dispel about how the group worked, how the pandemic was playing out. But ultimately, what's most interesting is how it's affecting the person you're watching on stage.  

 With the food bank show, I had a really hard time saying I was food insecure once, because it's not as dramatic as stories that other people have. While there were moments where I wasn't sure how I'd pay bills, it wasn't as dramatic. But I figured out how to distill it in ways to make it about me, and I think that once I figured that out, that helped settle the show a little bit more into a place where I feel like there's two things happening. It's like Kristina trying to write her version of Crazy Rich Asians, and then also speak to my own journey of how I came to really fall in love with this food bank, and not so much fall in love with it, but realize it can't be a lifelong love, which is a very abstract thought. That as much as I want people to support this food bank and take advantage of it, at the end of the day, I hope that we get to a place where no one needs it, and it can close down because everyone knows how to save themselves.  

 So I I don't know if that makes sense, but I want to make it real versus speaking on behalf of every food insecure Asian. I don't know how to do that, and I think what's also different about the way I work is I don't do the Sarah Jones kind of show where I do ten different characters. I’m just playing a version of myself. I'm not anthropologic in that sense. Like when I was working on Wong Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. People were like, oh, you want to interview so-and-so who could be a character in your show? I'm like, no, I don't do that. I don't do the let me let me put on a hat, and then I'm someone else, and then I'm someone's grandma, and then I'm going to talk about how hard it is to be a grandma, and be depressed. Like that's actually not that interesting to me, as much as I enjoy being an actor. Some artists are fantastic at the multi-character show. Sarah Jones can do tons of characters, and she's super interesting, but I also think that sometimes it's not that interesting. Some of the ones I would see in the late nineties and early 2000s were really built for White audiences. It was like, you're too scared to go into the inner city and meet all these people, so meet them safely through one actor who just plays all these people. 

MS: So you don't want to be the Asian American Anna Devere Smith, who, intentionally or not, fulfilled that function for a lot of both White and BIPOC audiences in the nineties? 

 KW: Yeah, no. She's a good artist. But that type of work is also for who typically shows up at theaters.  

MS: She did the post-LA riots show commissioned by the Mark Taper Forum. And who went to the Taper 30 years ago? Mostly White people. Like who watched theater on PBS then? Mostly White folks, because that was the curatorial lens framing everything.  

 KW: I mean, a lot of it felt like it was about safety. You know what I had noticed, because you and I both come out of Highways Performance Space, is like these characters you're playing. A lot of them are making their own weird solo work. So why do we need a portrayal of some character when we can watch an actual Trans Sri Lankan like D’lo just do his own show? There was a time when we would never be able to encounter these people in the theater, and the assumption was we needed to see them humanized through an incredible solo playwright-actor. But now those folks are out in the world doing their own shit, and we should just hear from them directly. 

 I was in a show in my early twenties. Someone else wrote the show, and I was basically portraying different Americans, Black, deaf, whatever. And it was always presented as part of the freshman orientation. And in my cynical way, was like, okay, they sit through this one show, they're no longer racist. And then they marched through the next four years, and it was a popular show, and I'm sure it did change people. You know it was different. Actors played these different characters, but I feel like now you don't need a show like that, because those people exist openly. They have their own voices. Just give the people their platform. 

MS: Yeah, I totally agree. I think again, though, just talking further about Asianness and Asian Americanness. I feel like somehow, by circumstance or personal desire, because we live in the society we live in, so many of us keep coming back to this place where we willingly engage those types of situations which you just described, where our perceived identity is mobilized by Whiteness. Because it's like, if I have to be the entry point, the gateway drug to White wokeness, because I'm the safe non-White person, then so be it. I think most of us don't consciously say that to ourselves, but that subtext is ever present. 

 As an artist, as a curator, scholar, and educator, I'm always thinking about how I can both push back against that trope as well as use my privilege to do what I can for people. The older I get, the more I'm a firm believer in not letting any privilege go unused. 

 KW: I think my tactic in my younger shows was like yell at White people a little bit from the stage.  

MS: I think you did that gently toward the beginning of #foodbankinfluencer where you talk about being Pulitzer finalist, but very quickly in your narrative. You pass through that reference in the first or second scene, and for me, I made the connection to that part of your character that then, is like, as you do in most of your shows, still struggling with a sense of okay, that's great, but how do I still pay rent? And who the fuck am I? And more than that, what the fuck am I doing with my life? And I think you say it like, okay, great that I got a call from the Crazy Rich Asians project and it opened doors, but… 

 KW: You have access, but to a hallway of more doors. 

MS: Exactly, and what does it all mean? I once sat in a story circle at a booking conference in Calgary with Native and Indigenous folks. There was a family running the circle, three generations of Blackfoot women, that had horrific stories of social oppression and cultural genocide. And suddenly I had this realization that, for better or worse, Asian Americans like myself have been put into this position of privilege to be that conduit, a sort of bridge between 

White folks who may care, at least ostensibly, and folks who are extremely marginalized, truly at risk as an entire community. There are, of course, plenty of truly marginalized, harmed, traumatized, and at-risk Asians and Asian Americans. But, as you know, on average, as a community, we are far more privileged than most others here. 

 So what does that mean as Asian American artists performing our trauma and privilege at the same time?  

KW: More followers, maybe. But I think, this trauma and privilege, if I were to ask what you are describing and how to project this, and how this affects me, I feel it's the sense that mine is not the most traumatizing story about food justice, or about depression, but it's not a contest. 

MS: It's not the Oppression Olympics. 

KW: And it's actually okay for me to admit to others all these things that happened. It was upsetting. But I'm not denying that what happened to them was more upsetting. But here's the story from this perspective. I don't need more people to die in real life for me to be allowed to be up here. 

MS: How do you navigate all that social baggage? 

KW: Yeah, I'm about to put up a food bank haul video. I am inviting people, privileged or not, to use this resource, which, of course, more unprivileged people should use. But it's here. We need to show that we're using these resources and not running off and exploiting them. That normalizes this community where we all give and take from the same place. I think that the point of that sort of mutual aid is, if you need it, you take it, and if you don't need it, you pay it forward. And so some of the thinking is just being honest with, okay, I have certain privileges, but I still will share the story. And if you want to fight me that I'm not oppressed enough to tell the story, fine, but that's also where I think that in the art and the craft of it, it's got to be so weird and quirky that only Kristina could tell the story this way. 

MS: So let's talk about craft. What is your process? Do you write first? Do you just go through life shit, and then you slowly accrete the writing? Does the writing write itself? 

KW: For the first time ever, I'm writing a play linearly from an outline. So strange. I'm like, this is so sane. But otherwise, I just have a bunch of thoughts. 

 I would say, with #foodbankinfluencer, it started out of order with me constantly being in positions where I had to talk about what my next piece was, but you don't know what it is, but each time you describe it, it helps make it clearer for you. So that's the blueprint. And then giving myself assignments like, how can I take all these facts without a lot of heart or story, and stories I've seen out of the Food Bank world that are like the sad commercials or the child who's hungry the on the website, and I had to think, okay, what are the narratives that exist, and what's a different way to invert this narrative? So the assignment of just writing songs, rewriting popular songs to take in those facts, was really useful. And then I was like, oh, shit, we have a musical. Then I started studying the structure of a musical and shaping around that.  

 With Sweatshop Overlord, that was a very strange play, developed in the pandemic where I was just giving a live diary of crazy things that were happening, and I would notice that we felt like we were in a war. And when I sat down to adapt it for off-Broadway, I looked up writings about war movies and the scenes that make a story, because it's not just fighting and fighting. There are scenes, for example, of people feeling disillusioned by war. The waiting, the thinking about life on the outside. And so that helped me shape a lot of these moments, collapse scenes, and create sort of more textures like a war movie. 

 So I think I often look at a genre that I'm leaning into. With #foodbankinfluencer, it's the American musical and rom-com, and trying to shape moments I'm having, which may not be that dramatic in actual life, around the structure of a romantic comedy or a musical.  

 And also the earliest versions of #foodbankinfluencer were me just talking through slides. That's another thing I do in my process. Show photos and kind of joke, and crack about things, and sort of see why I’m gravitating to this, and see if I can shape a scene around it. Here are some facts I learned, and some photos that go along with it.  

 So sometimes I'm half building a bunch of slides, and then just talking my way through the slides and listening to what's coming up. And then I also listen to what questions keep coming up with the audience, and I very quickly got audiences. Everyone gets on board with food banks. It's not a crazy leftist or right-wing thing. It's a rare bipartisan charity. 

MS: Did you have any moment early on in the process of wariness around the musical thing because of the whole karaoke trope with Asians? 

KW: I was just trying to pump shit out because I was like, this is gonna be hard. 

MS: Oh, wow, it feels so obvious to me. When I found out what you were doing, and I told some Asian American friends, and they were like, well, yeah, of course. 

KW: I've been surprised by that. I was just trying to think of a very quick way to write, because I don't know how to compose tunes, but I know how to rewrite lyrics. 

MS: Most people don't know how to write tunes, which is why I think the genre is so popular. 

KW: It also allows me to get away with not being able to sing. But karaoke, honestly, you know, some things are ingrained in me that I'm not like, what Asian thing can I do today? I don't think that way. It's just part of me.  

MS: So speaking within the box of being “Asian American artist Kristina Wong”, how do you navigate that identity, which is both put upon you as well as you having your own feelings about it? 

KW: Humiliate White people from the stage and then move on. That's all I have. I mean, no, but I do think about that, because I don't want to be safe. I want to feel like I'm challenging my audiences and not making them feel like, oh, I was good for watching an Asian woman perform today, so I'm not racist. 

MS: What part of your Asianness or not do you feel, embrace, or resist in in terms of your artist identity? 

KW: It depends. It's like, what is Asianness? What I'd say is I approached a very White people career in a very Asian way. Like I feel like the way I approach my business is very much my mother, and it's efficiency. Constantly pulling out the calculator app, crunching numbers. When I look at a fee, you know, like I'm the most, like, la la la, undefined, which is the Whiteness, which I hate giving White people the credit of, but you know, the hippie goes deep. But if I just worked with that sort of attitude... 

MS: That privilege. 

KW: I'd be broke if I was just making things. But I definitely think about a certain replicability in my work like a little Chinese factory. I think about making things. I think about when I talk about my work, to lean into why a venue would want it. I think I honestly feel that most places would prefer the food justice show over a Kristina Wong show. Maybe that'll change in the next piece. 

MS: That's interesting. I hadn't thought about that. I’m so used to always seeing you onstage as you.  

KW: Well with people at schools and stuff, no one's crying about your life, Kristina Wong. Like, they don't fucking care. They want to hear about food. They want themes, right? 

MS: But not just any food show. 

KW: I'm not the first one. I want to make sure my food show is not the sad awareness show. Children are hungry! Give me your food back! Like, fuck, that's a commercial. That's not why you came into the theater, right? But also my Chineseness is that sort of efficiency. For a long time, I was a big hater. I would attribute my competitiveness with other Asian American artists to my Chineseness. Luckily, they've all left this business because they're smart and realize there's no future in this shit, and now they work as curators and stuff that's salaried. Unlike me, just still freelancing. 

 I remember being at a booking conference, and there was a more experimental performer presenting, and when you get to meet these programmers in these middle of nowhere towns who aren't really into experimental stuff because they're programming family festivals. And I remember it was an Asian programmer, which is very rare, and you could tell he was an immigrant, and he was negative, like, Who's gonna watch this? It's like they need to know, what's the bottom line here? They don't like being left in the dark.  

MS: I think that's also definitely very much an Asian immigrant thing, because the idea of proving your worth. And that that bleeds into one’s business ethic. 

KW: Yeah, a bottom line value thing. This is not hard and fast, and I don't want to pin Asianness on anyone, because there are always going to be examples of things that defy it. But there is this certain efficiency business issue of replicableness. Profitability, right? Like these kinds of things that I loosely characterized as my Asian side, that have kicked in and helped keep me working. 

MS: I wonder how much of that is Asianness, and how much is Asian/Asian American immigrant-ness. I come from a working class family. I don't know what your ancestors did, but mine for the most part started in manual labor. One great-grandparent and his children also spent the majority of their careers as entrepreneurs, but they did it from literally nothing. And so I get the sense of why a lot of older Asian American folks, tend to think a lot closer to the traditional American dream, but doing it in a way that is also very safe and low risk. It’s not just about family and the collective, but it's also not simply about the individual. A collective mentality seeped in from the root culture, and that ironically contradicts the more self-absorbed, surface American culture. 

KW: Yeah, I think maybe it's that White hippie thing that I liked when I was growing up in San Francisco. I was always so confounded that White kids got money for getting Bs, or their parents encouraged them to do whatever the fuck they want. And I was just like, what?  

 I didn't have children because I was like, I cannot torture my kids. I only know how I was parented. I'm so scared to fuck it up. I was very much taught that there's a right way and a wrong way, and I do think that the reason why I came to art is because, while there are answers there that are more effective than others, there's no solid right and wrong. For many years I was terrified that my show got it wrong, or that there was some better way to end. I don't know how to end plays, and it took until recently for me to realize there's no one correct way to end a play. There are just more effective ways. 

MS: Has that served each time as an impetus to jump into your next project? 

KW: A little. So like my new play is about a Texas frat boy who wakes up pregnant. It follows the structure of a nativity play as he looks for an abortion. This is nothing like what I’ve done before. There are all these evangelical Christian details. I kind of grew up Buddhist, but it's weird how much Christianity is around you that you could just write something.  

 When the Dobbs decision came in, I was like, God damn it, this needs to be like a bro movie about men having to look for an abortion and running all over the place to get abortions, like The Hangover movies. And people I mentioned it to were like, that's not bad. And then I told my agent, and they said movies are hard to make. Write it as a play. And then La Jolla Playhouse gave me a commission. 

 So I’m just writing this play going, no one's producing this. It’s an exercise, Kristina. Just pump it out because you said it out loud. And so it's very different for me, because I'm like, who should this person be? Because in my plays, everyone's named Kristina. But I do feel like it’s a lot of me. It’s just super angry with the world and trying to think about how to fucking fix this. And I think that that also is that efficiency, right? Art doesn't need to necessarily fix things. Art is the making of a community in that moment. That's part of the fix. But I don't know. Right now, things are fucking desperate, so if I can give out food, I will. 

MS: Last question. Your mom is often referenced in your performances. Where is she at this point in your work? 

KW: Someone in San Francisco asked at a Q&A what my parents think. And my mother was in the row in front of them. She's like, Well, now that she's a Pulitzer finalist, and she makes money, it's fine. 

MS: You can't make that up. 

KW: It's weird. It's like now bringing up money and stuff with them is fine. But I think the fact that we're planning this wedding reception together... 

MS: Oh?! 

KW: I’ve come a long way, because I remember even way before I ever got engaged, I was like, I will never plan a wedding with my parents. But this was us trying to piggyback on their 50th anniversary. I said they should just have a thing, and then we'll just mention that we're married. And now, suddenly, that's how we suddenly back-ended into San Francisco City Hall and co-planning this banquet. So it's like a double wedding. I've been leaning deeply into the Kristina's desperately trying to do a Chinese wedding thing. 

MS: That sounds like the title of a play or a Harold and Kumar-type movie. “Christina and Lee have a Chinese wedding”. There's your title! 

KW: Yes! “Desperately clawing at the last of her Chineseness!” This is a fucking show. It's called The Wedding. That's it. Finally, no one needs to come to the theater to watch. 

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Active Re-Encountering