Kristina Wong: pushing the envelope on race, rights and America

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/mar/26/kristina-wong-pushing-envelope-art-race-america

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Kristina Wong believes Asian vaginas will cure racism. She’s introduced the world’s bachelors to the perfect mail order brides and has spread the word about the dangers of yellow fever (the fetishization of Asian women by white men).

A third generation Chinese American originally from San Francisco, Wong, 35, doesn’t just defy Asian stereotypes – she destroys them. Like Hari Kondabolu, Margaret Cho and Russell Peters, Wong’s irreverent critique of mainstream culture pushes the envelope about race. Her probing and provocative artistic pursuits don’t fit into neat little boxes, for example, her first major solo show – Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – investigated the prevalence of depression and suicide among Asian American women.

After a month-long trip to Uganda in 2013, Wong is back on the road previewing her new, 85-minute show, The Wong Street Journal. It’s been described as “part psychedelic TED lecture, part amateur hip-hop extravaganza, and part nonsense.” Wong Street will premiere in June at Z Below in San Francisco.

Wong Street was born out of Wong’s burnout from the grueling eight-year run of Cuckoo’s Nest. Because of Cuckoo’s Nest’s focus on mental health issues, Wong said she felt more like a therapist or social worker than a performer. She became known as “the depression girl” and started to “lose track” of her identity as a live artist.

If she was going to spend another eight years on tour for a show, she wanted to learn about something new, something outside herself, something that would push her in a different direction. What she settled on was the economy of poorer countries, particularly in Africa. “I could only parrot back what I had heard about [countries in Africa] from other people here, and what I saw on Save the Children commercials. Even plays I’ve seen about Africa depicted only charged and violent situations,” Wong said. She wanted to go deeper.

After brainstorming at an artists’ residency in Toronto, she connected with a microloan organization and traveled to Uganda to write a show about economics, the stock market, and theory.

Though the economy plays a role in the final version of Wong Street, the show primarily focuses on race, privilege and America’s paternalistic attitude toward African countries. With a handmade analog ticker of the New York stock exchange, Wong lists abbreviations of civil rights leaders’ names instead of stocks, and scrolls through their numbers of followers, subscribers and page views from Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, to demonstrate how “civil rights leaders have a certain kind of brand or clout on global culture.”

What Wong hopes to illuminate in Wong Street, is the patronizing way that Americans view Africans. She said: “I have a lot of responsibility to present Uganda in a way that is human, but that also reflects the honesty of what I experienced while I was there. I didn’t want to create [in Wong Street] a modern version of the World’s Fair – ‘look at them, look at how they act.’”

The prevailing perspective of the west, Wong says, is that poor people can’t help themselves. “We see Africa as this pitiful, sad, helpless, chaotic place,” she said. During her time in Uganda, she found herself questioning the presence and role of western non-governmental organizations, and concluded that in some instances, these NGOs are a “necessary evil”.

My mom would often cut out newspaper articles for me about what people were making in different professions on average.

Wong Street has previewed in California, Vermont and New York. If those early reviews are any indication, it appears Wong has another hit on her hands.

But for the UCLA graduate, success hasn’t always come easy. She spent her 20s selling items on eBay and earning $10 an hour at an art non-profit.

Wong said: “There’s nothing defined for an artist – no set structure that ensures a salary or future growth. I wish I could have told my younger self it was just going to take me 15 years [to succeed as an artist].”

During her leaner years, Wong’s accountant mother and insurance salesman father encouraged her to pursue a more pragmatic career, like medicine. “Every practical way money is calculated by my Chinese family does not apply [to performance art]. My mom would often cut out newspaper articles for me about what people were making in different professions on average. She still cuts them out for me.”

Wong concedes she would have made a “horrible, but funny, doctor”. Though she has researched nursing schools late at night, in moments of panic about whether she’d be able to continue to support herself with her craft.

Still, Wong has no regrets making a living from politically and socially relevant live work. And she’s grateful she stuck it out. “I feel very lucky to have made it.” Wong said. “I haven’t looked up going to nursing school in two years.”