On being afraid of your own power

How would you define your creative work?

It’s really common, especially for people that are women or come from immigrant cultures or Asian cultures, to struggle very famously with imposter syndrome. Part of the way that I combat that is just having confidence and saying I’m a writer and a comedian. But the other part of the hesitation I think I had in identifying as the professional work I actually do is that I don’t really necessarily fit in well with those very specific boxes that those professions are and continue to be.

It’s getting progressively harder to be like, “I am a writer. I am a comedian.” It’s like, you’re just a creative person, and I think the times also call for that. It’s getting less and less true that you can just be an actor, you have to have these other facets, and you know part of that is the fact that we are all online all the time. A lot of being a creative person and putting your hands in different things is something that shows up a lot in my online content.

Before I wrote this book, I literally didn’t write a single thing since high school. But I think you know, if you’re a writer, and I’m sure you can relate to this, you see the world in this way, and you pick up on the ability to see the narrative through patterns.

Everything you do has this skill, just inherently in it. And writing is one of those things—if you have a skill as a writer, you’re just good at making a narrative. With Tiktok you’re writing a story. Sometimes, when I do a travel Tiktok, it’ll just be thinking of the story in my head while I’m taking footage. So when I go home, and I just edit the video and post it, I already know the narrative that it’s going to have. And that is like writing.

Yeah, I really relate. It does seem like you notice so much constantly about Korean culture, whiteness, dating men, etc. It’s a service you do for others by putting it through your internal machine. And then it ends up being something that’s very relatable to a lot of people.

Yeah, digesting it for people.

You said something in the prologue of your book, that the thing that separates you from all the other Asian-American comedians is the showing of all your cards. When I first found your work it was one of the things that really drew me to you. I’ve been thinking about how there’s this interesting relationship between the showing of all your cards and power.

I had this inherent personality through my childhood, mostly from my mother. The way that she jokes, and sort of taught me to joke as self-deprecation, which people do really enjoy. It’s disarming. After I started doing stand up, I realized that I had honed it. And it is really powerful. And it’s something that needs to be used responsibly because it is so fucking powerful. I think where I get in trouble, is that’s how I live off the stage, too. It’s too powerful in everyday interactions.

It’s so easy for me to catch people and just crush them because of that. And it’s something that I’m aware of now, after years of just honing that really authentic perception. Because it’s this other part of it, I like to think the fact that I’m not always right. I am coming from my own brain. And sometimes it’s a perspective. It’s like being really good at rhetoric. And then, you see, people who are really good at it. And you see the misuse of it. These horrible conservative podcast people, like Ben Shapiro, people like that. Right? And I can see that he and I have a similar skill. But he has gone to the dark side where he is manipulating it. But that’s not about me. I’m not gonna fall into that. But it’s like something that I’m afraid of in real life. And it’s something that got really honed in stand up.

ButI really love it about myself. I really enjoy the power of being somebody that’s hyper authentic. It is so powerful, and it’s scares me in a lot of ways. I feel like I have to keep it in check.

It reminds me of when you first get divorced and I’m not saying everyone’s unhappy in marriage, but a lot of people are. When you get divorced and you go into the school, drop off or the playground. And you’re walking in like, yeah, I’m free, like, you’re so happy. And some people really don’t like it and they stop being your friend, and they don’t want to talk to you. And for a lot of them, its because they probably feel like that’s what they want to do. But they’re living in some sort of self-deception to be able to push through.

Divorced people, I feel specifically divorced families are just like bombs for married couples. I relate to your work because, as someone who identifies at least part of the time as a death doula, I talk about things all the time that are taboo, that we aren’t supposed to look at, joke about, talk about over tea. People often think speaking about death means you haven’t moved on, or you’re stuck in your grief. I personally have found it freeing to look closer at these things and say them out loud. I wonder If there’s anything in there that feels true for you, if you found some superpowers in the particular way you practice and explore your art form.

It feels very similar. It’s almost like I have to taper it down, or just tread carefully when I sense something that people don’t want to look at. The truth is, I can go into a dinner party, and just say there’s a horrible person there, and you can just tell already what their hangups are, because they are saying it. In polite society everyone’s just like, “Oh, really, that’s nice,” like whatever. I think this is the part of my job that’s the fun part, as a stand-up comedian. You get somebody like that, and you roast them. You just say the thing that everyone sees.

If do that, people laugh because people are like “This guy is so insufferable,” and, thank god, somebody said something, and he stopped. But most of the time people are gonna be like, “Why did you say that to my annoying guest? You know, it’s my father-in-law,” or something. And then it’s just like sorry and you stop getting invited to weddings, which is honestly a bonus for me. I hate weddings. Finding my journey to loving myself has lots to do with it.

Yeah, I’m really good at naming something or outing somebody that’s being dishonest. Saying something that is uncomfortable. But I feel uncomfortable when things are buried versus everyone else who feel uncomfortable when things are unearthed. It was this journey from being this younger woman who was afraid to be myself into becoming really, authentically myself. Then people actually start to really hate you right? Like, really hate you because they can really see you. But the reward in that is that the people who really like you really fucking like you, like a lot. And they really see you, and they see who you are.

And so that’s the reward to showing up with your authentic superpower. People who don’t want to hear it, that’s fine, but people who do want to hear or need to hear, are so thankful that you’re doing it. As a death doula, or someone that helps with grief, the people who really need that are probably so happy that you’re doing it. And they really treasure it, and that’s the big payoff.

You spoke in the book about how you were not able to pursue the natural talent you had as a child for writing, reading, interpreting, because of a complicated life, how you could have even resented the fact that you had to abandon this skill. But then you speak about what you gained in return for not being able to pursue your childhood talents was far more valuable. You say, “for people throughout history who weren’t openly allowed to shine, we found ways to display our intelligence and talent covertly in the dark.” You speak of this second skill that you don’t know what to call, but is what a crab has, like an adaptation to go in a direction that you weren’t meant to go. You write, “I was stopped from going one way, so I did something fucking weird and humiliating to survive. There’s no name for this skill. There’s no way to quantify it. There’s no way to record it in a white man’s book, because of that it is invisible to them.”

We all live in this world that was set up to exist for other people who didn’t look like us, right, like every system that was put in place. And even to this day, living in New York City, the successful writers and creative people, and a lot of them are people of color, non-men, from marginalized communities. But to be included in the atmosphere they have to have done the white things and they have to have the people writing articles, even though they’re people of color, and identify as other marginalized people, they still have to go to Yale, and that’s why they work at The New Yorker, etc. And they’re gonna get paid because of those credentials that were determined by white men and even though they’re progressive thinkers and pushing society forward. It’s almost like you have to go through the ring of fucking fire where a white man tells you good job, and then you get to do all that stuff, and obviously that takes a toll and restricts the kind of open-mindedness that we’re seeing, because if every progressive pusher of thoughts on the forefront of society came through this white man system, we’re getting whatever they think is that.

I always think about the fact that you’ll go to Thailand, and realize the tuk tuk driver is probably way smarter than a lot of the English teachers you’ve ever met. It’s this way that my mother had to come up in this world, and I talk a lot about her life. She’s so intelligent and smart. As a white man she would have been allowed into that system and become a great thinker, or a great comedian, or something like that, but because she was born this poor person, even though she has all the skills and the tools, she was never going to be included in that, anyway. I think her being so intelligent and so creative, she already knew that. So she was like, “Oh, we know we’re smart, we know what’s going on more than this dumbass white guy. But we can’t show them that, because then they get mad. So this is how you do that in front of them.” I think that skill moves so much of the world without anyone ever noticing.

Even now, living in this place where I’m surrounded by all these professional people that are the people known to be on top of everything, you can see they’re kind of lifting off other people. There is so much of that happening where the people that are actually smart, the people that actually should be in the limelight, are just not allowed to. It’s something I see from my mom. She has this feeling of being in a room and knowing that you’re smarter than everybody. But you have to act dumb. So you’re just going to make a joke.

I think a lot about the role of fear in creative work, especially for women and femmes and I felt the steady theme in your book of pulling back the curtains to your worst fears and discovering they weren’t real. You told this story in particular, of a school you went to that threatened physical violence by paddling for kids who didn’t follow the rules and your discovery of the truth of that empty threat. We, as adults aren’t in school anymore. But we can expand that story out to multiple systems we still live under the fear of misbehaving or speaking outside of the norm, or any variation of behavior. I’m wondering if you can give some advice to creative people navigating these various fears which are like blocks to movement.

The example that I hear a lot just from doing an Asian culture podcast for so long, the typical story I would hear is they have creative passions they wanted to pursue as children and they were afraid because their parents didn’t want them to do it. And so that’s the example that I keep that’s coming to my mind, this fear of rejection from your family or disapproval from your family or community. I don’t want to discount that fear, because I think it’s one of the most intense primitive fears that humans have. To be discarded by your tribe is pretty intense.

But if you really think about it, in the whole scheme of things, that’s fine. Who cares? There are real dangers that can happen in this world for not following the rules, that are very unfairly put on other people. But your parents cutting you off and not talking to you, and you having to move to a small apartment is probably not it. Just do it. Who cares? You know? In this very specific scenario all my life, I grew up in the same way that a lot of Asian-Americans grow up. But something happened where at one point I was just like, “Fuck this, I can’t fucking do this. I hate this. I’m not good at it. I just don’t fit in. And I’m never gonna fit in.”

That story, the reason I included it in the book, even when I was young, I was like, “I don’t fucking care, I’m not gonna win at this, even if I try hard to be this person that doesn’t get paddled.”

And it’s like the good Korean girl or whatever, I’m just not, I’m going to fail at it. So, because it was almost like I was forced to give up trying, and that continued for the rest of my life, it was like: my parents are disappointed in me. Well, surprise, surprise. I’m never gonna be someone that’s not disappointing to my parents. It’s not even like I can give advice because it wasn’t a choice. It was just, this is my personality. I can’t tell somebody stop caring about what [their] parents think, because it wasn’t a conscious decision on my part.

What I realized is that a lot of times when people don’t do something. It’s because they didn’t want to do something. If you are somebody that’s creative and you’re like, “Well, I want to leave my job and have a creative life,” there’s a reason you’re not doing it, and it might not be your parents. Maybe you like to live comfortably and maybe that’s important to you. And maybe it’s hard for you to admit that to yourself. And so you have to think about it like you’re doing it for your parents. But you know, maybe you don’t want to be broke and crazy online, like I am. It’s hard. It’s hard being broke, you know. Maybe you like having a nice house in New Jersey. There’s a reason that you didn’t want to do it, and you have to trust in yourself that you chose for yourself.

What advice would you give to people trying to get into comedy?

If you want to start doing stand up, or anything creatively, just start social media. And I know it’s so cringy. I started doing Tiktoks when I was 35 or 36, and I was like, “That’s so embarrassing.” But it’s this almost magical thing that can just take you from dreaming about something to literally in a month you can start making a living off of doing that, and there was never a time before that you had that accessible to you. I have a lot of friends that are much bigger than I am just reading content on the internet. And they’re, you know, like one of my friends is like a mother of two. I think she’s in her late forties or early fifties And she’s like, “Wow! I really wanted to do this, and I never thought it would happen.” And overnight, she’s making an actual living off of doing it.

As embarrassing and weird as content creation is, the fact that we live in a time where you can just do stuff in your living room, and in a week you could become famous, well, why wouldn’t everyone do that? It’s like, why not just do it?

Can you describe your writing process if you had one for this book?

I feel like it’s important for me to say this, because I feel like everybody thinks they’re not good enough to do it. In my mind I thought this. Once I sold the book, I was like, “Oh, my god! Every day I’m gonna wake up at eight A.M. and write for like eight hours.” You know, like office hours, I’m gonna get a coffee. And I’m gonna sit on my desk and write. When I tell you I didn’t do that, even one fucking time. Not once did I write anything from eight A.M. to five P.M. There were days where I would get up and sit at the computer and start crying because I just couldn’t do it. I was just like, “Why isn’t this working?”

And then I would not write anything for two months. And then one night at eleven p.m. write fifty pages overnight. After a while I just realized that’s just not how creative work is done. It’s not done like you’re an accountant. I mean you should make yourself write sometimes. But this whole idea that it’s gonna work like that, I think was wrong for me. I’m sure some people do write like that, and that’s great for them, but it got in the way of my creative process in a lot of ways. Because then I started judging myself like I wasn’t good enough at doing it, because I wasn’t disciplined enough, and then it harmed me overall. So I would say, if you feel yourself wanting to write something, that’s the moment where you should make yourself write. It doesn’t matter if it’s eight a.m. or two a.m.