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Famous Ali Wong Quotes

“A glowing green traced the movements of our limbs below the gentle surf. I imagined a scaly, bug-eyed eel with razor-sharp teeth had come from the deep to hunt for a late-night meal before realizing it was a luminescent algae emitting a subtle glow with each tread of the water. At one point, we returned to the beach to rest and came across a nest of hatching turtles making their first voyage into the water. We watched the sun gradually peek over the horizon, and I realized in this moment that I had your mother's deepest trust. Miles away from her comfort zone, she was willing to walk with me and explore the depth of a world I had grown to love. I, in turn, would need to trust her to the utmost as I stepped deeper into her world of stand-up comedy.”

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Book:Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets, & Advice for Living Your Best Life
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“Witnessing all of those hardworking female street vendors in Vietnam also made me understand why my mom felt so passionate about me and my sisters working. While we were in Vietnam together, she explained that the country had a history of always being in wartime, so women were expected to rise to the occasion of making money for the family. Vietnamese women were always ready to take over roles traditionally filled by men, Like A League of Their Own (but where everyone is Marla Hooch). I also understood why my mom wasn't into processing her feelings, and how she was taught to just get over tragedy. To survive, she had to believe things like depression and allergies were a choice. In a culture entrenched in wartime, those who chose to be unhappy or to refuse gluten didn't last long.”

FeelingsWorkDepressionEmotionsSurviveWartimeAllergies
Book:Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets, & Advice for Living Your Best Life
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“That Boston show was when I began to see your mother through the eyes of her fans and realized her stage presence was more than the sum of its jokes. She was speaking to people's truths and making them laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. This was what our ayahuasca ceremonies were about: sourcing the most potent parts of ourselves and letting go of the rest. Your mother, I saw, had done just that. She was embodying experiences lie pregnancy and childbirth that are sacred to us as individuals, and celebrating these acts in a fresh new light. Asian cultures often teach us to be silent about our sexuality and filled with shame. Your mother breaks that up and transmutes pain and shame into power, like a mystical priestess.”

LaughTruthsAyahuascaPriestess
Book:Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets, & Advice for Living Your Best Life
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“A reporter once asked me why I think progressive men who earn significantly less than their breadwinning wives still won't quit their jobs to take care of their children. Why do they still hold on to their careers, even if taking care of the children would make more financial sense because the cost of childcare is higher than their net salary? I think I know the answer to that now, and it sucks. Women are not expected to live a life for themselves. When women dedicate their lives to children, it is deemed a worthy and respectable choice. When women dedicate themselves to a passion outside of the family that doesn't involve worshiping their husbands or taking care of their kids, they're seen as selfish, cold, or unfit mothers. But when a man spends hours grueling over a craft, profession, or project, he's admired and seen as a genius. And when a man finds a woman who worships him, who dedicates her life to serving him, he's lucky. But when a man dedicates himself to taking care of his children it's seen as a last resort. That it must be because he ran out of other options. That it's plan Z. That it's an indicator of his inability to provide for his family. Basically, that he's a fucking loser. I think it's one of the most important falsehoods we need to shatter when talking about women's rights.”

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Book:Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets, & Advice for Living Your Best Life
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“For my twenty-seventh birthday, I was really looking forward to your father's gift...But there was no box. There was no bag with tissue sticking out of the top. We sat down on his bed, in his closet room, as he gave me an envelope...Instead, there was a blank card with these instructions: 'Write down all of your goals.' Then he had me recite them back to him. And after every goal I read out loud to him, he replied, 'So it shall be. '... And despite having put anal beads up another grown man's ass in a previous relationship, I had never experienced and activity that was so intimate. And straight up free.”

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Book:Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets, & Advice for Living Your Best Life
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“I think I have PTSD from when I was one of the few Asian kids in kindergarten and all the white kids made fun of my "smelly" and "weird" lunch. And now that we're all grown up, those same white kids (I mean literally the same people) like to post pics of their chimichurri bone marrow dish, and I'm like, Bitch, you used to call me a fucking vulture for eating my meat to the bone and sucking out the marrow. Now you're fishing for "Likes" with it??”

FoodRacismAsian American
Book:Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets, & Advice for Living Your Best Life
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“Studying in a developing/third-world country is way more intense and formative than studying in a first-world fancy country. It makes you so much more open-minded, adaptive, and confident. You become so much more real. When you have to shit on two little bricks into a hole the size of a tennis ball at an elementary school in the countryside, or sleep in a farmer's yurt after not bathing for five days, you become a much more easygoing person. It teaches you to value experience over material things real fast.”

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Book:Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets, & Advice for Living Your Best Life
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