Latest / National Immigration Law Center Freedom to Thrive Podcast / Ep. #106: Taking Our Power Back | Kristina Wong

Transcript

Ep. #106: Taking Our Power Back | Kristina Wong · National Immigration Law Center Freedom to Thrive Podcast

0:00
This is the NILC Freedom to Thrive podcast, powering pro-immigrant narratives, one story at a time.
0:08
I'm Victoria Ballesteros, Executive Vice President of Narrative at the National
0:12
Immigration Law Center.
0:14
Hi, Christina. Welcome to the podcast. Hi. What a beautiful story.
0:19
Oh, thank you. I remember drive-ins in San Francisco, too, but we did not watch Spanish movies.
0:25
Yeah. We would have been really lost. You might have needed the subtitles.
0:30
And yeah, drive-ins are just such a thing of the past, aren't they?
0:32
There is still one, I think, towards Orange County.
0:36
Yeah, I think there's two left in California, but it's so different.
0:39
You know, it's very different nowadays.
0:42
How are you? How's your cat? Everything good? My cat is on my lap right now.
0:46
Maybe I can pick him up and see.
0:51
I love it. I love it. What's your cat's name? His name is Happy.
0:55
He's currently biting my hand. Yeah.
0:58
He doesn't look happy at the moment. look at him he's like,
1:02
You're like attacking me. Get this on tape. So you're obviously a cat lover.
1:06
You're also a performing artist, comedian, organizer, playwright,
1:12
activist, politician, I think rap producer. Well, now former politician.
1:17
Former politician. And one time Ugandan rap sensation, yes. Oh my goodness.
1:22
But thank you for doing the research. Yeah, interesting and different creative
1:27
vehicles that you've worked in. To what do you attribute all of this creativity?
1:33
Not being able to find a good therapist, I think, or not being allowed to go
1:38
to a therapist when I was younger and needing some sort of outlet to work all my pathos out.
1:42
And so, yeah, because I couldn't find, I couldn't afford to pay someone to listen
1:48
to me talk about my problems.
1:49
I was like, well, I'll get an audience to pay me to listen to me talk about my problems.
1:54
And it's worked. Thank you for being the most unhealthy way to go about it.
1:59
Anything well that's taking something you
2:03
know a challenge and turning it into something that's obviously been very successful
2:06
for you yes now now it was an ugly write-up but yes i was listening to hector's
2:12
hector's last interview where he was describing sleeping in bathtubs i never
2:15
slept in a bathtub but i get it i've been there i have definitely had those
2:20
moments of my career where was,
2:21
yeah, just slugging, just slugging.
2:28
It's the struggle that nobody sees, right? It's not the glamorous part of the work.
2:32
What was that like for you, though, just, you know, in finding your way and
2:36
getting onto your path to where you are now?
2:38
Well, so, okay, so what I tell people is that sort of my first,
2:42
I went to UCLA, I graduated in 2000.
2:45
And at that point, the internet did not have the plethora of free pornography that it has right now.
2:52
And so my senior project, and this is when we still had dial up internet,
2:55
you know, and yeah, another blast from the past.
2:59
I know. And when you would, you would Yahoo search.
3:02
Asian women and you'd automatically find pornography like that's
3:05
the way the internet was organized and i and this
3:08
is also before search engine seos so my senior
3:11
project was a fake mail-order bride website called big bad
3:14
chinese mama.com and mama and i actually hand coded it like there was no wordpress
3:21
or you know there weren't these like even blogs were a fairly new thing and
3:25
it was a whole i had a harem of fake brides who were like my classmates and
3:29
it And it parodied the sections and actual Mail It or Bride websites.
3:34
And if you Yahoo search Mail It or Bride, it would be one of the top 10 search
3:38
results. So that was like my first project.
3:41
It's still there. I still pay for the domain name. Oh, my goodness.
3:43
Okay. You're going to get a flurry of activity now.
3:47
Yeah. Oh, flurry. Three visitors. You know, it's just, it's like flailing around
3:53
at the bottom of the internet right now.
3:54
But that was huge. This is a time before social media where the idea,
3:59
for the most part, most of our interactions at that point in time were somewhat in person.
4:06
We didn't have as many asynchronous interactions as we have now.
4:10
And so the idea that I'm asleep and some pervert in Kansas is trying to find
4:15
a picture of a naked woman and finds my angry sight was kind of terrifying. fine.
4:21
But that was like my calling card out of college.
4:25
And I basically would look at, I'd look myself up to see how I was doing.
4:30
And some college courses would be teaching me and I would invite myself to speak at their classes.
4:35
And I would drive for like a $50 honorarium all the way to Santa Barbara or whatever.
4:40
And because we did not have smart classrooms, then I had transparencies printed
4:45
out of my website that I would throw on an overhead projector.
4:47
Director wow and i would i would talk and those were my first performances
4:50
and then now i play colleges and you know
4:53
speak and i play for more than 50 bucks but like that's i just had it set in
4:58
my head that i really wanted to be an artist a performance artist and and at
5:04
that time in the late 90s there were a handful of asian american women who were
5:09
doing solo theater and i just sort thought,
5:12
oh, this could be a career.
5:14
So I was thinking Junichi Uehara, Jun Narita, Nobuko Miyamoto.
5:19
It was a thing. And enough so that I thought, okay, this could be a career.
5:26
I didn't realize how completely unsustainable it was, how hard it is to sustain,
5:32
and just how taxing it can be.
5:35
But here I am over 20 years later doing that thing that I set out to do.
5:40
Congratulations. I mean, you've really established yourself in a number of ways.
5:44
And so I'm interested about Big Bad Chinese Mama.
5:47
Your grandparents are immigrants from China, right?
5:50
Yes, yes. Came to the U.S. in the 1930s. So clearly some of that has factored
5:54
into your work or inspired a lot of your work or...
5:57
Sure, yeah. I mean, I definitely feel like.
6:03
There's, it's something to be said when the assumption is that you are the immigrant
6:07
or that your parent is the immigrant and, and, and how,
6:11
you know, I, I wasn't, I'm not fluent in Chinese, so I was never able to really
6:16
communicate fully to my grandparents.
6:19
And it was very painful. And there was a lot of history.
6:22
There's a lot of like these exercises. They tell kids like, interview your elders.
6:26
And I'm like, oh my God, like, and totally trigger them and get them upset.
6:29
Said. And they are talking.
6:33
And I mean, there's just a lot of secrets that are kept.
6:36
I won't say that we came as undocumented immigrants, but there was a lot of
6:41
creative paperwork with Chinese American immigrants of that generation.
6:44
There's a lot of relationships and relatives and marriages that were done more
6:52
for paperwork and to get people over here.
6:54
You know, what I'm describing paper sons, the phenomenal paper sons than not.
7:00
And so it's interesting because I didn't really, like for me,
7:03
it was very, there was a lot of people, a lot of Chinese Americans in San Francisco
7:07
who were of my generation who had other parents who were born here, but there also weren't.
7:12
And we have such a little, so little documentation about our diasporic history
7:20
that it's even and surprising to other Chinese Americans to know that I exist, right?
7:25
Like that, that, that there's such a thing as a third generation Chinese American
7:29
and, and sort of the popular culture assumption is that, you know,
7:33
we just got that fresh off the boat sitcom, right?
7:36
Like, we're, we're constantly just always arriving, and never here and around for a while.
7:42
Yeah. And so that was a lot to try to figure out how to make work about my identity,
7:46
but also respond to both this popular perception that.
7:53
I think it's shifted a bit, but that I'm not an immigrant, that I'm not the child of immigrants.
8:00
I'm also not hyper-sexualized or genetically inclined to be an overachiever,
8:09
though there was hella pressure to succeed academically when I was a kid. Right.
8:16
So it's just it's there. There were nuances that I felt like even within Asian-American
8:21
culture were were were hard to carve out for what my identity was.
8:25
Yeah. And that's really interesting that, you know, you're pointing something
8:29
out that I do believe is missing from the dialogue on immigrants and immigration
8:33
is that not everyone just got here.
8:35
Not everyone is coming in, you know, through the border.
8:38
Not everyone is at the border, the U.S.-Mexico border, I should say. Right.
8:42
And and that, you know, immigrants establish ourselves and have children and
8:47
their children have children.
8:48
And we've been here for as long as this country has been here.
8:50
Right. So, yeah, it's just it's missing, I believe, from the conversation.
8:55
But, you know, your work really does reflect, I believe, or you tell me if I'm
8:59
wrong, your heritage or even just some of the experiences that you have as a
9:04
woman, as a woman from, you know, a third generation immigrant person.
9:09
And I love the audacious names even of your work.
9:14
So there's things like Christina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord, and I want to know more about that.
9:18
Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Wong Street Journal, and then of course, Big Bad Chinese Mama.
9:24
What is the response in your family, in your community, and just more broadly
9:29
to this bold style that you bring to your work? Oh, well, there's no singular response, right?
9:36
And a lot of my early work, I mean, I was in such a bubble at UCLA,
9:42
which, you know, I feel very fortunate to be in a campus where there was such
9:46
diversity, but almost to the point that I think other students took it for granted
9:51
and began to eat on itself, right? Right.
9:53
Like that, that, that, that, that, that just because there were this many Asian
9:57
student clubs didn't mean that misogyny didn't have a way to persist within our clubs.
10:01
Like we didn't fight the way that I, when I go to the East Coast and visit those
10:05
colleges and meet those Asian American student unions, those kids are really
10:08
fighting because they are such the minority, both in the communities that the
10:12
colleges are situated in, but on their campuses.
10:15
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
10:27
much anger in arts activism, which was like, at that point, there was a lot
10:33
of spoken word and all these spoken word poems,
10:35
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...
10:43
That was what my website was, was like, how can we confront the people who aren't
10:47
in the room? Because right now we're just sort of yelling at people who are
10:49
already on the same side.
10:51
And also, how do we do this in ways that don't give us an ulcer and exhaust us further?
10:55
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,
11:05
so much of my early work was like,
11:09
because when I sort of discovered that I was,
11:12
I didn't even know what, you know, Asian American studies really was until I
11:17
got to college and understand that movement and understand how it intersected
11:22
with other racial, you know, civil rights movements.
11:24
And, and, and, and I just had an ulcer.
11:28
Like I was just so stressed out because there's so many things to be angry at, at once.
11:33
And so I think that's where my pull to satire was to tricking people to, to, I mean,
11:39
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,
11:49
how do we find humor in these moments?
11:51
Because this is a long fight. yeah this is a fight of
11:54
endurance this this is a marathon it's not a sprint
11:57
and and so how do we take power back and and
12:00
and celebrate the slivers of joy that leak
12:03
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
12:11
is necessary and it and lately when i was looking at you know the murder of
12:16
george floyd it was just like it wasn't like oh what's the joke we can pull
12:20
from this like there's some things are so angering that you have to express that.
12:24
But in terms of long-term survival, we need to also find ways to create our
12:29
own culture, not just constantly react.
12:31
Yeah, we absolutely do. And to your point, it's not a sprint, it's a marathon.
12:36
And the minute you finish that one marathon, there's another one right behind
12:38
it. So it just keeps going. Yeah.
12:41
I love that. I appreciate the emphasis on joy, on finding the joy.
12:45
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,
12:54
you've worked with undocumented Americans.
12:56
What was that like, working with the undocumented Americans?
12:59
What was that collaboration like?
13:01
And did anything surprise you about that? That came as an invitation from the Dream Resource Center,
13:08
where they had seen a theater project I had done that had to do with statistics
13:12
with young workers and the specific,
13:15
just the spottiness in which young, and the precarity in which young workers
13:21
find themselves in terms of not being able to find consistent hours or enough
13:26
hours to qualify for health insurance and things like that.
13:29
And they were like, we would love to do something like that with our community.
13:32
And I, you know, originally I didn't feel.
13:34
Qualified enough because I'm not, I don't live that experience.
13:38
And it, but basically what it was, it was a theater workshop where we worked
13:43
towards creating our own show at the end of eight weeks and people drove in from the Inland Empire.
13:49
This is in Los Angeles, right? They, they drive like two hours to be part of
13:52
this workshop because some of them have never,
13:57
you know, found spaces to address their
14:00
status yeah and it was incredibly powerful and
14:03
really you know what so much of that theater stuff is is it's
14:06
not so much like how beautiful or you know how how well crafted our final theater
14:10
piece is though it was a beautiful piece but it's just so much about being in
14:14
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
14:25
weren't sure like one person who
14:28
was in the workshop was a longtime friend of mine i had no idea she was
14:31
undocumented her her her parents were able
14:34
to be naturalized her husband and her children are naturalized but for whatever
14:38
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
14:46
ah what do i do and she drove like a long distance and and it was just really meaningful
14:53
for her to just connect with other people who were just in these weird paperwork
15:01
holes and had never been able to talk safely about their identity,
15:06
but also think about making work on it.
15:08
So some of these workshops would be split up on learning on what to do if an
15:13
ICE agent shows up at your door.
15:15
And I had thought, because I was privileged enough to be in the setting where
15:20
the folks I was meeting were, you know, a lot of them were very educated about
15:26
what to do in these situations.
15:28
And I remember saying to my one friend who was undocumented from Haiti,
15:31
she's since become a citizen. I'm like, you know, those red cards.
15:33
And she's like, what red cards? We don't talk about this.
15:36
So my knowledge of undocumented immigrants is all over the place.
15:39
Like in my mind, the ones that I would see were the ones who are very politicized,
15:43
very educated, and we're out there educating others.
15:46
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
15:52
radar are terrified about being deported as you know
15:55
as as reasonable concern but basically
15:58
there are you know there would be workshops and like which would be like acting
16:03
workshops what do you say when the ice agent is outside the door you slip them
16:07
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
16:16
basically laying out your rights and reminding you what you can say and what you,
16:22
what you should not say. But also having conversations with unaccompanied minors
16:28
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.
16:40
Yeah. You highlighted being surprised at learning that your friend was undocumented.
16:47
And I always say, there are 11 million undocumented Americans in this country,
16:51
that people that are our friends, our neighbors, right?
16:54
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.
17:01
What was your work like with formerly incarcerated individuals?
17:05
What was that about? That I'm still doing. So I work with the API.
17:08
Yeah. I work with a group called API Rise. We are the only API focused organization
17:14
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,
17:23
I was invited to be a guest at San Quentin Prison through their Restoring Our
17:27
Original True Selves, basically their Asian American Studies program in San Quentin.
17:32
And I remember when I was invited, I was like, oh yeah, sure,
17:35
I'll come. But I was terrified on the inside because I was like,
17:37
I've never been inside a prison.
17:39
Oh my God, if I bomb, they're
17:43
going to kill me because they may have done that before right
17:45
like just like every terrible thought and it
17:48
was one of the most profoundly human experiences of my life like i went in terrified
17:53
and i left going this is so weird that we have this that this is how we punish
17:58
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.
18:09
And and they they're asian in such a different way than i understood what asian
18:13
american was And that they weren't, it's not that they were pressured to be
18:17
doctors and then they suddenly ended up in prison, but it just like their trajectory
18:22
is completely different.
18:23
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.
18:32
And I went in not realizing how deeply involved I would end up being.
18:36
And at that point about six years ago when
18:39
I'd gone to my first meeting they there were
18:41
three folks who were coming home for the first time there was a welcome home
18:44
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
18:54
been around Asian Americans in this sort of context where it was just.
19:00
It's just so real. We never think about Asian Americans being in prison.
19:04
And I got a grant from the city of L.A. to do a storytelling workshop.
19:10
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.
19:19
They were suddenly trying to figure out how to put together a virtual season.
19:22
Snehal Desai, who was the artistic director, was like, what are you working
19:25
on? And I'm like, I'm trying to figure out how to save my grant and do this workshop online.
19:29
He's like, OK, great. great, we'll add the show to our season.
19:33
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.
19:43
But you know, it actually was really interesting that we weren't going to like
19:48
a room in a church to rehearse and make a show that everyone was working from
19:52
home because the homes became a character in the show.
19:55
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.
20:03
And, and so, you know, some of them had their baby photos behind them because
20:07
they're in their family house.
20:08
Like, so just really kind of, you know, Zoom theater was like this new genre
20:13
that got invented in the pandemic.
20:15
And, but it ended up being really powerful in terms of, you know,
20:20
articulating these stories and putting them out there.
20:23
That is really powerful. There's power in telling our stories.
20:26
I believe every single person has a story to tell and there's a lot of power there.
20:30
And okay, so I want to know more about the Auntie Sewing Squad.
20:37
What is the Auntie Sewing Squad? Because I think that was also something that
20:40
came out of COVID, if I'm not wrong.
20:42
And that led you to being shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize in 2022.
20:47
The technical term is finalist,
20:49
finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama.
20:53
But yeah, tell me the story.
20:57
Yeah, so I've made like seven or eight solo shows at this point in the pandemic.
21:02
I was touring in a completely different show called Christina Wong for public office.
21:06
I actually ran for local office in Koreatown.
21:10
One served and created the show that was supposed to tour live up until the
21:15
2020 election, right? Right.
21:17
Like the idea is you'd be watching these ridiculous rallies, you know, in real life.
21:22
And then you go to the theater and watch my little ridiculous rally about what
21:26
it means to be in public office.
21:28
And I had the greatest premiere of my life in February.
21:31
I felt like I was inside my own HBO special. The audience was like on their
21:35
feet before the show was over.
21:37
And then March hits and my entire tour is canceled.
21:41
And I'm deemed non-essential, as most artists are. And I can't feel bad about
21:45
it because everyone is in this situation.
21:48
And the thing is about my shows is I sew my set pieces.
21:52
It's like this. It's this very charming Pee Wee's Playhouse aesthetic that I bring to my shows.
21:57
And I am like feeling sorry for myself going, why did I think that this was
22:03
my calling in life to do something that doesn't even exist anymore?
22:07
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
22:16
I didn't take on essential work as my calling, right?
22:21
Yeah, why wasn't I a doctor? But I was like, okay, I didn't become a doctor, but I can save a doctor.
22:26
And so I had this very Joan of Arc moment where I was like, I'm going to save
22:31
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.
22:39
I will sew you a mask if you need one. And not realizing that's everybody because
22:44
we're not a culture that wore masks in March 2020.
22:47
But I just, you know, I've never
22:49
been the difference between life or death for anybody else. And yeah.
22:54
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,
23:05
running to the post office like a soldier, trying to play God,
23:12
figuring out which of these requests can take my finite number of masks first.
23:16
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.
23:24
And didn't think that when I named it Auntie Sewing Squad, our acronym is ASS.
23:29
And I just thought this will be a two week thing because the government will
23:33
clearly step in to distribute all the masks that are, they'll clearly step in.
23:40
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.
23:52
We suddenly, at one point we were helping purchase ambulances for Standing Rock.
24:00
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
24:11
a gender reveal party and set half of California on fire.
24:15
We were, we, you know, we, we were getting things to farm workers.
24:18
Like we were like full on shadow FEMA.
24:22
And I was like,
24:25
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,
24:34
why am I being nice to people?
24:37
But more than that, I was like an army. I was an overlord, basically.
24:41
I was the overlord of a sweatshop.
24:43
And so that's where Christina Wong's sweatshop overlord comes from.
24:46
Was it was it was a jokey thing i
24:49
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
24:54
of it was kind of like i don't think as an artist i should be able to see most
24:58
of this like i should not know that this is what's happening at children's hospital
25:02
right now that masks are being stolen by employees right like and sold on the
25:06
black market like why why did i just get that information yeah right like Like,
25:11
I should not be talking to the heads of medicine on certain tribes,
25:15
right? Like, I'm just like, what?
25:18
You know, and so some of this was so unbelievable.
25:20
I just had to write it all down. And I was performing it from my house in the
25:25
pandemic to entertain the aunties while they were sewing.
25:28
New York Theater Workshop asked me to premiere it off Broadway as the first
25:32
live show of their season. I was shocked.
25:35
And it opened off Broadway. way it was like
25:37
the first show people most people saw when they
25:41
came back from the pandemic and then it was a finalist for the pulitzer
25:43
so you know easy baby steps everybody baby
25:47
steps just like that besides pulitzer i'm i'm oh my god it's so fancy christina
25:54
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.
26:04
I just go, okay, why would you? No, it was a weird, it was a very tragic and weird few years.
26:11
But the one thing I did witness that I felt like was worth talking about in
26:16
a show, like a lot of people at the time were like, is this going to be your next show?
26:19
And I'm like, who wants to relive this? You want to relive this?
26:21
I don't want to relive this.
26:23
What I witnessed, I just never saw generosity the way I did.
26:27
I met all these in LA, you meet people because of what they have to offer you and what they do.
26:33
But in this situation, I still am learning what half those aunties do for a living.
26:37
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,
26:48
just not in the context of, oh my God, are we all going to die?
26:51
And that for me felt like the learning moment of the pandemic that I thought
26:56
we were all going to have at the end of this was that we would realize how interconnected we are.
27:01
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.
27:10
Yeah, I agree. We've sort of just moved on, right? We haven't actually processed
27:14
and talked about some of the good that was there.
27:16
Some of those beautiful things that came out that you've just described.
27:19
Yeah. Yeah. The care, the care was huge. The way we cared for each other was huge. Yeah.
27:24
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.
27:34
You, I talked about all All these, you know, vans we drove to the reservation
27:38
and supplies we were sending.
27:39
A lot of that came from our non-traditional food bank, World Harvest Food Bank
27:43
in Los Angeles, which is located just southwest of me.
27:46
And I am in Koreatown and this place is in Arlington Heights.
27:50
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.
28:02
But I just love his food bank model because it doesn't require that you prove that you're poor.
28:08
You can go and you can volunteer for four hours and you can get a ton of groceries,
28:13
like way more than you could ever eat.
28:15
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,
28:24
but you could use your EBT credits there.
28:27
So it's like a grocery store that looks like a food bank, but it restores is
28:30
dignity and i never when i
28:34
go there i feel like it's an episode of supermarket sweep i feel
28:37
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
28:44
shelf it gets dumped or it shows up at this food bank so i have i have appliances
28:48
you know from this food bank anyway i just became so obsessed with this place
28:53
i was and and and how important they were in terms of furthering our mutual
28:58
aid efforts that I was like,
28:59
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.
29:06
And what it's made me do is do a deep dive on our emergency food systems,
29:11
on the sort of ironies of we have more and more food banks, but we haven't stopped
29:17
hunger because we keep going after hunger by throwing free food at things and
29:22
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,
29:34
but most of their employees are in food stamps, right?
29:37
So I can't unionize, right? So in making this show, I've uncovered this other
29:44
underbelly that that one.
29:46
In typical Christina Wong shows, it's going to be so simple.
29:49
And then it gets really complicated.
29:50
That's, that's sort of where that show is going. And so that will,
29:53
I'll be, I'll be performing a little bit at my actual food bank to bring people
29:58
into the food bank, but also theaters around the country.
30:00
I'll be premiering at ASU Gammage in April, 2025.
30:03
Oh, great. I look forward to, to seeing that. It sounds really interesting.
30:08
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
30:14
sort of gotten involved in either intentionally and directly or sort of because
30:19
they're so intersectional, right?
30:22
I see the intersectionality of the different issues.
30:25
What would you say to somebody who says, oh, I don't care about that or I don't
30:29
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.
30:36
I don't think it doesn't affect me, right? It does.
30:40
Yeah. You use it like, you use roadways.
30:43
You use currency you are
30:47
in you are in a structure that has been laid
30:50
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
30:57
is that we are all interconnected that we affect each other that no one lives
31:02
i wish i could live in that kind of bubble that you think you live in yeah but
31:05
i would also get them to think about like what is it that you care about and
31:10
and who is responsible for for those decisions decisions.
31:13
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
31:26
in the bucket, but there are so many things that we can do to shift our communities.
31:30
And in a lot of the mutual aid work I found myself forced to do,
31:36
it was because these systems that you think we're supposed to step in and help
31:40
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...
31:47
These people are living in. But someone is governing their life,
31:51
whether it's their HOA or, you know, American democracy.
31:55
And I'd ask them about what is it they care about? Why is it they think that
31:59
way? Yeah, I'd unpack that with them.
32:01
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,
32:09
ChristinaWong.com and then MSChristinaWong on Instagram and X,
32:15
Twitter. I call it actually by its dead name.
32:17
Since Elon Musk won't recognize his trans daughter, I will call by its dead name, Twitter.
32:23
Twitter, okay. What's next for you?
32:26
Just working on this and I'm working on a podcast with Kern Kim,
32:29
who is one of our API Rise members.
32:31
And we're talking about the podcast is discussing the experience of being Asian
32:36
American and impacted by incarceration.
32:38
Restoration it's called that one will be called killing your
32:41
number that's the name of that podcast we're killing your numbers
32:44
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
32:50
that's used then i learned a lot of prison slang in this work yeah but that
32:57
we'll hopefully get that out in a few months oh nice congratulations final touches
33:01
on these episodes christina wong.com and killing your Your number is the name of the podcast.
33:06
And say your Instagram again, your Instagram handle.
33:10
Ms. Christina Wong. Ms. Christina Wong. Yeah. Thank you for joining us today.
33:15
I really appreciate your time. Yeah, thank you for having me.
33:18
For more immigration truths, visit us at nilk.org and freedomtothrive.com.
33:23
And make sure you subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes.
33:26
I look forward to continuing this conversation with all of you.