• The Boundless Whoosh
• Linette Lao (bio)

Ali Wong crosses the stage toward the spotlight. The horizontal stripes of her tight dress amplify her big pregnant belly. She ambles slightly—subtly—just enough to stir memories of the weight of my own belly when I was seven and a half months pregnant. It's just enough to engage people who haven't been pregnant to project the imagined physical pains, the swollen ankles and sore backs of pregnant ladies onto Wong. The deliberate use of her physicality—at the moment she is introduced and the audience is open, expectant and taking in her burgeoning belly—becomes clearer over the course of the show. Our assumptions of prenatal unspryness are revealed and transformed as Wong's pregnant lady shuffle becomes a twerk (a move designed to achieve optimal egg fertilization) and then, later, a wildly energetic Cabbage Patch and Running Man.

In Baby Cobra, her 2016 breakout special, Wong is a magician: making us laugh—and squirm—engaging then transforming our assumptions of identity and motherhood. What she creates is an invention, an elegantly unfolding contraption built with our own expectations—a portal, moving us from a place we think we know to another boundless one—in an unexpected whoosh!

Dear Girls is structured as a series of letters to Wong's infant and preschool-age daughters, who "are prohibited from reading this book until [they] are 21 years old." While the pretense is a solid comedic setup for sharing stories about a bevy of flaccid lovers, ayahuasca insights, and anal sex, it's not only that. Before Wong's father died of cancer, he left her a letter. "I'm very grateful for the letter but I wish he had written more about himself. There are so many questions I have for him—how he overcame all the challenges of his youth and the person he was before I was born. And so I wanted to leave something for you girls when I die, besides a collection of oversized glasses for you to sell on eBay," she writes.

There is an Instagram feed (and book) called Mothers Before (2020). Scrolling through the pages and pages of photos posted by their offspring, you'll see girls and women, captured on film, from every decade: young women with their hair teased high at prom, singing in their bands, bikini-clad at the beach, in front of the Eiffel Tower, fixing motorcycles, with spoons stuck to their noses, smiling, laughing, or looking out into space. The images generate a sense of wonder as we are confronted with the perplexing evidence that a mother is a person, that a mother is a woman, who existed and lived her own life before we were, literally and figuratively, in the picture. That we are the center of our mothers' lives is a ridiculous, archaic, yet irresistibly sticky, idea.

What do we risk and what would we gain if our children knew all our stories? The premise of Dear Girls, like much of Wong's comedy, is an expression of many things at once: a comedic set up, a creative challenge, a heartfelt quest, a boundary to push against—and a way to extend a sense of generosity to the reader and write what is meaningful.

The stories in Dear Girls are wholesome at heart—tales of bad dates and her wild adolescence are nested between loving and comical stories of family, the one Wong was born into and the one she builds. Wong grew up in San Francisco, the youngest of four siblings. She was raised by a mother who immigrated from Vietnam and a Chinese American father, the son of a man who came to the United States at age eight to work as a houseboy. She grew up in a city she calls an "Asian Wakanda" with parents who made a point to champion the cultural contributions of Asian Americans—from Margaret Cho, to Maxine Hong Kingston, to Lou Diamond Philips. Springing from this Asian Wakanda, Wong builds on and surges beyond...

• 无边飞快移动
• 老挝人（生物）

阿里·王（Ali Wong）越过舞台走向聚光灯。她紧身连衣裙的横条纹放大了大肚子。当我怀孕七个半月时，她微微地（微妙地）漫步，足以唤起人们对自己腹部重量的记忆。这足以吸引未怀孕的人将想象中的身体疼痛，脚踝肿胀和孕妇的后背酸痛投射到Wong身上。在演出过程中，对她身体的刻意使用-在介绍她的那一刻起，观众是开放的，期望的并且正在逐渐成长为腹部。随着Wong的孕妇洗牌成为twerk（旨在实现最佳卵子受精的举动），然后是充满活力的卷心菜补丁和Running Man，我们对产前不适的假设得到了揭示和改变。

在她的2016年突破特辑《婴儿眼镜蛇》中，黄是魔术师：让我们发笑，蠕动，参与，然后转变我们对身份和母性的假设。她创造的是一项发明，一种优雅地展现的装置，以我们自己的期望构建—一个门户，将我们从我们认为的地方转移到了另一个无边的地方—出乎意料的飞快移动！

亲爱的女孩是写给黄的婴儿和学龄前女儿的一系列信件，这些信件“被禁止在[他们] 21岁之前读这本书”。假装是一个扎实的喜剧装置，用于分享关于一群乏味的恋人，ayahuasca见识和肛交的故事，不仅如此。黄的父亲死于癌症之前，他给她写了一封信。“我很感激这封信，但我希望他能写更多关于他自己的信。我对他有很多疑问-他如何克服了他的青年时代以及我出生前那个人的所有挑战。所以我想在死后为女孩们留些东西，除了要在eBay上出售给您的超大眼镜系列，”她写道。

有一个Instagram提要（和书）叫做Mothers Before（2020）。滚动浏览其后代张贴的照片，您会看到每十年拍摄于电影中的女孩和妇女：年轻妇女的头发在舞会上高高地被挑逗，乐队中唱歌，沙滩上穿比基尼，在艾菲尔铁塔前，修理摩托车，将勺子塞在鼻子上，微笑，大笑或望着太空。当我们面对一个令人困惑的证据，即母亲是一个人，母亲是一个妇女，在我们从字面上和形象上存在之前存在并过着自己的生活时，这些图像产生一种惊奇感。我们是母亲生活的中心，这是一个荒谬，古老而又不可抗拒的顽固想法。

如果我们的孩子知道我们所有的故事，我们会冒险做什么？我们会得到什么？像Wong的喜剧一样，《Dear Girls》的前提是多种事物的一次表达：喜剧片的设置，创造性的挑战，发自内心的追求，要突破的界限，以及一种扩大慷慨感的方式。读者并写出有意义的东西。

《亲爱的女孩》中的故事令人心旷神怡–不好的约会和疯狂的青春期的故事被嵌套在充满爱意和喜剧性的家庭故事之间，其中一个是黄氏出生的，另一个是她所建造的。Wong在三兄弟中最年轻的旧金山长大。她由一个从越南移民的母亲和一个华裔美国人父亲抚养长大，后者是一个八岁时来美国做家务的男人的儿子。她在一个被称为“亚洲瓦卡达人”的城市长大，父母与父母为捍卫亚裔美国人的文化贡献-从玛格丽特·乔（Margaret Cho），马克西恩·洪·金斯顿（Maxine Hong Kingston）到卢蒙·菲利普斯（Lou Diamond Philips）而努力。Wong从这个亚洲Wakanda涌现出来，并超越了...