Kristina Wong’s Hunger for Change: ‘#FoodBankInfluencer’ comedian on pranks, activism & economic injustice

Courtesy photo: #FoodBankInfluencer

Just minutes into an interview with comedian and activist Kristina Wong about her upcoming Boston show, “#FoodBankInfluencer,” she drops a bomb: “I just got married!”

The big event was held in the ever-romantic San Francisco City Hall, which Wong says, is like the DMV but for weddings. She even donned an elaborate dress donated by the drag queen Juicy Liu, she gushed.

… But wait a minute … wasn’t Wong already married … to someone … ?

Wong, it appears, had some explaining to do. After all, she’s well aware of the rumors circulating on the internet.

It was, indeed, her “first marriage … first legal marriage,” she insisted during a phone interview with Sampan.

Her first “non-legal” marriage? That was to herself at age 30. Search online and you can find that picture of her cutting a slice of white cake in celebration of the partner who could never possibly leave her.

But Wong’s fans know there must be someone else, right? Who was that guy?

“I wish I could say how a pre-med major married me, and financed my art dreams,” she once told a graduating class at her alma mater, the University of California, Los Angeles, before eyeing up the grads, and announcing, “And by the way, I am still open to that happening.”

But — despite her parents’ wishes — she did not marry a doctor. Maybe a celebrity? If you believe that scandalous scoop in the New York Post in 2023 about former Knicks basketball star Jeremy Lin’s secret marriage, you’d be told that “Lin’s wife is Kristina Wong, who works as a performance artist....”

Not true, says Wong. (She did spend a good part of her career, however, fake “stalking” Lin.)

In real life, Wong just married Lee Supercinski, the producer of the animated television show “Futurama,” which has been airing since 1999.

“So it’s very lucky (for me) that he’s been working for so long, and when he proposed to me publicly on stage in San Francisco,” Wong told the Sampan, “my answer was not just, ‘Yes, I’ll marry you!’ It was like, ‘Yes, I want to be on your health insurance!’”

It turns out that, jokes aside (and included), heavy topics such as affording health care and finding a partner and getting married, are among the many topics Wong tackles on stage and in her activism. She also confronts Asian hate and fetishization, racism, and dealing with depression.

This is true for her show,“#FoodBankInfluencer” – which runs at the Emerson Paramount Center Sept. 19–21. The work is part of a years-long project that began during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Describing the show as a one-person “karaoke concert,” Wong explains how it came about after a combination of discovering the World Harvest Foodbank in California and its founder Glen Curado, trying to feed a team of overworked mutual-aid Covid mask stitchers — the Auntie Sewing Squad — and learning about the lack of grocery options to people living in Navajo Nation.

“So much of the narrative of food banks is like having Sarah McLaughlin music playing in the background and a child holding an apple,” she said, half jokingly. “It’s always about some magic hand from the sky that comes and feeds them.”

But, she said, the deeper story is more complex and includes the stigma of getting left-over or unwanted food and the deeper societal and economic reasons why people cannot afford necessities like nutritious meals, housing and healthcare.

“What are ways in which we don’t look at the people who are using these public services as the ‘sad, helpless’ ones?” she asks. “How can we organize them politically? How can we shift this narrative and be like, ‘Well, why is hunger growing so much in the first place? It needs to go beyond a hero who writes a check.’”

Courtesy photo: #FoodBankInfluencer

Instead, she offered self-determination as another option — the ability to vote in people who will bring economic equality and to craft legislation to change the structures that keep people in poverty.

“There’s so many billionaires,” she said, and, yet so many poor people will never be able to catch up. “These are the kinds of bigger things we need to question, versus just making constant fundraising pleas for food banks.”

She’s clear, however, that charities have a role to play for now, and worries about recent massive government funding cuts, both at home and abroad in the form of USAID.

A Childhood of Nuns and Pranks

On paper, Wong’s childhood story sounds pretty … regular. Her mom was an accountant and her dad, an insurance salesman. She attended a Catholic high school (mainly because she couldn’t get into the prestigious Lowell School). Pressure to succeed was high.

“I think my folks very much wanted me to be a doctor who would also become a ‘Miss Chinatown’ and marry another Chinese doctor and have doctor babies.”

But in reality, she said, as a teen she was a prankster, who would phone her classmates and play elaborate tricks on them. Around high school she became passionate about the environment but, she said, she didn’t really discover social activism — around racial injustices and sexism — until she was at UCLA and saw avant-garde performances by other students.

“I didn’t really have a lot of activism around race and gender” while in high school, she said, “I was more into the environment.”

That was years before San Francisco regulated recycling and other green initiatives. “Now it’s like, if you don’t compost you go to jail. Well, I don’t think that’s really the case, but that’s what my mother says.”

But, seriously, she said: “I didn’t know how to be an activist. I got clear about those strategies later on in my adult life.”

It wasn’t until college that she became aware of the world’s many injustices.

“I didn’t understand what Asian American Studies was when I came in and was like, Wow, oh, there’s a whole history that worked alongside other social movements and all these things that I just sort of thought were weird, or couldn’t put a context around, and I finally have a way to just to talk about all the guilt and, you know, the shame, or these things.”

Wong said much of her early half of life – she’s in her late 40s now – had her terrified about her future, whether she’d be successful, whether she’d live up to her family’s expectations.

“I like to say that Chinese Americans are not raised to be happy, we’re raised to be successful.”

Instead, Wong chose the uncertain, unpredictable, and, for most who try it, unattainable career of comedy and theater – a mix of high art (like when she dressed as a giant vagina on stage), crass but pointed jokes, social commentary and introspection.

And it’s paid off. In addition to winning a Doris Duke Artist Award and becoming a Guggenheim fellow, Wong was the first Asian American woman to be named Pulitzer Prize finalist in drama. Her work has been featured in the New York Times and National Public Radio and she’s appeared on shows like Fusion’s AM Tonight and several others.

Her list of performances is also long (and most also take back all those grade-school bully-style puns on her own family name): “The Wong Street Journal,” “Going Green the Wong Way,” “Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” She’s also got a book coming out, “Auntie Kristina’s Guide to Asian American Activism.”

But now, as she tours for her “Foodbank” show, times are much different than they were when the idea for the production came about. Her home state was the first place targeted by the Trump Administration in what appears to be an expanding series of shows of force by federal and military authorities.

“It’s horrifying to watch,” said Wong, about immigration raids in L.A. and the use of the National Guard and Marines there.

“But I also find a lot of inspiration in the mutual aid efforts. This is terrifying, to see them just snatching up people … people just trying to find work and doing honest work. And the (agents) are doing it without warrants, which is completely illegal and inhumane… I hate what ICE is doing. I hate, you know, the way the federal government is abusing the use of the National Guard and Marines. … But I do find hope in a lot of how I witness people coming together.”

(An edit was made to the eighth paragraph of this story after publication.)