Ali Wong

The stand-up comic Ali Wong wrote Dear Girls in 2019 as fourteen letters to her two young daughters, with a fifteenth from their father, Justin Hakuta, closing the book in the same form. Wong covers her Chinese American father, an anaesthetist, her mother's arrival from Huế in Vietnam, her own hungry years working small rooms, dating, money and the mechanics of having children while touring. Born in San Francisco in 1982, she studied Asian American studies at UCLA, joined the writing staff of the sitcom Fresh Off the Boat, and taped the Netflix hour Baby Cobra seven months pregnant, which is the performance that made her name.