The Wangs vs. the World(88)
After signing up, he still had half an hour to kill. He should have been excited, sitting there in that wood-paneled bar, a whiskey and Coke in front of him, waiting to go onstage. Instead, he was lonely. The thirty long minutes felt like a weight. One extended sip through that skinny red straw and his drink was gone. All the guys around him—and it was mostly guys—they looked like people he might be friends with except they wore really lame T-shirts and they weren’t actually his friends.
Maybe this was depression. Tak took Prozac and went to a therapist. They’d talked about it once. Andrew rolled his eyes at himself. Was two days of being homeless really all it took to knock him off-kilter? He ordered another drink.
By the time the emcee finally called his name, drawling it out so that it seemed to go on forever, an endless lazy a sound, Andrew had already toggled his mental state back and forth between boredom and anxiety and anticipation at least half a dozen times. He’d practiced the last minute of this set over and over in front of the full-length mirror in his dorm, so even the uncertainty of working with props wasn’t enough to keep him nervous and keyed up. But he was a professional. He’d leave it all on the stage.
“Yo, is that you?” the guy next to him asked.
“Yep.”
“Good luck, man.” Andrew checked his pocket to make sure everything was in place, downed the last of his drink, and ran up the narrow room just as the emcee ribbed him. “Ain’t nothing funny about taking your time, alright!”
Andrew catapulted himself onstage and shook the emcee’s hand before turning around to look out at the room. LSU frat boys, townies, and tourists. He spread his arms out.
“So, I’m Asian. Mm-hm. Yeah.”
There were a couple cheers as he turned his head right and left, showing his profile.
“Yep. One hundred percent Asian. I know you want to know what kind. Because people always say they can’t tell the difference between Asians, right? And that goes all ways. Like, you can’t tell the difference between particular Asians, and you also can’t tell the difference between different types of Asians. You know right now you’re all thinking, Is he kimchee and born-again Christian, or is he sushi and octopus porn??”
He leaned in and whispered, “Oh, or is he that guy I used to work with? That real quiet one in the IT department with the Hello Kitty license plate frame??” Straightened up. “Except you don’t say any of it out loud because you know that thinking all Asians look alike is one of those stereotypes that’s supposed to be super offensive, right?”
He was starting to feel like himself again. This was different from the club in Texas, where Barbra had seen him bomb. These people were laughing. Who could say why? He saw a guy shush his girlfriend when she leaned over to whisper something. Yes. He pumped a mental fist and then stepped a little to the left, turned, and said, in a John-Wayne-as-frat-boy voice that sailed out of him, booming and false, “So, hey, bro, you Korean or you Chinese?”
Stepped back to the right, turned, mimed a super-offended, borderline effeminate gasp and immediately hated himself for it. Still, he pivoted forward to face the audience. “I’ll tell you a secret . . . we can’t tell the difference either.” He pointed to an Asian guy in the crowd who luckily hadn’t moved since Andrew had first spotted him. “You, you could be a real cool-looking Chinese guy or a real dorky Japanese guy. I mean, I really can’t tell. ’Cause, dudes, honestly, we do all kind of look alike.” Thank god that got almost as big of a laugh as he’d thought it would, which buoyed him, making him talk even more expansively. “Oh, by the way, I’m Chinese, so just think, like, dumplings and human rights abuses.”
“But you know who else I can’t tell the difference between? White people.” He glanced at a few of the white people in the audience, half hoping that they would look upset. “I mean, first of all, British, Irish, Scottish? Uh, whatevs. Who knows. Oh, and British people, yeah, you don’t look all that different from Germans. Sorry, dudes, y’all both white. Oh, and you all-American white Republicans? Um, yeah. Your average Texan and your average Frenchman? You both wear high-waisted pants and have butter-based diets. Not that different. Sorry, haters. But let’s talk about the particular, because you guys are all sitting there thinking, Oh no, unh-unh, no way, we might be all ‘American’ but I do not look like this loser on my left, and I definitely don’t look like that mouth-breathing scab in front of me.” Air quotes. What the f*ck was wrong with him?
Crowd work. Crowd work. A good stand-up does good crowd work. Andrew held out a hand towards a white guy with a Nirvana T-shirt and light brown hair that hung to his shoulders. “You, grunge boy, nodding down there. That’s what you think, right? Weeeell . . . the only difference I see is that you’ve got a Nirvana shirt on, and that equally brown-haired guy next to you has a Pearl Jam shirt, so you’re probably a little cooler.” Okay, that didn’t make much sense, but the important thing was to try. And out in the audience, someone shouted back, gratifyingly, “Cobain rules!”
“By the way, white people, that’s how we tell the males in your species apart—by hair color. It’s kind of like with cats or horses, you know? ‘Oh, Dave? Yeah, he’s okay, he’s just a tabby, dime a dozen. Eh, kind of a sloppy drunk . . . Brian? Yeah, yeah, that guy’s cool, he’s a palomino. Real nice coat. Shiny. Yo, a little tip: Try to get him on your team when you’re playing Trivial Pursuit. Man, that guy knows everything about the ’80s. Declan? Oh, he’s real weird, but kind of beautiful, not in a gay way or anything, man. It’s just, he’s a tortoiseshell, and he’s got these white paws and these yellow eyes that just look through you, man, like he knows something . . .’”