Allan and Miles were close friends of mine from Mt. SAC. The three of us traveled a lot doing forensics together. But we didn’t just do speech and debate: we destroyed the entire Western United States speech and debate scene. If I sound cocky, it’s because we were two-year students taking on and beating the crap out of four-year students. We won speech tournaments at the local level, at the state level, and at the national level. And we did it while representing the three biggest minority groups in the country: Allan was Asian American; Miles was African American; and well, you know my story.
Allan and Miles both transferred to UCLA a year after I did. As I continued to commute to Westwood from my parents’ house, Miles moved into the dorms while Allan found a cost-effective apartment to live in. Now that we were all at university together, the three of us hung out all the time. We looked like a walking United Colors of Benetton ad. It was an unwritten rule among us that one of them would usually have to take me in for the night if I was too tired to commute home. Eventually this evolved into Miles always sneaking me into the dorm cafeteria during the day, while Allan let me crash in his apartment at night.
It was around this time that I complained to Liesel and Steve about my experience at UCLA. Outside of Jose Luis and the one Chicano theater festival I was a part of, nothing spoke to me, and I still wasn’t cast in anything on the main stage. I was starting to grow resentful from the lack of stories and roles for people of color in theater and began feeling like there would be no place for me in the entertainment industry as a whole that felt honest and real. Luckily, while still not enough representation, I discovered the theater work of John Leguizamo, Tim Miller, Anna Deavere Smith, and Spalding Gray. I wondered out loud if maybe I should write a one-man show.
“Oh, please don’t,” said an almost insulted Steve. “Those can be hard to watch sometimes.”
“Why don’t you get with Miles and Allan and put something together,” suggested Liesel.
“Yeah, like a three-man one-man show,” replied Steve, now a little more open to the idea.
Perhaps there was something to us uniting forces. Allan was getting into slam poetry at the time and Miles was just starting to work the stand-up circuit. I asked the guys if they were up to writing a new show with me. Sure, they thought, as long as they could fit it in between all their schoolwork.
The guys and I met up with Steve and Liesel, and it felt like old times. We had a shorthand with each other from those two solid years of doing forensics together. We quickly handed out assignments. Our first prompt: when was the first time you remember feeling different?
Allan and I took the assignment seriously. Of course, Allan was going to outshine all of us by talking about the first time he remembered hearing the word “chink” on the playground. He shared a heartbreaking story of learning from the girl he had a crush on that he wasn’t as good-looking as Tom Cruise (the American heartthrob Allan idolized) because he was a “chink.” My own writing was not as poignant, but it also had a lot to do with cultural identity because I talked about the year I dyed my hair blond and passed as white, and how cops stopped harassing me and girls started talking to me more. Miles, on the other hand, wrote a sketch about a Black Santa and how nobody would accept this nonwhite Santa at Christmas as he would most likely be forced to deliver toys to little children while doing community service. If Allan always found a way to exceed expectations in his assignments, Miles always knew how to blow them up and make them surprisingly hilarious.
I would work in the mornings at the UCLA law bookstore, then go to all my UCLA theater classes, before finally ending my evenings at Liesel and Steve’s house putting together the building blocks of a new show. After reading Allan’s story, we asked him what he did when the girl called him a “chink.”
“Well,” said Allan, “I told my mom and she said that maybe I could one day get the surgery.”
“What’s the surgery?” I asked naively.
The surgery was eyelid surgery, and it was quite common in Asian American communities. I was floored. I knew Allan, and his very sweet mother, so well, yet I had never heard of this specific incident in his life. I had no clue that mutilation of one’s face was common in the global Asian community in an attempt to appear more Caucasian.
We then looked at my writing, which the group thought was okay, but none of them could understand why I was avoiding the most obvious difficulty I had to deal with: growing up undocumented in America. Oh yeah, I thought. There was that. I wasn’t ready to talk about myself just yet, so I hid behind my parents’ journey. I was receptive to the idea of sharing their story.
The Black Santa sketch Miles wrote was so incredibly funny that we were determined to use it in some capacity, but as everyone did with me, we tried to get Miles to dig a little deeper. We asked him if he remembered the first time he heard “the word.” Oh, did he! Miles said it was in a predominantly white school, with his predominantly white friends as they read Huckleberry Finn. The word makes quite a few appearances in Mark Twain’s novel. And while he had heard it before, it wasn’t until the predominantly white class landed on it in the book and everyone turned to look at him that Miles ever related that word to himself. Fuck. That shit was heavy… but it was also a phenomenal story to share onstage! I was strangely jealous that Miles’s racism story was better than mine.
As the show and its acts were taking shape, we still faced a major problem: what would the title be? We tried not to think about it too much, and just stayed focused on the writing. It was unbelievable to me that the three of us were so vastly different—and literally came from different parts of the world—yet shared that same commonalities of feeling othered at a very young age. These three derogatory terms that kept popping up during our writing process—nigger, wetback, chink—were all trying to take the place of our unique cultural identities.
With the play practically done, the five of us came together to brainstorm on a title. This was a safe space, and there were no bad ideas. We just started spitballing…
“The Race Show?”
“The Vocal Minority?”
“Ethnic Friends?”
“Race-ish?”
“America Redux?”
And then someone jokingly said: “N*GGER WETB*CK CH*NK?”
When a powerful title arrives, it truly lets itself be known. The problem, of course, was how controversial this title would be regardless of our intention of having a discussion around those hateful words. But they kept appearing in a lot of our writing. They were unavoidable. I must admit that Ethnic Friends was a close second, but none of us wanted to be sued for using the font of NBC’s Friends. We chose the more difficult route: to have a dialogue about racist hate speech in America with the actual racist language.
We had our script and title, but now we needed money to put together our show. We needed costumes, sets, and a theater. It was my dream to be able to rent out the Freud Playhouse, which was reserved only for professional touring companies, like the Royal Shakespeare Company. Goddamn it, I thought. Shakespeare strikes again. I was determined to beat the Bard this time around. But alas, the Freud Playhouse was too expensive and out of our marginalized reach. That’s when we came up with the idea to become a student group on campus. Student groups were eligible to apply for campus activities money. Campus activities money came out of our student fees, so we were just applying for the money we had already paid to the university as students. We discovered you only needed four things to become a student group at UCLA. One, have three members: Allan, Miles, and me. Two, have official titles: we all trusted Allan being our treasurer, but I beat Miles to the presidency by highlighting all the things my administration had accomplished while I was senior class president. Three, have a mission statement: we came up with something on the fly. And four, have a name. To this day, if you check the records of UCLA, you will discover there was a student group called N*GGER WETB*CK CH*NK, and that group applied for and received fifteen thousand dollars for our first production. By the way, we only got that funding because nobody in student government wanted to go on the record saying any of those words out loud, which you had to do to bring up any objections with any particular program being funded.
We quickly rented a theater on campus, set the date for our premiere, and then started marketing the show. The marketing was a great lesson on the difference between in-group and out-group jokes. If we had put up posters with our faces on it with our title, people might have gotten it. Instead we put up posters that simply stated “N*GGER WETB*CK CH*NK TONIGHT.” Like Michelle Rodriguez, the uproar was fast and furious. We thought we might shock some people, but never at this magnitude. Ironically enough, the people who were most offended were not of African American, Latin American, or Asian American descent. Our posters were destroyed. Some people would rip off “N*GGER” but leave “WETB*CK” and “CH*NK” because those were okay. Others would cross out all three and write “honky honky honky.” Some people just took the signs home with them. We were an official student group, so we had full permission to advertise the show on campus. I was forced to file a police report on our stolen posters, and when I told the seasoned white police officer the title of our show, he looked me directly in the eyes and all he said was: “How do you spell ‘chink’?”
The night of our first performance, we were nervous wrecks. None of us had invited our parents. We were just focusing on not forgetting our lines and hoping that enough people showed up to justify our renting the 300-seat auditorium. I had never spent that much money on anything before. It didn’t help that a small group of protesters came to picket our show. For one hot second, we did think we’d made a huge mistake putting this show together. But then, out of nowhere, the audience came out in droves. The auditorium could only seat 300 people, but 450 people showed up. There was so much excitement around the show that the protesters gave up and joined the line to try to get in themselves. We got in trouble with the venue because people broke the exit door to sneak in and watch the show. It was mayhem. And then we took the stage.
I still cry thinking about those early performances. There was so much riding on a single show. On one level, we wanted people to like our writing. On another level, we wanted people to like our acting. And on yet another, we wanted people to like us as human beings. The response and the reaction to that first night were overwhelming. Buzz quickly built around campus. Who were these guys? What was this show? And what hunger did they tap into that everyone seemed to suddenly want to talk about race? Then we did what no other student group had ever done before: we walked up to the Freud Playhouse and handed them a check from the earnings we’d made in the first two shows. We rented out the professional touring theater. We were now set to take the main stage at UCLA.
Hugh Hart, an L.A. Times journalist, heard about our show and wanted to come witness it for himself at the Freud Playhouse. Unfortunately, the night of the Freud performance it started to rain. Being that it was Los Angeles, we feared that nobody would show up, and that the nearly six-hundred-seat Freud Playhouse would be empty except for Hugh himself. But that wasn’t the story that was meant to be. Instead, the L.A. Times journalist wrote about how hundreds of people stood in the cold and in the pouring rain, wrapped around the theater, just to experience a show that had now developed a cult following. He titled the piece: “Nasty Words, Wicked Fun.” Hugh’s article created even more buzz for us.
My theater mentor, Jose Luis, pulled me aside after our two sold-out Freud Playhouse performances and in a stoic fashion said, “I cannot say the title of your play, but it’s important and I want to produce it at the Los Angeles Theater Center.” And just like that, NWC was prepped for its first union, professional run in downtown LA. Packing the show with hundreds of college students was one thing. A general audience of judgmental Angelenos who only went to theater in LA if it was produced by Center Theatre Group was quite another.
Now with the support of the Latino Theater Company, we continued the success of NWC in Los Angeles. Liesel and Steve stepped up to codirect the show. Additionally, Steve oversaw the new set and costume designs, while Liesel focused on tech and lighting design—leaving Miles, Allan, and me free to work on our performances and postshow Q&As, which we knew there would be a ton of. We quickly built an audience in downtown LA, and it began selling out. I partially credit our success to my family. You know I had so many friends and aunts and cousins that we sold out the first two weeks without a problem. The Latino Theater Company also had a remarkable following, so the affluent Latinos came out in droves. We extended the run in downtown twice, and the only reason we had to put an end to it was not because there was a lack of interest, but because we had finals. Allan and I were the first in our families to graduate from college in the United States. For that reason, kicking ass on our finals was more important than the dream of having an extended sold-out theater run in Los Angeles. NWC, however, achieved both.
After the three of us graduated from UCLA (Allan and Miles with their BAs and me with my MA), the five of us collectively signed with a management company. But not just any management company. David Lieberman was a master of touring performing arts centers. He managed the who’s who of national touring companies. He represented The Actors’ Gang, Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Circle in the Square, the Watts Prophets, Kronos Quartet, and now N*GGER WETB*CK CH*NK. In case you were doing the math in your head, we went from a student show to a professional run in downtown LA to a national tour in just three months.