Nuances: Our Asian Stories

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GUEST BIO

Ivy Le is a Vietnamese American comedian, actress, and writer based in Austin, Texas. She is the creator of the critically-acclaimed Spotify Studios podcast FOGO: Fear of Going Outside, a nature show by the most reluctant host ever. FOGO is featured on Delta flights and recommended by The Guardian, CBC, Oprah and, inexplicably, Outside. She hosts the only queer comedy open mic in Austin, and performs at comedy festivals all over the country. She is also mom to two as-yet untraumatized kids..

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DEFINITIONS

• CPTSD: Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) can result from experiencing chronic trauma, such as prolonged child abuse or domestic violence. It’s closely related to PTSD and borderline personality disorder.
• ADHD: ADHD is a long-term (chronic) brain condition that causes executive dysfunction, which means it disrupts a person’s ability to manage their own emotions, thoughts and actions.
• Heteronormativity: When heterosexuality (cis-man & woman) is the norm, and any other sexual orientation or gender identity is seen as outside the norm, and hence has less privilege.

Additional Music Links:

Nuances Podcast – curated Spotify | Apple Music playlists with past guests, hosts & more Asian diaspora artists.

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Featured song: “Wasted Space In My Heart” by Sherry-Lynn Lee

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Transcript

Lazou: Ivy Le is a Vietnamese American comedian, actress, and writer based in Austin, Texas. She’s the creator of the critically acclaimed Spotify Studios podcast, FOGO Fear of Going Outside: a nature show by the most reluctant host ever. FOGO is featured on Delta flights and recommended by The Guardian, CBC, Oprah, and, inexplicably, Outside.

She hosts the only queer comedy open mic in Austin and performs at comedy festivals all over the country. She’s also a mom to two as yet untraumatized kids. Ivy, thank you so much for being here today.

Ivy: Thanks Lazou. I’m so happy to be here.

Lazou: I love your show, by the way.

Ivy: Oh, you listened to FOGO.

Lazou: Oh yeah I listened to the entire season two and I just loved it. But we’ll talk more about that. So let’s start from the beginning. Where’d you grow up and what was that like?

Ivy: I’m from Texas. I was born in Houston. I was raised in Dallas. And then I had a reckless youth in Georgia. I came back to Austin, Texas to raise my family. I was the first American in my family. There’s a big wave of Vietnamese immigrants in the late seventies, early eighties, obviously because of the Vietnam War. And then the next big wave came in the late nineties, early two thousands after we normalized relations with Vietnam in 1995. So when my parents first got here, there was not a whole lot of infrastructure for Vietnamese immigrants. Also back then poor people lived in the city. So I’ve always been a city person. But then by the time we were able to bring more of our family here in the late nineties, we were very eager to reunite. We all set them up in the suburbs. Now, like in the, 2020s, our demographics have completely changed again where now, wealthier people are gentrifying the cities and poor people are getting pushed out to the suburbs. But I am holding on to my city life as long as I can. ’cause I’m just too old to adjust. But basically I’m from the hood in Dallas,

Lazou: What was that experience like growing up?. Was it a pretty diverse place Were you the only Asian.

Ivy: Dallas, Texas is an extremely diverse place. I was absolutely not the only Asian. When I went home from school on Friday afternoon, I would often not see another white person until I went back to school on Monday morning. In elementary school, there were kids who were like, when I grow up, I wanna be a dope fiend.

And, you know, there, and we’re like, boy, you’re so silly. What does that even mean when you’re in elementary school. And then in high school, I lived literally between an Albertsons, which was a local grocery store here. That was not a shopping center that a young teenage girl should be in .

It was just a dangerous place. There were people being trafficked. It was just not a place that a teenage girl should be alone. I would not allow a teenage girl to go be alone at that shopping center. And then on the other side of my neighborhood was the Hong Kong supermarket.

It’s just a huge city. Texas is extremely diverse. People forget Beyonce is from Texas, Megan thee stallion is from Texas. Texas is huge and extremely diverse. But people forget it because the face of power here doesn’t necessarily represent the actual population here.

I learned Spanish growing up. All my dad’s coworkers spoke Spanish. My mom worked at the postal service. She was an extremely diverse union. All kinds of people would help her advocate for herself. Black people, Latino people, other kinds of Asian people. They had solidarity in the union together, even if they socially had their separations.

I heard this story about Obama. The president of China was visiting Obama in the White House. And he takes him to his daughters and says, was just super proud. Oh, my daughters are studying Chinese in school. And he tells his daughters like, speak Chinese. to my coworker, basically the president of China, and I laugh because when I was growing up, my dad was so proud I was taking Spanish in school. His coworkers would come over to hang out and he’d be like, oh, my daughter’s studying Spanish. And I’m like, wow. All dads are the same, all dads. It does not matter how much money you have. Dads are the same at every class.

But yeah, that I just grew up in a really diverse place and my school did not have a lot of Asian people because I lived on a street that was between two high schools and I could have gone to the Asian high school but I really wanted to go to college, and I knew that if I went to that high school, I would not make it to college. In America, Vietnamese people historically don’t go to college. Only one in four of us go past high school. So I knew if I went to the Asian high school where I knew too many people who were not college bound, like it was just not gonna happen for me.

And so I decided to go to the quote unquote white high school just so that I would have better resources and have a better shot and not be so distracted. And it worked. I did end up being the first person in my family to go to college. But I did not have the experience of being like the only Asian person in a really lame white suburb.

Lazou: So when did you decide you wanted to become a comedian?

Ivy: It was not that long ago. It was early 2019, I did a sex positive storytelling show called BedPost Confessions. You can actually still find this story on their podcast. I think they titled it, “Come to Me, Daddy”. And I told a story about sexuality after childbirth.

I had time to do this because after my second child, I was finding it extremely difficult to get back into the workforce. I was getting tons of interviews or I was just not getting the job offers and it was taking so long. I got babies to feed. It was taking so long that I was getting really stressed out about providing for my family.

And so I did this storytelling show. I guess I think I’m witty, but I really have thought of myself more as like a more serious person, like a writer or a spoken word artist or something pretentious like that. And then after the show, all these people came up to me not saying, oh, you should try out comedy.

They assumed I was already a working comedian based on my story about sexuality after childbirth. And for me, I wasn’t sitting there trying to write jokes and punchlines and think about joke structure like I do now as a professional comedian. I was just using humor to help us move through the difficult parts of that story.

coming back into your body and finding your sexuality again and coming to terms with, it’s just not gonna be the same body. And you have to come to terms with that one way or another. Its not always an easy topic to talk about and.

In my life, just generally, because I’m from the hood, right? We use humor to deal with these really difficult topics and talk about them in a way that doesn’t re hurt the person, and so there were I guess, a lot of funny moments in that story, but people assumed I was a working comedian, asked me how to get tickets to my shows and where I was playing, and I was not in a position to turn down career ideas at that point in my life.

I was so desperate. I was like, I gotta sign up for shifts at Sephora. I speak four languages. I gotta figure out how to get in on the translation gigs at the hospital and the courthouse. And retail and translation jobs like that are not good jobs for parents because you don’t have a regular schedule.

Even people who work nine to five jobs in the United States, it is extremely difficult already to get childcare. We do not have enough resources for childcare. And I’m not near any family. Like I can’t just send my kids over to a grandma and grandpa’s house. or something like. It was getting to that point where I’m like, if I get that job offer I’m just gonna have to figure out a way because I need a job. And so I started researching comedy and it turned out that , it was true.

There were people willing to pay for my comedy and I took it to feed my babies. I know that’s the most immigrant ass answer ever to How did you get into comedy?

It’s like you’re from your home country and you’re a fricking doctor or something, and then you come to America and people just want your food. And you’re like, I guess I’ll open a restaurant.

Lazou: It’s a great entry to comedy.

What’s your process like when you’re writing comedy? When you’re writing a bit?

Ivy: So after I was like, okay, well I guess I’m gonna go be a comic now. I wasted months writing early scripts of FOGO, trying to be funny on purpose, and it all sucked. I had to trash everything that I wrote and start over again. So trying to be funny on purpose does not work for me. What I need to do, because it’s just who I am, is to tell the truth.

As precisely and faithfully as I can. And when that happens, half the audience will cry and moan and ugh and awe, and half the audience will laugh non consensually. And that’s okay. That’s actually the measure of a really good Ivy Le joke actually.

Lazou: How long have you had that idea?

Ivy: I applied with this idea to a podcast accelerator for underrepresented voices at Spotify called Sound Up. In 2018, it was their very first one. 18,000 women applied. They did not expect that, and only 10 women were gonna get it. I did end up being one of the 10, but when I was applying, I’ve applied to a lot of these hunger game types of competitions for we’re gonna, we’re gonna, we’re gonna diversify the books that we’re gonna publish.

So we’re gonna have a fight to the death to pick the one person of color we’re gonna publish this year or like the one poor that we’re gonna let into our college. Like I’ve been in a lot of these kinds of competitions and they feel so scarce. They put you in such a scarcity mentality, that I’m like, oh, I need to come up with something like capital I important. I got into podcasts when I had my first kid and I was breastfeeding all the time, and they’re really greasy you need both your hands to breastfeed it. It is not a natural thing. They don’t just like clip on like magnets or anything like that.

You really have to pay attention or you’ll drop a baby or lose a nipple or something. So I couldn’t watch tv. I was listening to podcasts for hours a day while I was trying to take care of my baby, and I had already a running list of 200 podcast ideas. But when this call came out, I didn’t pick one of them.

I felt that it had to be something that would help my community or give back or something like that. And I came up with all these new podcast ideas, like the gentrification of food in my city, or about maternal mortality in my minorities, or just raising children in a racist society, or the podcasts, dude, I would never listen to. I would never listen to them. And it was so absurd. I care about these issues. But this list was so serious and so absurd that I just finally, it hit me. I’m like, why am I not allowed to be a fun person? I am a fun person, right? So I said I gotta start over. I need to come up with an idea where my point of view matters.

It’s not about trauma, it’s not about how terrible it is to be blah, blah, blah, blah, in America, because it was something I would never, I don’t need to listen to, I would never listen to. And so finally I realized, oh my God, I love nature shows. I watch nature shows all the time. Nature is a cultural construct.

Your idea of what is nature and what are appropriate outdoor activities or what is recreation or what should your relationship with nature be, varies wildly according to the social context that you grew up in. And I’m like, that’s perfect. I love nature shows and there’s never been a nature show by somebody who wasn’t a reckless white man.

I’m gonna make this nature show. And yeah, it got through. Everybody found it compelling. It’s wild that people think the show is so unique that we’re doing a nature show from an indoor perspective, when you consider that we’re an indoor species. Most people are indoor people.

That’s kind of the foundation of architecture and society and city planning, But we’ve never had a nature show from that perspective until now. Ah.

Lazou: I guess because I grew up in a different place I didn’t realize that nature here was so white dominated

Ivy: Oh,

Lazou: because after I moved here, I didn’t really go outside. I was pretty much an indoor person. And,

Ivy: hold up. Hold up. Were you an outdoor person before and then you moved here and you became an indoor person?

Lazou: I went to Canada first. Canada was way too cold. People were like, let’s go skiing. I’m like

Ivy: Nope. Hard, no.

Lazou: I think partly too, it’s everything is a long drive away, and I’m from a small island where you drive two hours and you’re on the other side of the country, like that’s the furthest you can go. Like anything that’s over an hour drive for me it’s eh, too much work.

Ivy: And I’ve never been to where you’re from, but I visited other islands and the construct of nature there is much more porous. What is indoor versus what is outdoor is a much more porous thing. People let the outdoors in and they let the indoors out, so to speak, and the architecture and the way people live and eat and things like that.

Lazou: Yeah.

Ivy: Whereas like here, it’s a much harsher divide between indoor and outdoor spaces.

Lazou: But I was a lot more outdoors there partly because I was in the scouts group and you have to be outdoors.

Ivy: I mean the fact that you signed up for that, right? And you were like willing to do that, just says like how default outdoors you were. And that’s just wild that you come here to this place where I’m from, where I’m like, yeah, the outdoors is white people shit.

It’s more nuanced than that, obviously, but it’s fascinating to me that somebody who was an outdoor person from a more outdoor culture comes here and becomes an indoor person.

Lazou: I think a lot of it is. The car culture too. There’s no easy way to get to places and there’s always a lot of traffic and I’m just like, not worth it.

Ivy: Not worth it. Wow. So when you listened to my show, were you able to relate or were you just recontextualizing what you’d experienced in the United States since you got here?

Lazou: I think I’ve been in the country enough that I could relate. I can see the historical context and how things are set up not to help people of color explore the outdoors. It did make me think about what my experience has been over there versus what it has been here.

I really liked the interviews that you had with people and all the perspectives that you brought in. It is such a great show. I cannot say enough, good things about this show people, go listen to this show.

Ivy: If you just want a good laugh about the outdoors, yeah, go listen to the show. I hate that the history of America is so fraught with trauma and race that I do end up having to get serious on the show a couple times in order to just tell the truth and be precise. I do have to address some things that just become big elephants in the room.

But the thing about FOGO: fear of going outside is it’s not a show where I have to explain myself to white people. If anything, it’s a show where a lot of white people have to explain themselves to me,

Lazou: Yeah.

Ivy: where I’m just like, why are you like this?

Lazou: So you said before that you do not want representation for representation’s sake. What do you mean by that?

Ivy: I think we celebrate a lot oh, look like a person who looks like us is in a mainstream movie or something. And that’s great, but there are people who stop at that. The problem with representation for representation’s sake, representation as a goal instead of a strategy toward another goal is that especially with Asian people, the power structure will use representation as an excuse to not change.

So they’ll be like, oh, but look, we got an Asian person on the screen. We’re good. We’re not racist. We don’t need to change anything about the way we do things. And the power structure that disadvantages marginalized groups in the United States, and probably globally, it goes much deeper than just who’s on the screen.

I think a really classic example is that show Kim’s convenience. We had all these great Asian Canadian and Asian American actors on the screen, which great. It was fun, ugh. That’s when we realized that Simu Liu is hot. They made him super hot. I was so worried ’cause they hold off the reveal on the brother for a few episodes. I was like, oh God, I hope he’s hot. And he was, they made him so hot in that show and that’s great. But the writer’s room was white. The directors were white, the executives were white. They canceled the show.

They had a couple weird storylines that you’re like, it’s being acted by Asian actors like, but this is not an Asian Canadian story. This doesn’t seem right. It seems like a parody of what somebody thinks being Asian Canadian is in a couple parts and then you see just how the show was treated by the network.

And that’s the problem with representation for representation’s sake, right? Is that then your image, your presence can be used to uphold a power structure and entrench it and enrich people continually at the expense of your community instead of actually changing the structures that keep us just from having true equity. That’s what I mean by that. We should not choose representation for representation sake.

Lazou: Yeah, I agree with you. Another thing that came up last time you and I talked was Fancy Asians. You wanna talk about that and what you wish fancy Asians understood about their privilege? I should say our privilege, ’cause I’m a fancy Asian,

I guess.

Ivy: Fancy Asian and Jungle Asian. That’s a joke by Ali Wong. I did not get to come up with that. I’m very sad I did not personally come up with that distinction. The jungle Asians are like, Vietnamese, Filipinos, Cambodians, Southeast Asians, and then the Fancy Asians are Koreans and Chinese and Japanese people who largely come over for business or educational opportunities as opposed to be lower compensated labor or just ’cause of refugees or whatever. And a lot of fancy Asians can do this thing that say white women do where they’re exercising their proximity to whiteness at the same time that they’re trying to get the quote unquote advantages of oppression.

And then all of a sudden because they have the power and the ear of power and they have the resources like the money and the free time to advocate for themselves, they can forget that they are actually the most privileged in that coalition of people. We’re not a monolith right, but just like, L G B T Q I A, right? That’s not a monolith. Gender and orientation are not the same thing, but it’s a political identity that says we’re gonna stand in solidarity with all these issues that may or may not directly affect me personally, but when we stand together, we’re stronger.

And wherever we have privilege, we should leverage it to help the other people. Like in this political group. Asians getting painted as a political monolith. We all know, all Asian people know. That’s not true. I have some crazy trumpy aunts. You know what I mean?

We know that we’re very politically diverse. We don’t speak the same language. We have wild income inequality even within ethnic groups. I think Koreans have some of the highest income disparities.

And then there are also these intersectional issues that don’t affect fancy Asians at all. The way that ICE is going after Southeast Asians to deport us is heavy, right? In Texas, Vietnamese men are incarcerated. Our population isn’t as big, but are incarcerated at the same rate as black men in Texas. And Fancy Asians do not understand sometimes the damage that they do when they make their goal proximity to whiteness. There’s a difference between fighting for the rights of everyone. Like things that are privileges to some should be rights for all. There are just some things like education a good education, right?

A good K 12 education should just be a right for everyone. We should not want illiterate kids in our society, right? But instead, if people are fighting to entrench their privilege or fighting to just get their kids into white schools, as opposed to making sure that all children in their district, for example, are getting the resources that they need, then all they’re doing is trying to become the oppressor themselves instead of breaking a system of oppression. And that’s what I mean. And I’m both right. I’m from the hood, but like I am a fancy Asian now, right? I’m educated now I have access to the ears of power.

I’ll speak real good English most of the time, even though I’m from Texas, right? Like I’m the first natural born United States citizen, so I can speak my mind without being afraid of being deported. And so I’m kind of a bridge between both but it’s in this bridge, in this role of, having been exposed to both, that’s where I’m able to see the blind spots of Asians who not only not realize that they’re becoming white adjacent and that the definition of whiteness constantly changes. Like how Irish people will be like, oh, we used to be black, or Italians didn’t used to be white and Jews didn’t used to be white.

But race is a social construct and whiteness changes itself and morphs itself and adapts itself in whatever way it needs to maintain its supremacy. And that’s not a good thing for them to be like if you uphold anti-blackness, we’ll let you into the white club.

That’s not a good bargain.

Lazou: Yeah. Bad deal.

Ivy: It is not a good deal. Yeah, that’s what I want people to understand about their privilege.

Lazou: When did you realize that you didn’t wanna be assimilating and you didn’t wanna be part of that?

Ivy: I think I realized that I wasn’t assimilating, I just wasn’t I have this joke, my family thinks I’m white. But white people don’t. People clock me as weird, people in my family think I’m weird, but they’re just like, oh, it’s probably ’cause Ivy’s whitewashed, but white people are like, no, this bitch is just weird. You know? I think they meet me and they sense that I’m queer, they sense that I have a disability, which is ADHD.

It’s been very weird for me to come to terms with the fact that I’m not an ally to disability rights. I’m not an ally. I’m in it. It’s very hard to unpack your internalized ableism and really embrace that and admit that to yourself. I’m still struggling with it, but I think it explains a lot. When you have you have CPTSD , ADHD people clock you as weird. So you don’t get to assimilate. You don’t get to belong. It’s not ’cause I have imposter syndrome, it’s ’cause people treat me like I don’t belong and that’s why I feel like I don’t belong.

And after a certain point, my dad was like, you just can’t care about that kind of thing. The reason why I’m named Ivy. People my age are not named Ivy. It was a very unusual name. I got bullied for it all the time. And it’s ’cause my mom wanted to name me an American name like Elizabeth. My dad wanted to give me a very Vietnamese name. He’s very proud of being Vietnamese.

He’s very patriotic. He was military in Vietnam. He wanted to gimme a Vietnamese name and he likes really unique names. And so he came up with a name, Ái Vy, which is tonal.

It’s two words, two different names. And he, we paired ’em together to him it was a really beautiful name that meant something bright and shiny on high as in the moon.

And my mom went to her English teacher. She asked the name, of course, they can’t hear the tones, and so they said, oh, yeah, Ivy’s a legit name.

It’s just a regular name. So they’re like, okay, compromise. We’re gonna spell it the English way. People are gonna recognize it as an English name. But then at home, obviously everybody’s calling me Ái Vy with the Vietnamese tones. And I did well in school. I had a cousin who was fixing to come over in the late nineties who was very young and they decided to name her Ivy. Because they said what’s a good American name to give our kid right before we immigrate? ’cause the people in the late nineties, they had more time to prepare to come. And they said well, Ivy’s the kid in our family that’s doing good in school, she seems to have assimilated well enough. And so they named her Ivy as well. And it’s just spread like now there are thousands and thousands of young Asian American women named Ivy, and I’m pretty sure that’s me and my dad’s fault. That story spread they’re like, oh, here’s a girl that’s successfully assimilated and her name is Ivy and it sounds like this Vietnamese name.

And now just boom, tons of Ivys and they’re all at least 15 years younger than me.

Lazou: Wow.

Ivy: People thought I was assimilating, but I wasn’t. And I get frustrated like that sometimes. ’cause, my mom’s always oh, why can’t you just be a dental hygenist? She’s always trying to gimme advice whether she’s like, people make a lot more money on YouTube than you’re making, and it’s just frustrating because they did do a lot of stuff alone and they had no guidance being immigrants in this country. But, the oldest daughters we had to do a lot alone too. She’s trying to gimme career advice, my mom only knew three jobs.

Okay. She has no idea. Nobody in my family knew how to navigate the college admissions process or going to a predominantly white institution. They don’t have white friends. They don’t have white coworkers. Nobody’s ever attempted in my family to make it in Hollywood so I had plenty that I had to do on my own without guidance too. And at a certain point, because I’m the first one to know white people and black people and Latino people outside our community at the scale that I do, I don’t feel a need to assimilate because these people are busted.

White people don’t know how to cut their own mangoes. White people think their food is spicy. Do you know what I mean? Like I don’t wanna assimilate. I am American enough. There is no one standard of being American.

There’s no point in assimilating. I am not assimilating to America. I am making America. I am a queer, weird artist that no one in my family gets. Like I am making what it means to be American. America has to assimilate to me.

Lazou: Switching gears a bit, you’re a mom of two. What’s something that nobody prepared you for when it comes to becoming a parent?

Ivy: Oh man, how hard it is to raise kids without hitting them. They are such pussy ass kids. They don’t know how to take a hint ’cause I don’t hit them. I want so badly to break the cycle of intergenerational trauma, and part of that is obviously not enacting violence on my kids.

And I want that for them ’cause I want them to be able to fly. I don’t want them to be, scrappy and down in the trenches like me. I don’t want them to survive. I want them to thrive, which is just a different skill set and a different set of concerns. But it didn’t prepare me for how not independent they would be.

If you don’t hate your family life and you don’t wanna run away from home, you have no need to learn how to do things for yourself. You just express your needs and expect them to be fulfilled by your parents. That’s nuts. That’s freaking nuts. And it’s so obnoxious. I’m experiencing the consequences of my own success. You’re supposed to pretend that college is just assumed, that’s what middle class people do. And then poor people try to be that way with their kids, and so I’ll periodically talk about oh yeah, you need to help me cook because you’re gonna go off to college and you need to learn how to cook. So come help your mom in the kitchen And one day my sweet boy was just like really upset. He was like, I don’t wanna leave. Why are you, he was just really upset about the idea that he was just gonna have to move away from home. And it never occurred to me that there would be people that would be really sad about that idea, leaving home.

And so I was like, oh baby. No you never have to leave home. You are only going to leave home if something really great happens and you’re really excited about leaving home. You get a job in another city and you’re super excited and then you leave, or you get into a college you actually really wanna go to that’s not here.

So then you leave and go on an adventure or you fall in love and you wanna go start a new home with that person. Only then, only something amazing will make you leave home. Like you don’t, I’m not just gonna shove you out, and force you to leave and you’re like crying on the street.

Lazou: You wouldn’t think about it, but I guess looking back, a kid would be like, why are you always talking about me leaving home? Do you want me to leave now?

Ivy: It just never occurred to me. There’s just all these unintended consequences of breaking the cycle of intergenerational trauma and one of them is your pussy ass kids are always like mama, mama. And I’m like, what do you want? What do you want? This time when I was eight years old, I could lay tile and run a customer service desk at a restaurant. Do you know what I mean? My eight year old still wants me to make his dinner for him.

Lazou: Any other motherhood myths you’d like to bust?

Ivy: The biggest myth about motherhood or parenthood in general is about community.

I think a lot of Asian people grow up and they blame everything that’s wrong with them on their culture and their parents. What they think is culture is actually trauma.

Just like in a regular person, trauma, if you don’t know about it and it’s decontextualized, you think it’s just their personality. So it’s the same thing, trauma that happened at a mass level. As did like for my particular part of the diaspora, right? It happens on a mass level all at once to a ton of people and then after a long time it gets decontextualized and it looks like culture, but it’s not culture.

If anything, going back to what is actually my culture and my values has made me able to be a much more effective and more mentally healthy mom than like these white moms are out there isolated in their little boxes, like they’re in solitary confinement as soon as they have kids and they’re out here with these cheeky jokes that are not funny.

Is it really coffee in this cup or is it wine? I’m like this bitch is doing a cry for help. She is drowning. She has an alcohol problem now to cope and nobody is supporting her and that’s not right. That is not how we were supposed to mom. The way we’re supposed to do it is our cultural heritage, which is in community with each other, right?

All of us are responsible for all the children, whether or not you have children. We are all responsible for the next generation. In our particular society, the accountability for that responsibility is meted out according to guardianship, right? But just because that’s where the accountability lies does not mean that the rest of us don’t have a responsibility to come and support these families, and each other in our community.

So I have built a very large supportive community around my children, people with children, people without children. It does not matter as long as they have a common goal and they care about the future and the next generation. We need all kinds of people, right? But if they are parents, for example, but their perspective is how do we entrench just our children’s privilege, possibly at the expense of other children who should have these privileges as rights? Then they’re not coming to the birthday party, right? They do not have a common vision for the more equitable world I think my children are gonna want to be left with instead of having to to deal with the problems that we push down the road. And so we have this community of people who care about our children very much, they’re adopted aunts and uncles, and play different roles in their lives.

And so even when I’m being a comic and I have to spend a lot of nights away, and I feel like I’m a bad mom and I probably am being a bad mom, but my children are not gonna become people who you think of who had bad moms, right? Because they had all these other adults, like they may still have a bad mom, but they will still turn out to be good adults because they had all of these adults like coming around as a community to support them.

And that is not an American perspective. That is a perspective from societies that are more collective, like the ones that my parents came from.

Lazou: You’re also openly bi. What has your experience been as an Asian American bi woman?

Ivy: Five stars. I highly recommend it. I think everyone should try being an Asian American bi woman. Now, I’m from the south. Even my reckless youth, it was very taboo to speak out loud, but I would not say that I was closeted. Queerness was not addressed and the way they’re trying to get the world to be now. It actually was that when I was growing up, right? there’s a lot of politicians trying to put us back in that world, where people did not know that queerness exists right? Don’t say gay and banning books and things like that. But because I was also the only English speaker in my family for a really long time. I did not know that I needed to be closeted. I thought everyone was bi and that you didn’t have sex till you’re married. And I felt like everybody who spoke English or Vietnamese agreed on that. Okay. And I’m like, you just gonna fall in love with who you fall in love with.

And that’s just a roll of the dice, what gender they were gonna be. And then you marry the person that you love. ’cause that’s what all the Disney movies say. And then that’s how the government finds out if you’re gay is straight. And then that’s what all the hubbub on the news is about.

I dunno, because you, when you don’t speak English, you’re learning English, you just gotta piece together your context clues. And these are my context clues. Obviously I was wrong, right? And so by the time I figured out, it took a long time for me to figure out that not everyone is bi. So it never occurred to me to hide it. I think anybody who spent any amount of time with me, especially on a Friday or Saturday night out in Atlanta, knew that I was not straight, knew that I was bi. Southerners are very polite about it, right? If they’re not bigoted, then they just don’t mention it because it’s taboo to speak.

And then people who really wanna pin you down, sometimes it’s somebody trying to be in community with you, but a lot of times it’s somebody who is bigoted, right? Is trying to pin you down because it was so taboo to say, from everybody, it’s not just that you weren’t straight enough for the straight, you also weren’t gay enough for the gays.

So it was taboo, period across the spectrum, right? I would just say in my southern way look I’m just sensitive to beauty. Which is the honest to God truth. That is the honest to God truth. You could not dispute that I wasn’t trying to pull the wool over anybody’s eyes. That’s how I was dealing with that.

I only came out quote unquote, as if I was ever really hiding it. I only started talking about it explicitly after working for several years in the civil rights space here in Texas, which is a terrible space to work in, if you can imagine. I worked alongside some really incredible young queer activists. Young people clocked me as queer a mile away. It was never a discussion. They absolutely can tell, they didn’t grow up with as much heteronormativity as I did. So they could clock you a mile away. It never even occurred to them that I might not be out.

So these young people, one of their complaints about how my generation handled L G B T Q rights was focusing on the wealthy white gay man as the face of gay marriage and then gay marriage being the main issue. And they have very valid reasons for that critique. So one of the strategies that’s important for them is by visibility. It’s one of the pillars of their strategy moving forward. And I’m getting on in years and so whatever the young people trying to take the mantle of leadership tell me to do, I’m just gonna get in line and do it. And so that’s when I started being very explicit about my flaming bisexuality.

Lazou: Was that difficult for your family to wrap their heads around?

Ivy: No,

Lazou: That’s great.

Ivy: Because I have kids, right? It was illegal to marry your gender when I got married and they got their grandkids. So what do they care?

Lazou: Awesome. What’s next for you? What are you excited about?

Ivy: I don’t know what’s next for me. Hollywood’s a bit of a mess right now. I had really hoped that this is the year that I would be able to join a writer’s room. And I’m so happy that the writers are striking because I know that even if I had joined a writer’s room, I would be dealing with the same instability. That’s the reason why they’re striking, right? One day I’m gonna join a writer’s room and I’m gonna be really grateful they handled all this stuff and stood strong when they did so that I could walk into the industry as a writer with my head held high.

But my kids are too young for me to tour comedy.

So right now, I’m just writing my scripts to just get as good as I can. Be ready when the writer’s strike is over, writing my jokes and doing as much standup as I can. But I don’t know. I hope it’s a TV show. I hope what’s next is a FOGO TV show, but, we can’t do that until the am t p gets their act together.

Lazou: Yeah. All right. We’ll close out the show with rapid fire questions. These are one word or one phrase answers. You don’t have to explain, but you can if you want to.

What languages do you speak?

Ivy: English, Spanish, German, and Vietnamese.

Lazou: What’s an Asian food that you should like, but don’t I.

Ivy: Ah, bitter melon. ‘ cause I’m getting to that age demographic where I should like bitter melon, but, ah, fuck it. No.

Lazou: What’s an Asian food you’ll never get tired of?

Ivy: Ah, fish sauce and broken rice.

Lazou: Who’s your favorite comedian right now?

Ivy: Ali Siddiq outta Houston, Texas. He’s got a new special on YouTube too.

Lazou: What’s your favorite FOGO episode?

Ivy: Oh, season one, episode four is a spoof, a nature documentary. Following me where I go through an r e i and it’s hysterical.

Lazou: All right. Thank you so much for doing this. It was a blast chatting with you.

Ivy: Thanks, Lazou