Kristina Wong

Kristina Wong (Chinese: 黄君儀; pinyin: Huáng Jūnyí) is an American comedian known primarily for her work as a solo theater performer, performance artist, and actor. She identifies as a feminist and her work often tackles themes regarding race, sex, and privilege, often in conjunction with the Asian-American experience, through a satirical lens.

As of 2019^[update], she serves as an elected representative of the Wilshire Center Sub-district 5 Koreatown Neighborhood Council in Los Angeles.

Wong was born in San Francisco to an accountant mother and insurance salesman father. She is a third-generation Chinese American. Her grandmother immigrated to the United States from Guang Mei Cun, a village near Kaiping county, in the 1930s. Wong attended an all-girls Catholic high school, where she took speech class.

Wong attended the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). For her senior project, she created “Big Bad Chinese Mama”, a fake mail-order bride website to tackle fetishization of Asian women by white males. The site was advertised in fetish chat rooms, next to masseuse ads in the local newspaper, and optimized in search engines to return alongside searches for Asian porn. It featured biographies of real Asian women accompanied by photographs of them in fighting poses and abrasive language critiquing the viewer's potential search for mail order brides.

She graduated in 2000 with double degrees in English and World Arts and Cultures and a minor in Asian American Studies. She later returned as a commencement speaker for the UCLA English Department in 2008 and UCLA's student-initiated Asian Pacific Islander graduation (APIG) in 2014, the latter included a bit about re-defining sex appeal of Asian American men.

Prior to finding success as an artist, she worked as an eBay vendor, a restaurant hostess, and earned $10/hour at an art non-profit.

In 2017, Wong exhibited her "Fannie Wong" persona, a crass "former Miss Chinatown 2nd-Runner-Up", at "In Search of Miss Ruthless", an experimental, multi-media exhibition revolving around the cultural impact of the Miss Chinatown USA pageant within the Chinese American diaspora, at the Para Site gallery in Hong Kong. The installation included Wong interacting with exhibit-goers next to a display case full of memorabilia from "Fannie Wong's" previous performances, including the time she crashed the 2003 Miss LA Chinatown pageant. Themes include questioning the traditional beauty standards for Chinese-American women and the cultural expectation of them to be obedient and overachievers.

As part of the City of Los Angeles Individual Artists 2018 Fellowship, Wong intends to run for public office before 2030. While doing so, she intends on performing various exaggerated campaign events, such as a debate match with a dog and public stoning by audience members during a stump speech. Wong comments on the reality of the Donald Trump presidency and the dualistic nature of being a politician and a performance artist, whether that be the trained, such as the trained, codified body language. “We used to listen to politicians and laugh at comedians, now we laugh at politicians and listen to comedians.” The piece premiered as an interactive exhibit in LA Chinatown in November 2018.