Making people laugh was the only thing I ever truly excelled at. But at home, I was so quiet with my family, which taught me to be really observant.
Before my dad passed away, I would miss a lot of baby showers and weddings, sacrificed a lot of family and friend events for dumb road dates. I don't do that anymore. It's gone in the other direction. I'm more inclined to put family and friends first.
My dad was a very unconventional Asian American man. He was very much not quiet, not shy, not passive. If he had to fart, he'd do it in the library. He did not care. He was like, 'I don't know these people. I'm uncomfortable, and I need to let it go.'
Women, a lot of the time, are so much funnier than men, but they just choose not to do comedy for a living.
It's really strange being in, like, Addison,Texas, and having people come up to me at a Nordstrom's or a gas station. It's really, really surreal.
A lot of women do stand-up as a gateway into acting, but I love stand-up, and to be a good stand-up, you have to go on the road a lot. It means going to places in America where they've never seen a Vietnamese person in their life.
I didn't expect to be so comfortable handing my child off to a nanny without getting any of her information. As soon as she arrived at my house, I threw my baby in her arms and went to Target.
I have a hoarding problem because my mom is from a third-world country. And she taught me that you can never throw away anything because you never know when a dictator is going to overtake the country and snatch all of your wealth.
In giving birth, I knew that I would have to take a break after I had a baby; I just didn't know that it would be, like, six weeks long. Taking a six-week break was a very big deal for me. I have never taken that long of a break from stand-up other than my honeymoon, which was 14 days long.
My husband and I went to Japan for our honeymoon, and you look at, like, the presentation of the food, and it's ridiculous. It looks like a Mondrian painting or something. Everything looks like a bunch of little Hello Kitty erasers when you eat a little bento box in Japan. It's so precise and beautiful and processed and neat.
In Hue, Vietnam, we had savory rice pancakes with crumbled shrimp and pork rinds. I've still never had a version as good.
Aside from Joan Rivers and Roseanne, it's hard for me to think of any female comedian who's had kids and has a serious level of fame - like, the level where your mother has heard of them.
I constantly peed in my pants up until the 8th grade and wore an extra-large sailor uniform from kindergarten to 8th grade because my mom was scared I'd grow out of it. So I learned to make fun of myself at school and summer camp.
I love being a mom and having two kids. But I've had two C-sections, and I have suffered enough. That's my favourite mantra when it comes to motherhood.
Maternity leave is for women to hide and heal their disintegrating body.
It's unfair to the hard-core stay-at-home moms to pretend you're able to have an amazing body by chasing around your kids.
There are certainly other female comics who are moms, but I don't know any who are actively touring with their kids. But there are more and more becoming moms, and it's awesome. I feel we're in a super sisterhood.
I've seen many female comics that a lot of people haven't heard of who are so funny, and I saw them come up, and they were working so hard, and then all of a sudden they had a baby, and they just got tied up in motherhood, and eventually, they kind of just stopped doing stand-up, and I thought it was such a shame.
There's something I want to say, and I haven't been able to articulate it yet, about how it's so rude when people don't admit that they have a nanny.
I'll tell you how I balance family and career. I have a nanny.
