Ali Wong Shares Just How Incredibly Supportive Her Father Was Of Her Career

The comedian told Jimmy Kimmel about how her dad would be ecstatic to show up to her "not-so-well-attended shows."
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This is the sweetest.

While on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” Ali Wong, who stars in the recent Netflix movie “Always Be My Maybe,” told an emotional story about why she decided she’ll hand over her iconic “Baby Cobra” dress to the Smithsonian for display.

Wong told the host that her father, Adolphus Wong, had grown up in a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco’s Chinatown with no running water, working “his ass off to study and become this anesthesiologist to provide the best life possible for me and my siblings.”

“Even when I was struggling, he was so supportive,” she said.

The actress and comedian told Kimmel that her father would come to her “not-so-well-attended shows.” And after telling a “really filthy joke,” she’d announce to the audience that her dad was present. She recounted her father standing up and proudly gesturing as if he’d “just won the Indy 500 or conquered Mount Everest.”

“When he died, I was still struggling, and I’d think about him seeing that costume at the Smithsonian and he would probably be outside the museum every day,” she said of Adolphus Wong, who died in 2011.

The comedian had told San Francisco magazine that her father was the son of a sweatshop worker and a cook. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, before becoming an anesthesiologist. She explained that her dad was definitely the kind of guy who bucked Asian stereotypes.

“My dad was a very unconventional Asian American man,” she told the magazine in 2017. “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.’ That tension” — the feeling of being embarrassed and yet thrilled by watching her father do something forbidden and gross — “it really stuck with me.”

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