ST PAUL, Minnesota — Later this week, the Funny Asian Women Kollective (FAWK) will be taking the stage at The Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul to celebrate their 10-year anniversary.
Naomi Ko, May Lee-Yang, and Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay — three English majors, Bush Leadership Fellows, and McKnight Fellows — started the group as a way to combat the invisibility and dehumanization of Asian American women.
"It sounds really serious. All to say, we host live comedy shows; we do professional development workshops and we just do a bunch of random, funny stuff to create spaces for Asian women to tell their stories, uncensored," Lee-Yang said.
The trio came together one night in 2014.
"It birthed out of Naomi's trauma," said Vongsay, causing all three to laugh. "Naomi did a show. She didn't do very well because she was censored and she didn't feel comfortable with censoring herself like mid-reading of a poem. That brought on this longer conversation about what does it mean to be Asian women presenting in the way that we do? And being an artist in this community, why are we expected to say certain things or act certain ways?"
FAWK is their way to create space for Asian American women to embrace their fuller humanity and do it uncensored. The group uses comedy to talk about controversial issues.
Last week, FAWK was in the middle of rehearsals for their anniversary show on Nov. 8 called "The Extra Quality Super Show."
"This year is a pretty dramatic year. It's the election. We will have potentially, maybe, the first biracial, Black and Asian female president of the United States," Ko said. "That really kind of brought up a lot of feelings that Asian women and Asian American women feel about our politics and just kind of being stereotyped as second wives or just like dolls and window dressing for American husbands."
A sketch written by Patty Kameya explores the topic. "The Extra Quality Super Show" will not only feature live sketches but standup comedy, short films and a new game. Dulcé Sloan, an Emmy Award-winning comedian and correspondent for The Daily Show, will also be joining FAWK as a special guest.
"I think the best compliment we ever got was from our first Super Show at the Ordway. An audience member said, 'Y'all were so funny I forgot I was watching Asian women,'" Vongsay recalled, as Yang and Ko burst into laughter. "Thank you. Guess we've made it. But if you unpack that, what does that mean? That means that... members of our community have been not conditioned but like been bombarded with narratives that are not our own. So when we see somebody who looks like us on stage, it could feel maybe they didn't have the the words to really express what they meant but, to me, that meant everything."
Yang recalled another story of an older Asian American women who moved to Minnesota from the East Coast and found FAWK.
Yang said, "She's like, 'I was lonely. I needed community. FAWK saved my life. I needed this community.'"
"The Extra Quality Super Show" is happening Nov. 8 at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul at 7:30 p.m. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and the show is for ages 18 and over.
Tickets can be found, here.