Ali Wong’s two daughters are the inspiration for her 2019 The New York Times bestseller book Dear girls: intimate stories, untold secrets and advice for the best life.
The comedian and her ex-husband Justin Hakuta had two daughters during their eight-year marriage: Mari (8) and Nikki (6). Beef star was known to be pregnant with her children during her Netflix comedy specials in 2016 and 2018. Baby Cobra and Hard Knock Wifewhich helped the comedian become a star.
Who is Ali Wong’s ex-husband? All about Justin Hakuta
After the success of her first comedy special, Wong received a book offer, but she had no ideas for the subject until she remembered the sweet acting of her late father, Adolphus Wong, who died of cancer in 2011. This letter inspired her to write a book in the form of letters dedicated to her own daughters, as she later shared during an October 2019 appearance. The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
“I remembered that my dad wrote me this letter that started with ‘Dear Alexandra’ before he passed away and it affected our relationship,” Wong told Ellen DeGeneres. “It was really sweet, but it was short and I wish he had written more. And after he died, it was too late for me to ask him all those questions about who he was before he became my dad and he grew up really poor and I only knew him as a successful anesthetist.”
Wong said her father had to overcome “a lot of obstacles and setbacks” in his life, adding: “I really wanted to talk about it a lot with him, especially at that time, but it was too late and he had already passed away.”
“My girls, they only know me after I did those specials with them in the womb, so they don’t know what I went through to get where I am and I think that’s really important,” she continued.
In addition to her daughters serving as inspiration for her book, motherhood has given Wong plenty of material to draw on for her comedy, and she’s been very candid about her parenting experiences over the years — though she never makes jokes specifically about her daughters. .
She also discussed whether Mari and Nikki would follow in her footsteps and do comedy themselves.
Keep reading to learn more about Ali Wong’s two children.
Mari Hakuta, 8
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Wong’s older daughter, Mari, was born in November 2015 by caesarean section. The comedian was pregnant with Mari in her first Netflix comedy special Baby Cobra. In an interview for The in May 2018 The New York Timesthe Always be my maybe star joked that she was worried her then-husband wouldn’t love their child. Wong decided to give her daughter a Japanese name, since her ex is half-Japanese and half-Filipino, as is the surname Hakuta.
“There aren’t many traces of me in her name,” she explained. “And I think subconsciously I did it to make sure she would love her.”
In her 2019 book, Wong was candid about her pregnancy with her first child, writing about a medical condition she was diagnosed with called intrauterine growth retardation (IUGR). She said she got the news when she was 30 weeks pregnant and learned from her doctors that her baby was “not growing enough”.
“Apparently there was resistance to blood flow in the umbilical cord from the placenta to Mari,” she wrote. “It was unsafe for her to stay in my womb past thirty-seven weeks at the latest, and my obstetrician explained that she would get better nutrition outside instead of inside.”
After Mari was born, Wong wrote in her book about her attempt to be a stay-at-home mother for Mari, which lasted only eight weeks. “Mari was so easy and cool, yet I was completely exhausted at the end of the day. The little things just took a lot out of me,” she wrote.
Following the birth of her younger daughter, Nikki, Wong spoke about how Mari was adjusting to being a big sister during an April 2018 episode of the series. The Ellen DeGeneres Show. The Beef the actress said that just three months after she had her younger sister Mari, she was “very jealous at first”.
“When the new baby came, my little one wanted to be a baby again,” Wong explained. “Having a 2 year old is really hard. I feel like I’m in a relationship with an emotionally unstable woman who’s also physically abusive and never gets in trouble for it. She kicked me in the neck today for giving her a measure of skinny Mints. So, whenever you see pictures of us smiling, it’s a lie.”
Wong told DeGeneres that she was happy with her decision to have two children and not to have any more children, explaining, “I love being a mom and I love having two children. But I’ve had two C-sections and suffered enough.”
“That’s my favorite mantra when it comes to motherhood: I’ve suffered enough,” she added. “Whenever I feel motherly guilt or pressure to be a better mom, to cook my kids salmon on a bed of quinoa, I just think, ‘I’ve suffered enough.’ And then I feel good about feeding my kid a bag of chips for dinner.”
While Wong later told DeGeneres that she didn’t want her daughters to be comedians for safety reasons, she did talk about some of the funniest things Mari has done during an October 2019 interview. TIME.
“It’s hard to describe how funny this is, but when my oldest daughter was maybe a year and a half, she would do this thing where she would fart and she’d look right at me and say, ‘No,'” Wong said. “And it was serious. She wouldn’t laugh or anything. But her timing was so good. She’d catch it right at the end of the fart where she’d say, ‘No.’
Nikki Hakuta, 6
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Frederick M. Brown/Getty
Wong welcomed her younger daughter, Nikki, in December 2017. Wong was pregnant with Nikki during her second Netflix special, Hard Knock Wife. She deliberately chose her daughters to be around her age because of the “painful” age gap between her siblings as the youngest of four children.
“They were all ten to fifteen years older than me and lived very different lives as a family of five before I was born,” she wrote in Dear Girls. “There are framed pictures of them, all on skis. When I was born, my parents didn’t go to the ski slopes; they went to Metamucil.”
As a mother of two, Wong has both of her daughters with her as she travels the country for her stand-up. In an interview from April 2019 vanity fair, it was reported that the comedian traveled with Mari and Nikki, Hakuto and the nanny or her relatives during her Milk & Money tour. That way, in each city, the family could enjoy the surroundings, including participating in various child-friendly activities, such as trips to a museum or a science center. After the kids went to bed, Wong took the stage for her performance.
Today, Wong still brings his daughters with him on tour. During the interview with S. in March 2023 Hollywood Reporter, she explained: “Taking the kids on the road is so nice. It’s the opposite of film and TV where I’m gone all day.
“It’s a really fun family adventure because I usually perform at night and then during the day we go on adventures to the children’s museum or gardens or see family friends,” she added. – It’s great that they saw so much of America.
While Wong often joked about Hakuta during her standup routines and was pregnant during her Netflix shows in 2016 and 2018, she purposely does not make jokes about her daughters while on stage.
“I feel like I would have to get their permission, and they’re 5 and 7; they still don’t fully understand what I’m doing,” she told the newspaper. “And also, there was a lot to complain about when they were babies and it was so hard, but now it’s so corny because I love them so much and I love spending time with them, and anything I would complain about would be cliche and contrived.”
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Source: HIS Education