Democracy For Nepal: Jiaoying Summers: Chinese Immigrant Standup Comedian

Monday, January 31, 2022

Jiaoying Summers: Chinese Immigrant Standup Comedian

Jiaoying Summers’ joke about China’s one-child policy made everyone laugh — except TikTok censors . “I could barely talk — all my trauma, the lack of confidence of growing up a little girl in China, being unwanted and nearly thrown in a dumpster … I was horrified.” ............. Today she’s far from the brutal reality of being born a girl in China during the country’s one-child mandate allowing only one child per household — preferably male. For years she didn’t talk about memories of nearly being killed as a baby that stained her subconscious. ............ Summers eventually turned her survival into jokes that got laughs in comedy clubs across the country. Two years after starting her stand-up career, she’s not only headlined the Laugh Factory and the Improv, she’s also opened her own local comedy clubs — the Hollywood Comedy and the Pasadena Comedy. But posting jokes about China’s one-child policy recently got her booted from a much bigger platform: TikTok. ............. Summers started her TikTok account, @jiaoyingsummers, in 2020 to boost her confidence on stage and share innocuous mom jokes. She quickly turned up the heat (and her viewer count) by roasting American names in Chinese. ......... “Hi guys, it’s me your funny mom, I’m roasting your name in Chinese,” she says, greeting her followers with ruby red lips starched in a grin. “Jennifer in Chinese means ‘jian ni fou.’ ‘Jian’ means ‘slutty’; ‘fou’ means ‘are you?’ So Jennifer means ‘Are you slutty?’... If your Jennifer goes by Jen, she’s already decided, because Jen means ‘slutty.’” ......... Her character Uber Karen, a racist, air-headed gig driver who insults everyone who gets in her car, was also a hit, helping her reach more than one million followers in less than a year. .......... “When I was born my father found out my penis was missing and he took me to the dumpster, but he was drunk and dropped me on the ground,” Summers says in the video. “My mother heard me screaming and she said, ‘She’s ugly but she’s a fighter, let’s keep her.’ Meanwhile all the other baby girls ended up in the dumpster — they were taken by hyenas, coyotes and Jeffrey Epstein.” ............
Within days, the video went viral with more than 1.2 million likes. It also got tens of thousands of angry followers flooding the comments.
........... “Most people commenting said things like, ‘You cannot say that, because you did not die.’ Some people said I’m insulting the little girls who died,” Summers says. .......... She responded by making a video defending herself and the decision to talk about the one-child policy as a survivor. Within days, TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, banned her account, citing a violation of community guidelines. Attempts to make new accounts using her name were blocked. ......... In November, three months after being blocked, Summers’ TikTok account was turned back on. ........ Still, Summers was unable to go live or access thousands of dollars in creator funds from her product sponsorships after the reinstatement.
She also saw her viewership drastically deflated for a time, with her videos reaching only a fraction of her following, leading her to suspect that her account had been shadow banned.
Even so, Summers continues making TikTok videos. ............. For Summers, surviving the one-child policy and immigrating to America only to be censored by a Chinese app is heartbreaking. ........
Born in 1990 in a small village in Henan province, Summers’ parents birthed her at home instead of the hospital to avoid the shame of having a girl.
........ “If you have a son you are respected,” Summers says. “If you have a girl, your whole life you are considered shameful because you never brought a son into the world.” .......... At the height of the policy, girl babies were often aborted or savagely discarded. Shortly after she was born, Summers’ father cradled her in the doorway of their home, considering whether he should take his newborn child to the grassy, rock-strewn mountains known as “death valley” where parents would go to leave their girls to die or be picked up by strangers. But her mother screamed and pleaded with her father to keep the baby. ........ “I’m sure,” her mother responded, remembering the abuse she’d suffered as a young girl being starved and punished by her parents while her brothers were spoiled. ........ When Summers discovered the place, it was a prim, all-white dress shop that she transformed into a club for L.A.’s comedy misfits. ....... The financial stress added even more tension to her domestic life as a wife and mother of two. She and her husband had nightly arguments over her late-night comedian lifestyle. .......... “I went to 20 mics in two or three days waiting in line and holding my high heels. I’d come home, breastfeed the baby or pump the milk while waiting in my car between sets.” ........ Her “Funny Mom” TikTok videos helped Summers launch a new audience from home. “I remember thinking I’m on TikTok telling jokes, I just found my job,” she says. ............ Within months, Summers’ followers hit 300,000.
By 2021 she’d racked up over a million followers and sponsorship deals garnering between $10,000 to $20,000 a month, dwarfing her earnings from stand-up.
“I used it as a way to stand up financially in my marriage,” she says. ......... Growing up in China, Summers says beauty standards set by tall, light-skinned and pointy-chinned “premiere Asian girls” never matched up to her features — being short and darker skinned, with a rounded face and big lips, which she often pokes fun at in her act. ..........
she left China at 18 to attend the University of Kentucky
........ “I can’t just copy [Ali Wong], I will never become her — I’d just be the cheap knockoff version,” Summers says. “So I talk about being a girl in China, and the one-child policy and coming to America.” ........ For her part, Summers has regularly been posting all of her TikTok content to her Instagram account, which has more than 50,000 followers — nowhere near the size of her TikTok audience, but it’s a start. ........ her mother reveals the definition of her name in Chinese — not to roast her but to remind her who she is. Jiao means “beautiful,” Ying means “sharp.”