Ten Things I Did When I Was Broke And What I Learned From It.
Greetings from Mexico City where I am on a much needed vacation! Not a tour of my show where I take a day off to sight see… an actual vacation with no performance obligation!
In digging through my google docs, I found this essay I wrote in 2016 but never published— I think because I felt weird about showing you all how ugly my past was. Or maybe it was because I wrote this before Trump was sworn in and I thought I might very likely crash into this hell of survival again. Or maybe it made me feel like a creepy life coach who uses their “life wins” to make you feel bad that you can’t get here if you don’t buy my “mastermind sessions”.
But as I re-read it now while on vacation, I think: “THIS IS GREAT SHIT THAT I WISH I COULD SHARE WITH ALL THE BABY WONGS TRYING TO PULL OFF AN ARTIST LIFE.”
And now that I’m a Pulitzer Fucking Prize Finalist with a major 3 city Equity theater tour ahead, repped by a big agent, a 3-year Artist-in-Residency at ASU, and I’m on a vacation where I am not fretting over every penny I spend, I feel like I’ve earned this validation in my career and I want to share with folks who might feel lost like I was.
SO HERE IT IS… WISDOM FROM MY 2016 self that I finally share with you in 2022!
Me in 2016.
Holy shit. This year marks my 11th 17th year of working full time as an artist with no day job or side hustle (or sugar daddy or trust fund). Lately, when I pay my monster property tax bill, or pay off my steadily growing health insurance premiums, or do upgrades in the home I own, I say a humble prayer to the gods because I wasn’t always able to live this large. (And by “live this large” I mean pay my bills and grow a fraction of the emergency savings Suze Orman recommends.)
As I celebrate the 11 17 year milestone, I find inspiration in Daymond John, one of the venture capitalists on ABC’s Shark Tank (my guilty pleasure favorite show). He founded clothing empire Fubu with $20 and grew it to a billion dollar brand. He talks often about how being broke kept him hungry for success.
Sharing the following is a wee bit embarrassing (yeah, even I get embarrassed) but I think a lot of young artists will appreciate it. So I here goes… humiliating myself for the goodness of the world!
Here are ten anecdotes of my early broke life that remind me how thirsty I once was for what I’ve got now.
1. Sold promotional items on eBay that I got for free.
Out of college I was making $800/ month working full time hours for part time pay at an arts non-profit. I was also teaching theater to teenagers once a week for $425/ month. $1225/ month or $14,700/year was not enough money to cover rent, car costs, health insurance, taxes and food. It certainly wasn’t enough to invest in things like acting classes and headshots. But at that, I had almost no time between all these jobs to think about how to grow in my artist practice. I was so busy trying to keep a roof over my head, I could barely remember what I cared about anymore.
I went to a bar on my birthday the year after I graduated and a promotional company was giving out free magnets, posters, and books for a special episode of Iron Chef. Almost nobody was at the bar and the company gave me all the leftovers. I used my flatbed scanner (because camera phones didn’t exist then) to scan the items, then put them up for bid on eBay. I will never forget the liberation I felt when I woke up to having made $32 in my sleep. Now that $32 seems like such a tiny amount of money, but it opened up an understanding of how I could make money from nothing. In the following years, I re-sold a ton of stuff I had gotten for free, stuff in Hollywood swag bags and even those free postcards from the free postcard racks at cafes. It was time consuming, but still more profitable than what my jobs yielded per hour. Thank you hoarders of America for subsidizing my ability to be a working artist!
Lesson: While there may not be cash lying around in the street, this country is filled with crap and people willing to buy it. If you are willing to do the legwork, you can flip it. However, don’t get as obsessed with finding and flipping like I did. It takes your energy from the end goal.
2. Offered myself up for medical research.
I only did this once, but basically it involved getting something injected in my bloodstream, staying overnight at the UCLA hospital, then getting a follow-up test in the morning. I made sure when I agreed to do it that it wasn’t permanently damaging. And back then, $100 was a lot of money to sit up in the hospital bed and watch TV while random non-lethal injectoids roamed my bloodstream.
Lesson: I really don’t recommend doing this, especially if it is something that damages you permanently, which some medical trials can do. It makes for interesting artist research if you are interested in things like hospitals or watching tv from a hospital bed…
3. Rented out my couch.
Back in the day, my rent was $850 for a two bedroom apartment in West LA. This is unheard of now as you can’t even find a studio in Koreatown for that now. Still, it was just a little too much for me to afford alone. I could have found a room to rent for less, but rents in Los Angeles were doubling and it didn’t make sense to leave a cheap two bedroom to cram my life into one room of a shared apartment to save $200. I also liked having a separate room as an office. So I put my couch for rent on Craigslist for $300/month. I was trying to appeal to Eastsiders working long hours on the Westside who didn’t want to do the hour-long commute home. Instead, they could crash on my couch after work and go back to the office in the morning. Then, they would go back home on the weekends. People thought I was nuts for doing this, but it allowed me to not rack up debt and still have my two bedrooms.
Lesson: It blows my mind that $300 was such a pivotal amount of money for me to survive back then but it was a non-invasive way for me to still maintain the reins of my home without giving up a lot of space. Eventually, I was able to cover the rent on my own, but this was what I had to do to get there.
4. Briefly entertained getting into the French Maid/ used underwear/ sex worker adjacent business.
I left that $800/month arts admin job in 2002 to pursue my full time life as a freelance artist which really meant I was wailing and flailing for a good 2 years scanning Craigslist for a miracle side hustle while trying to be a working artist. My eBay auctions weren’t making what they used to and I was getting desperate. I even interviewed for nanny jobs. In retrospect, I would have been a shitty nanny. More than once I almost responded to ads seeking women to clean houses wearing lingerie. I also briefly looked into selling my used underwear but it didn’t seem possible to do without relinquishing some anonymity. Ultimately, my comfort levels were not ready to go there, and I never pursued it. Plus oh yeah… my mother would have killed me! Though I can’t say I didn’t feel like a chump every time I took a Craigslist gig that paid $10/hour knowing I could make a lot more if I compromised my comfort level.
LESSON: I can’t hate on sex workers. Nobody should hate on them. They are doing what they must do to put food on the table for themselves and their families. Sex work is some really hard work and those folks earn every penny they make.
5. I sold things on Craigslist I still needed.
I left that $800/month arts admin job too early and didn’t really have anything lined up except a plan to “freelance”. I should have made the full time artist leap when I had more savings and more gigs lined up. I did end up landing a part time job in 2004 which I kept for eight months before the full time artist stint I’m in now. But that first initial leap of trying to survive as an independent artist was brutal. I would wake up every morning in a panic and look around my house for things to sell. I remember selling a heater that I still needed for $8. And a microwave that an old roommate left me for $20.
I agreed to deliver the microwave to the buyer because it meant I could get the cash sooner. She was a commercial director who was only a few years older than me. She lived in this fancy apartment by the beach. I looked out her window and felt this bitter ache in my stomach. Why can’t I have this ocean view and keep my microwave? Suddenly, seeing that ocean made me want to do what she did for a living. Anything but what I was doing. She said editors made a lot of money. Suddenly, I wanted to be an editor. I spent a few weeks researching what it would take to be good at that. I ended up not pursuing it because when it comes down to it, editing is one of my least favorite things to do even with the films I make now.
LESSON: There is always going to be someone making more than you are. And there will be many temptations to push you off course to pursue someone else’s life. I was constantly pushed off course by unsolicited career recommendations for things I ultimately wasn’t passionate about. Sometimes it takes tunnel vision and a ravenous pursuit to push past all those voices to keep on with what you are meant to do.
6. Took advantage of all the free things.
Cheese cubes and hummus anyone? I can’t tell you how many dinners I cobbled together from the free appetizer offerings at art openings. I went to free movie screenings and plays. I ushered to watch shows for free. I couldn’t afford to commit to an acting school (many of the “reputable” ones in Los Angeles were as much as $400/month then). I couldn’t afford to take improv classes. Instead, I took free workshops made possible by the Artist-in-Residence grant offered by the Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles. I developed my first solo shows in the free performance art workshops offered by artists Denise Uyehara, Danielle Brazell and Leilani Chan. I applied for the PEN USA writing fellowship and got it. While I briefly tried out grad school in 2004, I would say that my real arts education came from all these things I experienced for free. And now, I teach free workshops with the Artist-in-Residence Grant from the city (gotten it five nine times!) and my students have gone on to teach free workshops to others.
LESSON: Don’t let lack of money stop you from finding a creative community and education. You might not be able to afford some fancy ass Beverly Hills Playhouse acting school, but there’s still so much to learn from other places.
7. Drove long distances to talk about myself for $50.
Young artists often ask me how I get booked to speak and perform at schools. Some artists get lucky and get booking agents right away. I only started working with a college agent two eight years ago. But before that, I hustled and got my own bookings.
When I graduated from college, I would google my website www.bigbadchinesemama.com to see what classes were teaching my site. Then I’d email all the California professors teaching my my work and offer to give a guest talk. I literally, invited myself into their classes. I didn’t even know how to give a guest talk back then, but I figured it was a way to get good at it and also start building my university connections for when I had one woman shows to tour. I still am connected to many of those professors whose classes I spoke at back then. I remember waking up at 6am to drive to a morning class at UC Santa Barbara. There were nine students in the class and a $50 honorarium for my time. I’m still facebook friends with one of those students that I met that morning at 9am. After a few years of this chasing, word got around the academic world that I gave talks and the invites came without me chasing them down.
LESSON: Nobody makes anything happen but you. You assign your work value.
8. Told everyone I was broke. All the time.
The scramble for cash became the rhythm of my life so much that it was all I talked about on and offline. Something began to happen the more I told people I was broke and struggling-- people took advantage of me and my time. People began to refer to me in terms of my struggle and not my art. People would offer me lowball humiliating gigs for my time as if my time was disposable. The craziest thing that happened was a successful actor who I respected immensely, who was coming off a major Sundance film, came to my place under the premise of “hanging out” because I was feeling down about my finances. He ended up doing a one hour “multi-level marketing” presentation in my home. He made a strong pitch for me to join his pyramid scheme but I was too pissed off (and shocked that an actor of his caliber was doing this kind of ridiculous side hustle) to join.
LESSON: Don’t let being broke be your identity. Don’t refer to yourself as “aspiring” or “starving” and don’t let anyone else call you those things. You are an artist no matter what. Let passion be your identity. If you can talk about anything else besides being broke, you can shift the energy around you fast. And for god sakes, don’t join a multi-level marketing scheme. I don’t care what people say, that shit is a trap.
9. Did non-union background work for $56/day.
Wanting to get on TV ASAP, I registered with Central Casting, and worked background in my early 20s. Despite what the background actor “lifers” tell you, being a human blur is not the best route to a bright acting career-- it’s a paycheck. It’s hard to not get sucked into background set culture-- you feel so close to the action, the craft service table is sweet and sometimes the celebrities look in your direction. It lost its charm after a while and there was a certain energy of working background that was getting into my psyche and not helping me at being a better artist. I didn’t like all the background actors getting excited that we might be working 12 hours (on a freezing set) thus getting overtime (Oh joy! A check close to $100!). I didn’t like overhearing the same cyclical conversations between “lifers” and “newbies” about how to get more background work. I got tired of seeing wide eyed actors reading Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich” in the holding area. I tired of listening to background actors reductively parrot back what it was they thought I was trying to do as a performance artist (“Oh! Like a standup but with props? Carrot Top?”) And if I was going to play a racist stereotype, could I at least NOT be a blurry one?!
Eventually, I got my SAG card doing background as a Harajuku Girl in one movie and a Japanese school girl in another. I cut out of the background game to put my energy towards what I really came to LA for-- to do the thing, not hover in the background.
LESSON: While I was able to read a lot of books, I wanted to be in an energy of “doing” and not “trying to do.” Background work is a way to get money and food, but if it’s not serving the energy of your life, move towards something that is.
10. Borrowed Money from friends and one ex.
A lot of artists friends around me, young and grown, received money from their family long after school was over. I did not. I did ask my parents my first year out of college to borrow money when I was living in paralyzing scarcity. The call felt humiliating as did receiving their $200 which came with an admonishing message that I find a better job. I am very lucky that they were willing to help me but I didn’t want to ask for help again because of how helpless it made me feel. I didn’t want my family to worry about me or look down on my choice to be an artist. And I didn’t want to change career paths.
So when I was $100 short for my monthly health insurance premium, I briefly contemplated cancelling my insurance. My filmmaker friend Jennifer graciously loaned the amount to me. Other friends helped me by giving me their time. Whether it was helping me fix something on my website, or directing my performance work— I survived on the generosity of others.
When I was 24, my then-boyfriend loaned me about $400 two months in a row so I could pay my rent. This seemed so astronomical. I paid him back within the year. It definitely complicated our relationship and power dynamic and eventually, for many reasons, we broke up though are still friends today. I’m extremely grateful that he and all these people helped me through that time. I know there are people who are not even as lucky. I’m also lucky, that now my family is much more supportive of my work and have been contributors to my crowdfunding campaigns. We have come a long long way.
Now I’m on the other end of it. I have loaned money, offered free housing, and given advance pay on artist fees. I’ve been paid back. I’ve also been burned.
LESSON: Unfortunately, being broke means asking favors. I think it’s ok to borrow money as long as you are gracious about it and take calculated risks to pay that back. But in the long run, the goal should be to be on the giving end of the spectrum, not just the scrambling and taking end.