🧊2025: The Year of Fire and Ice
The pages are turning on yet another incredibly dismal year of this achingly long rapture that is modern civilization. The year 2025 marked some insane new lows for this country but also… significant shifts in my life. Below, a reflection on almost everything that happened in 2025, written down, if anything, for my own memory keeping.
1. I declared 2025 a “Buy Nothing Year”.
Some people introduce me as “This is Kristina and this year, she’s a cheapskate”. Ugh. So many misunderstandings of what this Buy Nothing Year thing is.
I was frustrated with America’s descent into oligarchy, and it felt like the only way I could fight back was to participate as little as possible in exploitative capitalism. Is there ethical consumption under capitalism? Probably not. But if I just circulated what existed or what was going to waste, I could maybe win this war against the billionaires and give power back to the community. At least, that was the thinking.
I still paid my insurance bills, taxes, ate at restaurants, and paid for services. But my carbon footprint would be about extracting as little new material as possible, supporting local businesses where I could hand my money directly to the maker/ owner, thrifting/ borrowing the objects that I absolutely needed, and find more reliance on my community than with major retailers.
2. LA was enveloped in fire while I watched in horror from New York.
Early evening of January 7, I was with my partner in La Canada and the power went out in the house. We found a Japanese restaurant that still had power and charged our phones during dinner so we could have our phones through the night. The winds raged all night and fanned the flames that would consume the Palisades and Altadena. I had a 7am flight the next day to New York City for the Under the Radar Festival and drove through smoke and ash to get to LAX. Emergency evacuation alerts beeping on my phone. My partner evacuated to my home in Koreatown with his dogs.
Once in New York, I realized how devastated Altadena and Pasadena were. I was glued to the Watch Duty app while networking with my colleagues.
I went to volunteer at a distribution site in Pasadena a week after the fire on MLK Day/ Inauguration day. Another volunteer showed me the footage of Elon Musk doing a Nazi salute on his phone. I just wrote “toiletries” over and over in marker on trashbags, hoping that this was somehow going to undo the devastation.
3. I agreed to free-ish health insurance. Specifically, via marriage proposal.
I got engaged a week after the fires in San Francisco. Like ACTUALLY engaged. Not performance art engaged. But like married. To another human. Who I love (and still love!).
When I met Lee, it was everything those annoying perfect couples tell you about meeting their soul mates– an instant connection. We are hilarious together, silly together, caring together. He’s got good politics. In just over a year of dating, he proposed to me on stage at San Francisco Sketchfest. When he asked me my ring size last year, I knew he would be proposing at some point, I just didn’t know it was going to be that night. And I was totally thrilled (just shocked in the moment) that he did it so publicly. In fact, when he asked what my ring size was a few months before, I said “This proposal better be on a jumbotron, marching band, Times Square worthy. And did he deliver or what?
4. Now suddenly I was tasked to figure out how one gets married and premieres a new show in a Buy Nothing Year.
After decades of staring down the Wedding Industrial Complex, it was my turn to cagematch with the most notoriously expensive and waste inducing celebration of one’s life. Would I delay the Buy Nothing Year? Make up a bunch of rules that would allow me to buy a bunch of crap? Deny myself the joys of a colorful wedding with stuff?
And then there was the added challenge of how to “Buy Nothing” with my upcoming solo show premiere. Most of my sets and props were made from fabric I already had from the year before. The show has three streamer guns that I launch and had a hell of a time getting the correct streamers for them donated. I ended up breaking down and buying “streamer remnants” from a vendor.
How to pull this off? Keep reading…
5. Watched in total fucking horror as the field in which I work gets usurped by authoritarianism.
While I was not an employee of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, (which I will always call by its deadname), I was an artist-in-residence in the now dissolved Social Impact program. I never got a final show of “Kristina Wong, #FoodBankInfluencer” at the KC mainstage. The comedy curator had resigned after their new Board President took over and then the layoffs of some of the hardest arts workers in the country began fast and furious. This whole climate had me panicking about what I could say anymore. I’ve been feeling watched, and not in that way that leads to a standing ovation.
I’m so incredibly lucky that the last couple years brought a life changing amount of money and career laurels to me. I have a safety net until my Doris Duke Award runs out which will allow me to ring in the next fews years not knowing exactly how much work I am going to get but also feel like I can survive and say things that nobody wants to pay to hear anymore. I still feel like there’s a lot of freelance work for artists but the pool has shrunk or pays a hell of a lot less. But I also feel myself battling the culture wars.
6. I premiered a new show.
After three glorious years in residency as ASU Gammage, I premiered this show.
Before the government shut down and massive cuts to SNAP benefits were threatening already food insecure Americans, I premiered my newest solo show about America’s emergency food system. It seemed like an evergreen topic when I embarked on it, but now we have rising food prices and cuts to federal food aid and massive unemployment. I’m relevant… sadly.
7. I went to Oaxaca, Mexico on a vacation.
I’ve been bad about taking vacation-only trips. So when I saw that Home for Refugees had a silent online auction and one of the donated items was an all-inclusive resort stay OF COURSE I had to help refugees… and get a vacay in. We were able to pick from a bunch of Mexican cities and a resort in the DR. I picked Oaxaca, specifically Hualtulco because of the reality shows I’ve seen filmed there and also because my neighborhood of Koreatown has a large Oaxacan population. I wanted to see where my neighbors were from.
It was fun! And we were a minority of the Americans we ran into, so it didn’t feel like we were totally colonizing as tourists.
8. I went to Listowel, Ireland where I wrote a draft of a screenplay.
I was invited to apply and then selected to participate in an exchange of Irish and American artists. It was a little quaint town that had a literary festival going at the same time. It was an unlikely place for me to get very productive working on the screenplay version of “Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord. The sun was up til after 9pm out there which gave me more time to stay up and write. I ended up writing in this abandoned nail salon attached to a bar.
9. I wrote a new play! With other characters and stuff.
In July, I was in residence for a couple weeks at Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, CA where I got my own studio, had dinners made by Jose (the residency’s private chef) and finally wrote this crazy play that has been bouncing around my head for two years. It really took being in the woods with no distractions to get this craziness written down. The play was written for an ensemble of 9 actors and will be workshopped next year!!
10. I figured out how one gets married in a Buy Nothing Year and had what a low imprint/ high impact wedding.
I borrowed and repurposed a lot of things, including three Chinese wedding dresses worn for different parts of my wedding celebration.
It was a crazy process to track them down but I did it. Everyone is loving the story of drag queen Juicy Liu giving me her dress which I had heavily tailored by my talented friend Rosalida and wore on my wedding day!
I made my own bouquet out of old buttons and foam to the ire of some of the internet.
11. I got married. Like LEGALLY.
We got married on August 22 at San Francisco City Hall with a few family members as witnesses at 10:30am. I slept in my childhood bedroom the night before, my father drove us to City Hall where we met Lee and his family on the front steps. A Robovoice calls your name like a DMV and then you go upstairs and get quickie married in the rotunda. I was cracking jokes the whole time but once the ceremony started, I was sobbing. Holy crap, I got married. Which is crazy because I’m surrounded by so many divorced people. Luckily it isn’t contagious? I guess I’m on a different cycle. Everyone is coming out of their first marriage and entering later-in-life singlehood, I’m just jumping into the waters.
12. We had a joint wedding reception with my parents in San Francisco.
When I was younger, I thought, no fucking way if I ever get married will I get my parents involved with the planning because their meddling will kill me.
Well oops, I ended up planning a joint wedding celebration with my parents who celebrated their 50th this year. This ended up determining the date of our civil ceremony just a few days before. They originally weren’t planning to do anything, but I thought, well if we casually get married, we might as well have a joint casual party in San Francisco.
This casual turned into a BIG DEAL PARTY that they spent 7 months obsessing over. The way I obsess over every detail of a show premiere. I had to talk my mother off the ledge multiple times as her thoughts got catastrophic putting together seating charts and the day of reception schedule. But we did it. We got married with my parents? It was actually quite sweet.
13. Then with a wedding ring fresh on my finger, I took off on tour!
Are you two going on a honeymoon? Sure, does going on tour without my spouse count? As is the life of an artist, I spent more time on tour than with my spouse the first month of marriage.
I had a show at the Quick Center:
I had a great week in Boston at Arts Emerson:
Was in residence at Harvard!
14. We had two wedding receptions in Los Angeles.
The easiest, most cost effective wedding reception you can ever have is in Chinatown or someone’s backyard. We did both! It was super meaningful to bring business into LA Chinatown and do the Chinese banquet thing at Golden Dragon. We were also treated to a backyard wedding reception by the Auntie Sewing Squad.
15. I raised $6000 for a cancer hospital and did the New York Marathon in under 9 hours.
If there’s any advice I can pass on from this year, it’s don’t do a marathon while trying to launch a kids book, a new show and get married. Especially a marathon that requires you to raise money in order to qualify. The better advice I can give is don’t be best friends with Brian Feldman. That dumbass (and my best friend) signed us up for the New York City marathon after I texted after Trump’s re-election “Screw it, let’s do the marathon”. This was not me offering consent to be signed up for the marathon and on top of that, take on a fundraising commitment to qualify. But leave it to Brian to sign me up without my consent.
Because I didn’t want the marathon to take focus away for all the Boards I sit on and all the other organizations I raise money for year round, I had to use some downright shady ass tactics to shake down the dough.
This marathon was grueling but oddly, not as painful as the first two that I’ve also done without training. I broke my Buy Nothing Year to buy special toe socks that kept me from having any blisters! I also squired a tube of Biofreeze right into my socks when they were hot and sore.
16. I gave keynotes and speeches. Had performances about town.
Budgets for speakers and performers are drying up in a lot of places, as is the climate for progressive ideas in academic spaces. So when I did get invites to speak this year, I made it count. One of my fave invites was at my alma mater UCLA Asian American Studies Center where I was invited to give the keynote speech.
17. I protested, but not enough to stop all the crazy shit.
I went to a rally or two hundred. I worked behind the scenes to help a friend who was arrested for ICE protests. I also helped another friend who has an ICE hold get some key letters of support for a gubernatorial pardon. She didn’t get the pardon but the governor did notice the letters. With the ICE raids, the war on DEI, and all the noise of people slewing god knows what at each other on social media, I was finding that the best way I could contribute was to rethink the small gestures and transactions I make each day and how to make decisions that maximized impact directly for people around me. There was one weekend I attempted to buy out my local tamale street vendor with all of $14 I had on me so she could be safe at home.
18. Still spent like almost nothing on groceries.
A lot of this is because my spouse does a lot of grocery shopping now, but thanks to my scavenging ways and my BFF at World Harvest Food Bank, my personal grocery spending in 2025 was only $555.15 (I know!). Of course this does not include eating out.
19. Went to weddings, baby parties and funerals.
The cycle of life be lifing. I went to a couple of weddings. I went to a few red egg and ginger parties. And sadly, said goodbye to a few friends like Kirk Wilson and Alice Wong.
20. We FINALLY launched our podcast.
I’ve been pitching the Killing Your Number podcast since 2019 hoping some powerful entity would flood me with money to make it from scratch and do all the producing work on it. When that didn’t happen, I raised a lot of money for API RISE and gave hundreds of hours on this for $0 pay. I did it for love baby! We have two episodes up after two years of toiling. We are talking about the impact of mass incarceration on the Asian American community. More coming soon!
21. We are ready to give birth to a Kid’s book next year and have an audiobook ready to roll out with it!
I sometimes think I’m doing nothing, but then I realize that with this book I’m seeding the next generation with tools to think about how they can record their own stories on their terms and harness political power. Auntie Kristina’s Guide to Asian American Activism isn’t a dangerous book and yet the current culture wars will make it a banned book in many states. But here we come anyway. April 2026!
22. Despite the misery of this year, my own personal life was quite happy.
There is an anxiety that comes with being single during an autocracy. I will not miss frantically swiping dating apps at 2am during my pee break as I also scroll headlines of who we bombed or whose rights were stripped inside our own country. I will not mourn the cycle of endless first dates and the dreaded “this is my life, what’s your life like” awkward first date banter with someone who I’ll never see again because they turn out to be an #alllivesmatter centrist with a latent Asian fetish. I won’t miss having my heart broken every few weeks or months when after what feels like a decent connection ends with my unanswered “So how’s it going?” text.
There’s a calmness when I’m with my spouse. I like being a boring married person and discussing meal planning for the week during our morning dog walk. It’s kinda great. We completely still follow the news with horror. We fight this shit together but also make finding peace in our private lives a priority as well.
23. I will continue this “Buy Nothing Ethos” into eternity.
Listen, this year of Buy Nothing was filled with hella relapses. The first clothing relapse I had was in July when I went to the Goodwill Bins with a friend from the Montalvo artist residency and loading more used textiles into my life. In fact, I just found myself buying an armful of clothing at Goodwill this week while listening to an audiobook about a Hoarder trying to let go of her clutter on my free Libby app. But I loved how much LESS shit, how much LESS impulsive buying I have succumbed to, and how much LESS I brought into my home knowing because of this pledge.
My spouse isn’t on a Buy Nothing Year and he manages to buy a lot of stuff. But I can tell I’m rubbing off on him. I got him to join the Buy Nothing Group in La Canada and we’ve already gotten and given some things away through it.
So the plan for 2026? More circular economy. More picking up stuff from people’s porches before I break down and buy it. More reusing. More making space for imagination and less for despair.
What does 2026 have in store?
I am leading a performance and writing workshop at World Harvest Food Bank. A new play reading. A few runs of Kristina Wong, #FoodBankInfluencer. A first full calendar year of being married. A launch of our kids’ book! A return of my theater project From Number to Name which will feature a cast of formerly incarcerated APIs— this time live and in person at Center Theater Group!