By Noma Faingold

Nothing in Kristina Wong’s conventional, middle-class background, growing up in the Sunset District (Golden Gate Heights), under the safety of her frilly canopy bed, would lead her to becoming a subversive, satirical and award-winning solo theater artist.

Her mother, Gwen, was an accountant. Her father, Donald, sold insurance. She was expected to be a doctor. Instead, she became the first artist in her Chinese-American family.

“From the beginning, I felt like I was doing everything wrong,” Wong said. “I quit piano lessons. At Chinese afterschool classes, I had no idea what was happening most of the time. I had guilt at such an early age. How did I get like this?”

Wong remembers her mother clipping out articles listing the most money-making professions. She would highlight the most sensible career paths and leave them in her daughter’s room.

“Art was not on those charts,” Wong said. “Performance art and solo performance was not either.”

The first creative outlet that seeped out for Wong was making prank calls during her middle school years at Hoover Middle School.

“I would pretend to be different people,” she said. “That was my early form of self-expression. Later, I was able to channel it into something a little healthier.”

At Mercy High School, she excelled in public speaking competitions and got comfortable in front of an audience. She found her people in the theater department.

Her latest solo show, “Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord,” April 4-May 5, at the American Conservatory Theater’s Strand Theater, is not just a homecoming for 45-year-old Wong. It’s a finite way to go back to the perilous early days of the COVID-19 pandemic from an original, very personal point of view.

The high-energy, humorous solo show, which made its debut at the New York Theatre Workshop in 2021, won Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel awards and was a 2022 Pulitzer finalist (in the drama category). Audiences and critics have praised the moving experience, which, at its core, is just as much about the art of giving as it is about surviving a plague.

“They’re laughing but they’re remembering this moment none of us wanted to revisit,” Wong said.

The title, “Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord,” was a hyperbolic joke Wong said out loud, once her benevolent gesture turned into a grassroots movement. In 2020, she was about to embark on a tour with a new satirical show called, “Kristina Wong for Public Office.” The set resembled a campaign rally. Some of the material was inspired by becoming an elected representative in 2019 in Los Angeles on the Koreatown Neighborhood Council, where she currently lives.

After the first two performances in February of 2020, like virtually every live theatrical production in the U.S., her show was sidelined.

“I had my fake political rally and it all went to sh*t,” she said.

Officially, like all types of artists, Wong was instantly classified as a “non-essential worker.”

She could have panicked like she did after 9/11. Instead, Wong immediately thought of a way to be useful while under the shelter-in-place restrictions. She started sewing much-needed masks on her Hello Kitty sewing machine out of bed linens and bra straps. She got her mother involved, then created a Facebook group of mostly women, which expanded really fast. She dubbed them the “Auntie Sewing Squad.”

Among the more than 300 volunteers, if someone couldn’t sew, they delivered masks to places in need, from hospitals to the populations at the highest risk of getting COVID. Other volunteers raised money, secured supplies and even made meals for other volunteers.

“Never in my life had I been in the position as an artist where my work is the difference between life or death for somebody,” Wong said. “It was consuming. We were in this crisis. We were all so scared. People were freaking out.”

After the first 10 days, a few friends asked Wong if her next solo show would be born out of the operation. In fact, she was unknowingly creating material for “Sweatshop Overlord.”

“I wasn’t sure we would survive as a civilization,” she said. “But if this was the end, we would go down sewing.”

Experience as a collaborative artist had a lot to do with the way Wong motivated the Auntie Sewing Squad.

“Artists figure out how to get it done. We’re scrappy,” she said. “I didn’t sew those masks because I thought it was good PR. I went with being generous. It was the right thing to do.”

The project lasted 504 days and resulted in the production and distribution of 350,000 masks. At the same time, she was developing her seventh solo show and workshopped it on Zoom. Not surprisingly, she found humor and irony amid tragic circumstances, including, with the rise of Asian hate in this country, the coalition of volunteers were mostly Asian women.

The first 20 years of Wong’s lengthy career as a niche performer were a struggle. She is finally financially comfortable (owning her own home), having won the lucrative Doris Duke Award last year. But she still has to hustle. She is savvy about how she uses social media. She also occasionally pulls outrageous, attention-getting stunts like crashing red carpets and claiming to be wife of former NBA player Jeremy Lin, whom she has never met.

“Sometimes you have to wave down an audience. I would love more people to experience my ideas,” she said. “What ties a lot of my shows together is culture jamming and social commentary. They give me a chance to take this thing outside of me and make everyone else look at it.”

Wong now has her parents’ approval, has a manager and is represented by the global Creative Arts Agency (but in its smallest department – theater). Outside her artistic genre, she is not well known. Would a Netflix special help? Maybe.

What makes her sad is what she refers to as the “airplane conversation.”

It starts out when a stranger in the seat next to her asks what she does for a living. The exchange goes something like this:

Wong: “I do solo theater.”

Stranger: “What’s that?”

Wong: “I make these shows myself.”

Stranger: “Oh, you’re a stand-up.”

Wong: “Sort of. More theater.”

Stranger: “The last thing I saw was ‘The Lion King.’”

Wong will force a smile while thinking, “Wow. My career doesn’t even exist.”

Yet, she carries on. She’s already developing her next solo show on the subject of food banks.

“What else am I going to do?” Wong asked.

“Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord,” written and performed by Kristina Wong and directed by Chay Yew, April 4-May 5, at ACT’s Strand Theater, 1127 Market St., San Francisco. Tickets: act-sf.org.