Editor’s note: Standup comedian Wang Dadao came under the spotlight this year after an appearance on the online show “Standup Comedy and Friends” in which she recounted a tale of being sexually harassed on the street by an elderly man. While audiences were divided on her unorthodox, physical style, she received a flood of messages from young women with similar traumatic experiences. Here, in her own words, Wang shares about her upbringing in the southwestern Sichuan province, and how comedy has helped her turn shame into catharsis, making her bolder and unyielding.

My grandpa passed away last year. A few days back, my mom called to tell me about visiting his grave with her siblings. My grandma had brought apples and chicken legs as offerings for the dead. When my mom balked at the price of apples — about 10 yuan ($1.40) for 500 grams — my aunt said, “Our mom just asked Dad to bless our health and wealth. Can’t you spare 10 yuan for him to enjoy some apples?” My mother, ever the pragmatist, replied, “For such grand wishes, the expected return on investment for 10 yuan’s worth of apples seems a stretch.”

This exchange epitomizes our family psyche. In Sichuan province, we’ll use the word “shen,” meaning “manic,” to describe someone who speaks and acts beyond ordinary logic. Most Sichuanese are very shen. And in our particularly shen household, I’ve always been the one in the spotlight.

As a child, I staged impromptu one-person plays at my aunt’s teahouse, reveling in mimicry. My laughter was explosive, my gestures wild; suppressing them only made me louder. An audience member once said my performances feel like the very definition of “expectation violation” — one moment I’m like a rapid-fire auctioneer; the next I’m doing a gymnastic Thomas salto on a tabletop. This chaos mirrors my father. Mid-conversation, he’ll leap up to impersonate someone, and I never see it coming.

Raised in this whirlwind, I grew into an unapologetic extrovert. As a kid, I’d strike absurd poses on the street for no reason. Now, I dance mid-joke when chatting with fellow comics. At school, I performed calisthenics with exaggerated precision, basking in the laughter of my classmates.

For me, standup isn’t a craft, it’s a temperament. Some call my style “theatrical,” but it’s unconscious, shaped by childhood obsessions. I loved watching musicals like “High School Musical,” “Moulin Rouge,” “The Phantom of the Opera,” and “The Phantom Lover.” I felt deeply touched by the rhythms and the actors’ facial expressions while singing, bringing me a sense of happiness.

I always knew that I had dramatic expressions, that I was special, and that there would definitely be someone who could spot and admire my uniqueness. Yet childhood also taught me the cost of being special. When the boy I adored invited another girl — aloof as an ice queen — to play the card game dou dizhu together, my worldview was shattered twice over. He had not only failed to cherish my uniqueness, but he also wasn’t the person I thought he was.

Later, I played the ice queen myself in relationships, recognizing the same performativity in men. We all wear masks, but gender roles, social class, and other systemic forces dictate to what extent we have to pretend.

When I write jokes, I dig into the raw, private stuff. It’s never just about gender, it’s something more. When an audience member says they cried during my set, I don’t know why, but that’s probably because I cried while writing the jokes. I recognize that ache — not because I uncovered some grand, forgotten truth, but because I’m just another ordinary person, fumbling through the same mess.

When I voice the things that are buried, rage that’s been swallowed, it’s because my story isn’t just mine. This world, this planet, binds us in the same struggles. That’s just how it is.

Chasing alchemy

In the winter of 2019, I stumbled across an open mic at a comedy club in Kunming (Editor’s note: capital of the southwestern Yunnan province). Six months and half a dozen performances later, I walked away from standup — only to return in April 2023, hungry to reclaim something I’d lost.

Before comedy, there were three years of auditing ledgers at an accounting firm, then a stint in media. I learned a lot, but the work left me hollow. Not just from the drudgery — those recycled annual proposals, carbon-copied by rote — but from the gnawing sense that none of it was truly mine. I remember nights sighing before sleep, typing through tears, waiting for the pain of my tonsillitis to recede at 3 a.m., and walking through rain back to my hotel, sobbing in the dark.

I cried a lot, and the tears always came with self-doubt: How long can I bear? When will I find my North Star?

Schoolgirl me thought love was eternal; heartbreak revealed eternity as fiction. Now I wonder: If today were my last, would I grieve the life I’ve lived? Life feels fragile, fleeting, and I crave something unshakably mine. Not children, not some legacy, but something I’ve written, performed, breathed into being.

Live shows are like fireworks. The audience won’t recall every spark, but they’ll remember how the set made them feel — that sublime, ephemeral glow. A televised performance becomes something else, though, like a short film preserved in amber, replayable at will.

I’m no master of punchlines. Technique bores me; I crave the alchemy of spontaneous laughter. My creative process is chaos punctuated by clarity. Whenever I’m stuck, I conjure a protagonist who speaks freely, and through them I rediscover my own voice.

That debut piece of mine is both ugly and radiant. The ugliness defies definition, but the beauty? It’s in the gasp when an unscripted line lands perfectly — the collective intake of breath as something new is born onstage. It’s in the hush of a dim stage and finding that rhythm mid-performance, each pause and inflection clicking into place like coordinates on a map.

I’m obsessed with precision, fresh perspectives, novel forms, and surgical exactitude. Take Charlie Chaplin in “The Great Dictator.” As the “Hitler” character, he prods a globe-shaped balloon, nudging it with his head, his palms, and his butt, until it pops, his performance conveying precisely the fragile illusion of domination. That kind of thing moves me.

Healing wounds

Since childhood, I’ve carried this desperation to be liked. I lack the instinct for malice; my default is to see the good in everyone. Even now, I resist passing judgment, though this is in itself a kind of extremism. When I don’t like someone, coexistence becomes unbearable. Yet, life demands compromise, so I contort my perceptions, cobble together excuses to paint them in a kinder light. Not out of some inherent grace, but because it’s easier that way, more comfortable.

Standup cracked me open. For the first time, I could confront my latent cruelty, the realization that harshness isn’t just permissible, but sometimes necessary. I began owning my aggression, the jagged edges of anger and darkness that I’d suppressed. For years, I hated my thick lips. Now, I’ve made peace with them. But let’s be clear, this acceptance isn’t some triumph of self-actualization. It’s circumstantial, a shifting aesthetic tide that’s finally lapped at my shores.

As a child, I dreaded hearing someone say, “You look just like ‘so-and-so’” — surely, whoever that is must be hideous, I’d think. I’d force an awkward smile and swallow the words I couldn’t articulate. These small wounds don’t heal easily. They’re like pinpricks: gone quick, but the sting lingers. Years later, though the words lose their power, you remember how it felt when you had no retort.

Such moments were common during my childhood. My parents divorced when I was in primary school, and I lived with my mother. I wanted her to just be my mom — fully, constantly — but she had her own life to navigate, her career and relationships.

I became desperate to make her happy. On her birthday, Mother’s Day, and International Women’s Day, I’d buy her carnations, stand on a stool to reach the wok and cook, or scrub our apartment until it was spotless. I’d even leave a carnation at every neighbor’s door where a woman lived. I’d mimic our physics teacher’s mannerisms to make her laugh; I liked to see her smile.

One afternoon, scribbling in my room, I wrote the English coda to the so-called “ice queen” set. In that moment, I realized none of my emotions sprang from loving relationships, or that elderly man who sexually harassed me in the street. They traced back to a little girl starving for affection, to all those shame-filled moments when I ached for my mother’s tenderness.

Even as an adult, passing those dilapidated six-story tenements with their dim yellow lights, I would feel a visceral pull to move in. Before primary school, those crumbling walls held my intact family, then later just my mother and me. Those rooms preserved my childhood terror of darkness, every desperate effort I’d made to make my mother smile.

That glow used to fill me with aching nostalgia. But recently, walking past similar buildings, I noticed that that feeling has subsided, and I recognized that something had shifted in my relationship with my mother.

That child who needed every light blazing, doors open — even begging neighbors to lend her their dogs for company — she couldn’t have imagined her future self striding confidently past dark apartments in strange cities.

These days, my sense of security comes from a delicious hotpot, from inner stillness, from ordering extravagant takeout meals without guilt. On the lifestyle app Xiaohongshu (also known as RedNote), I have a folder titled “Courage” containing all the “repo” (internet slang for online write-ups following a performance) that mention me. But I know better than to anchor myself there. The praise of others is not lasting, and I must not rely on it.

Bi Gan, the film director, once described watching a lamp’s glow during his parents’ fights, and that light later inspired his cinematic visuals. There’s something profound in the fragments that shape us — the vulnerable, choked-up, unresolved versions of ourselves. Some knots shouldn’t be untangled. We need our grudges to keep us striving.

As told to reporters Er Hei and Ba Rui.

A version of this article originally appeared in Oh Youth! (36Kr). It has been translated and edited for brevity and clarity, and is republished here with permission.

Translator: Kiong Xin Xi; editors: Wang Juyi and Hao Qibao.

(Header image: Visuals from @脱口秀和Ta的朋友们 on Weibo and VCG, reedited by Sixth Tone)