Posted on this Website in June 2003
First Published in San Francisco Chronicle, June 3, 2003
By David Wiegand, Chronicle Staff Writer

•  Interview with B. D. Wong

The young Asian American hostess in the smart blue uniform at the Compass Rose is happy to provide an out-of-the-way table for a reporter to tape an interview with B.D. Wong, who is staying upstairs at the Westin St. Francis.

"This one would be fairly quiet, I think," she says with a professional smile. Then, unable to help herself, she adds: "Wow, B.D. Wong is here. Oh, I love him -- an Asian actor."

A few minutes later, the actor who has often campaigned for greater visibility for Asians in film, television and stage, grins broadly when he's told about Janice Yee Bolosan's comment. He knows how she feels. Growing up in the Sunset District as Bradley Darryl Wong, he remembers being confused and then angry watching all those TV shows with no Asian faces. And although he's beaten the odds in his own career since his Tony-winning gender-bending turn in the title role of "M. Butterfly," it still gets him upset that things haven't improved that much for other Asian American actors.

"Television shows and movies that are all white, I can't watch them," he says, sitting down wearing a gray Dartmouth T-shirt and jeans after tossing his long, black leather coat on a nearby chair. "They totally alienate me."

These days, Wong is dealing with a few more labels in his life as well. Although he's spent much of his career being, as he puts it, "cagey" about his personal life, he's now officially out as a gay man, thanks to a cover story in the new issue of the national gay magazine, the Advocate. That's part of the reason the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Discrimination honored him, along with Stockard Channing, at the group's annual media awards Saturday at the St. Francis. The more important reason, however, is that Wong has written a memoir, not about his career, but about how he and his partner of 15 years, talent agent Richie Jackson ("Some of you aren't even aware that there is 'a Richie' " he writes), decided to become parents.

"Following Foo: The Electronic Adventures of the Chestnut Man" isn't like most books you'll ever read because it was originally a series of detailed and very emotional e-mails he wrote to friends and family all over the world in the harrowing weeks after the birth of Boaz Dov and Jackson Foo Wong. It's also safe to say that no one who is a parent or who ever had parents of his own will read the book without crying -- a lot.

Five pages into the 377-paged book and it doesn't matter that B.D. Wong has come out or that the parents of the infants are two gay men. The boys, due in August 2000 to the Modesto-area surrogate, Shauna Berringer, arrived May 28, 2000. Boaz Dov (to carry the B.D. Wong name, inherited from their dad, Bill D, by B.D. and his brothers, Barry and Brian), was born first, followed 15 minutes later by his brother, Jackson Foo. Within an hour and a half, Boaz Dov had died, but there was little time to grieve as a pitch battle commenced to save the life of his surviving brother, who weighed less than 3 pounds at birth and was dubbed "the chestnut man" because he seemed to have the worldly wise face of the old men who sold chestnuts on the streets of New York.

That battle began in Modesto, with B.D. staying at a cheap motel whenever he didn't have to fly down to Los Angeles for work on the film "The Salton Sea. " Richie flew out from New York when he could, and members of both of their families were on hand as well. Soon, it became clear that the Modesto hospital wasn't equipped to handle the multitude of ailments afflicting the infant, whose body was an octopus of tubes and monitoring devices. After a few days, Jackson Foo and his "dad with the hair on top" (Richie is the follicly challenged parent) boarded a helicopter for San Francisco, where the medical staff at UC San Francisco Hospital went into high gear and stayed there for weeks until, at last, Richie and B.D. could take their son back home to New York.

Sitting near a window at the Compass Rose, Wong's face is bathed in blazing sunlight. His dark hair, almost imperceptibly flecked with gray and parted in the middle, has grown out some since the actor, 42, finished his five-year role as Father Ray in HBO's gritty cellblock drama "Oz." He has a couple of rings on the fingers of one hand and a silver bracelet on his left wrist. He's also wearing a pair of clunky dark leather work boots, which won't exactly go with the neat dark suit, lime-green shirt and op-art tie he'll wear at the GLAAD dinner the next night. After the event, he'll fly back to New York to finish his stint this season as a regular cast member on NBC's "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit" and to host the American Foundation for AIDS Research dinner on Monday night. Then he'll turn around and come back to San Francisco on Tuesday for readings tonight and Wednesday at area bookstores. But given the air miles he logged in the three months following the birth of his sons, jet lag is an old friend, almost as much a part of the unofficial Wong-Jackson family of friends and medical personnel whose support Wong chronicles in his book.

If Wong had decided to record his thoughts during Jackson's extended hospitalization with an eye toward making them public some day, "Following Foo" would be a different and very conventional book. But the e-mails he pounded out on his laptop in the hospital or in the wee hours of the morning at his parents' kitchen table in the Sunset had much more immediate purposes: To let family and friends know what was going on with Jackson's treatment, and to keep his own sanity. The book wasn't rewritten from those hundreds of e- mails: With some minor prepublication tweaking, it is those hundreds of e- mails, along with some of the hundreds of electronic responses of support from friends like John Lithgow, Michelle Kwan, Harvey Fierstein, Jill Clayburgh, far-flung members of both the Wong and Jackson clans, and the medical personnel back in Modesto who were all pulling for the "chestnut man" to pull through.

The emotional nakedness of that first e-mail surprised Wong.

"I wasn't used to expressing myself so openly," he says. "Usually, I'd stop myself from that, but this time, I didn't. And when I wrote the second, I still didn't stop myself."

About two-thirds of the way into that summer, someone suggested he compile the e-mails into a book. He couldn't even begin to train his mind on the idea then, but later on, he realized how many people "really got into the Jackson story. They got into it like a soap opera," awaiting each new "'episode," which included a terrifying operation on the infant to remove a damaged section of his threadlike colon and then waiting anxiously for the all- important "poop" as evidence that Jackson's system was beginning to function normally. And lest anyone think "Following Foo" is pure "Stella Dallas," it's also very funny and filled with lots of giddy ICU humor, including a poetic ode to "poop" ("Poop Dreams" -- you can't make this stuff up) by the relieved dad with the hair on top when Jackson begins to turn the corner.

Recalling the events of the past three years, Wong talks about how "the birth of my sons" -- emphatically plural -- "changed everything in my life." It isn't that he doesn't acknowledge that one son died, but believing without question that Boaz Dov gave his life so his brother would survive in turn convinces him that Boaz is still part of Jackson's life. And still part of his own life, changing it for the better.

"It created a situation that I never would have thought desirable," he says.

"It can be argued that even in the wake of AIDS and Sept. 11, incredibly inspiring things occurred. Conventional thought would probably say that, Well I would choose for those things not to have happened, but I don't think that's life. It sounds very harsh to say Sept. 11 resulted in inspiring things happening, but I have learned that is life. As soon as you step aside from trying to control what's going to happen to you, you're opening yourself up to true life. And I wouldn't trade what happened for the world."

Before the babies were born, "I did all the right things, everything I needed to do to prepare," he says, including working with the California surrogacy agency to find the right woman to carry the infants, who were conceived in vitro from an egg from Richie's sister and from B.D.'s sperm. All the legal t's were crossed and i's dotted, while Richie and B.D. prepared their home for their sons' arrival back in New York.

But on May 28, 2000, Wong had to face the reality that there are things in life even a self-confessed control freak couldn't prepare for.

"You let go of what you think it can do to you, you just go with it. You mustn't control it," he says. "I thought I was doing all the right things as a parent by taking care of everything, but guess what? S -- is going to happen. Ironically enough you have to love it, you kind of have to say, Come at me, show me what you're going to show me. Things like this show me as a human being what human beings are capable of. What is heroism without tragedy? Do we want life without heroism?"

Wong correctly insists "Following Foo" is not a book about gay parenting or even about parenting itself, as opposed to a journey of self-discovery that anyone is forced to take by cataclysmic events in his or her life.

"Prior to the day the sky opened up, I wasn't totally me for some reason and now I'm getting an idea of who I am," he says.

On Saturday night, like a true star, Wong arrives with an entourage, but they aren't the usual Central Casting hangers-on. They're his mom, Roberta, a bubbly retired phone company employee, and his father, "the original B.D. Wong, " his son says of Bill D. Wong, a retired postal worker. Also on hand are his brother Barry, the public information officer for the San Francisco Fire Department, and his wife, Doris.

"I've always had tremendous support from my parents," Wong says, a fact more than evident throughout "Following Foo." "I think there's a myth that gay people have lousy relationships with their parents. Maybe there are logical reasons for a gay person not to have a great relationship with their parents -- not because there's a parent who made him gay, but just because it may be difficult to understand everything. But there are gay people who have great relationships with their parents, and (Richie and I) just happen to be two of them."

On Saturday, Wong tells the audience at the GLAAD dinner that his long journey toward coming out and becoming the man and father he is today is like "a train that for a long time has not always made its destination clear."

If he has a better idea of his destination now, he says, it's because of his sons -- emphatically plural.

As theater audiences know, the climactic moment in "M. Butterfly" comes when the beautiful Song Liling finally reveals herself as a man to her longtime European lover by removing her wig, allowing her silk gown to tumble to the floor and standing naked before him. Twenty-five years after he first played that scene, Wong, who was first billed as B.D. in the "M. Butterfly" program in order to smudge his gender, stood before the GLAAD audience and declared himself, as he put it, as a gay man, as a father and as Bradley Darryl Wong. As he did so, the entire room rose to applaud.

Welcome home, Bradd.