It’s hard to pick which part of Ali Wong’s new book, “Dear Girls,” made me laugh hardest. Is it when the well-known stand-up comedian, writer and actor says that being forced to masturbate quietly, sans vibrator, is masturbating “Amish-style”? Or is it when she explains that, while pregnant, she couldn’t see her vagina except in a mirror, at which point the hair was so long and unruly it looked like “an ancient, wise Chinese man from a fairy tale that got stuck in a cave and survived off yams”?

I’m not sure, but I do know that, while reading “Dear Girls,” which comes out Tuesday, Oct. 15, I laughed so much, so violently, that my husband, who’d been reading next to me, put down his book and joined me in reading “Dear Girls,” sharing my copy.

As in the examples above, part of the force Wong brings to her book, its thrilling hilarity, has to do with how she talks about bodies, sex and motherhood. It’s also part of what she brings to her performed comedy, which has been groundbreaking, riotous and inarguably powerful.

In 2016, Wong performed in a pivotal hour-long Netflix comedy special, “Baby Cobra,” that quickly turned her into a public figure. During the special, she made fantastically funny, raunchy jokes of a kind I’d never quite heard — not on a stage, filmed, for public consumption. About the pleasures of receiving oral sex from white people: “I could just crush your head at any moment, white man! I could just kill you right now! Crush those brains! Colonize the colonizer, you know?”

About the sexiness of Asian men, some of whom can tend to be less hirsute: “It’s like making love to a dolphin. Oh my God. It’s so smooth, just like a Slip ‘N Slide.”

Wong is of half Chinese and half Vietnamese descent, while her husband, Justin Hakuta, is of half Japanese and half Filipino descent, which makes them both, she said, “half fancy Asian and half jungle Asian.”

With “Baby Cobra,” Wong rapidly went from sometimes having trouble filling comedy venues to becoming easily recognizable. Now, when she goes out to eat, she often has her restaurant bills paid by incognito strangers who love her work and just want to anonymously show their appreciation. On the phone, I ask Wong if fame has come as a burden, a joy, or both. It is exciting, she says, and she feels honored; it has, though, been odd for her family — her siblings, her mother, her husband. “I think about how strange and surreal it is for all of them.”

A lot of Wong’s motivation for writing “Dear Girls” has to do with her family. The book is written as a series of letters to her two young daughters: Wong conceived of it after her father died, out of the desire to know more about who he’d been. “I wanted to leave something for you girls for when I die,” she says, in the book’s preface. Wong wished, with this first book, to talk in depth about her siblings and parents. It’s also the part she’s most nervous about. “I haven’t really done that before in my stand-up. I tried so many times, and it just never worked out because it took too long to explain what my family was like. A lot of times, people almost didn’t believe me.”

In stand-up, she says, one has to get people to laugh every 30 seconds, maybe every couple of minutes. With the expanded space a book provides, she had air; she could breathe. What is it about her family that stand-up audiences didn’t believe? How progressive they are, she says.

Her family has also deeply informed her relationship to shame. They were and are, for one, very open about sex: “Not just my parents. My aunt who’s a senior citizen — she has said some wild things. That’s just kind of how it’s always been.”

I find I’m nodding, and I tell Wong that in the past year, while touring with a first novel, I’ve felt increasingly unsettled by how often I’m asked if my parents resisted my becoming a writer — and by how frequently I’m met with confusion, even incredulity, when I say my parents were, in fact, excited. The sense I get is that I’ve disturbed a questioner’s received notions about how Asian American families work.

“Right, there’s this disbelief,” Wong says. “We don’t all have the same experience, you know?”

No, we very much don’t, and this is another source of Wong’s power — the disparities between what people might expect when they see her, a 5-foot-tall Asian woman, the stereotypes they could have in mind, versus the bold, filthy jokes she tells. That said, as she emphasizes in “Dear Girls,” she hates being asked what it’s like being an Asian American woman in Hollywood. “I resent that white men never get asked, ‘What is it like to be a white man in movies?’” she notes.

Elsewhere, she’s also said that, in her comedy, she’s not trying to send out political messages. I ask Wong about this. So much of what she does, I say, feels inherently political — how she talks about bodies and shame, the extent to which parts of her comedy center on Asian Americans. “I think that it’s a nice outcome, but when you’re creating something, if that is your intention, that will not produce the greatest joke, and definitely not the most effective message,” Wong says. “Comedy and laughing are like a magic trick. When people laugh, it does something chemical to their body, and then they think about it.”

And she is very rigorously interested in making people laugh. Stand-up is Wong’s passion, her calling. Even at her busiest, she tries to perform stand-up three to five times a week, and she doesn’t consider a joke solid until she’s performed it at least 25 times. I ask Wong to walk me through the evolution of a joke.

“What’s an example of a joke of mine that you like?” she says, and my mind fires with dozens of possibilities.

OK, what about fancy Asians versus jungle Asians? It’s one that every Asian American person in my life seems to know, a bit of lingua franca that comes up, oh, maybe every week.

“The execution in stand-up all has to do with word choice,” she says. In a previous incarnation of the joke, she talked about “bougie” Asians, but some people didn’t understand what she meant, so she switched to “fancy.” The word order matters, too: “It’s much funnier if I say half-fancy Asian and half-jungle Asian versus half-jungle Asian and half-fancy Asian.”

She’s always trying to make the joke better; a joke is never finished.

It’s mattered greatly to Wong, though, that, starting with “Baby Cobra” — then again with her first movie, the captivating 2019 romantic comedy “Always Be My Maybe,” which she wrote with her longtime friend and co-star Randall Park — she’s become a popular Halloween costume, an Asian American cultural touchstone that doesn’t require added context to convey the costume’s meaning.

“So many Asian American women were like, ‘Thank you for giving me a costume,’ an easy costume,” Wong says, referencing the leopard-print contour dress she wore while visibly pregnant during “Baby Cobra.”

Before “Baby Cobra,” she says, a lot of Asian American women felt we had to buy a wig to cover our black hair, or maybe we could be Snow White. What’s more, with “Always Be My Maybe,” Asian Americans now have a his-and-hers costume to portray Wong’s and Park’s characters in the film.

“An Asian couple can be a pair, which is so cool.” And it’s inexpensive! “They don’t got to buy no wig. Get a T-shirt and draw a heart on it. Put a red cardigan on, get some glasses. It’s super easy and cheap.”

“Dear Girls” is packed with this kind of hilarity and insight, history and advice. There are stories about her childhood, her college years, experiences she’s had with disordered eating, tips on giving birth, stand-up wisdom and very accurate thoughts on how to find good Asian food. “I’d rather catch you trafficking cocaine into Thailand in any number of orifices than see you eating at a P.F. Chang’s,” she tells her daughters.

Since she’s a San Francisco native, I ask for her favorite restaurants: R&G Lounge, for Chinese food. Turtle Tower, Yamo, Saigon Sandwich. Humphry Slocombe and Mitchell’s. Taqueria Cancun, definitely.

In an afterword for “Dear Girls,” Wong’s husband talks about what it’s like to see her perform, “like a fiery, foul-mouthed preacher” offering “profane salvation.” Wong takes silence and shame about bodies, childbirth and sex, he says, and “transmutes pain and shame into power, like a mystical priestess.”

I think of her daughters reading this book one day, when they’re old enough — how wonderful, to have such a record. How lucky that the rest of us get to listen in.

“Dear Girls”

By Ali Wong

Random House

(240 pages; $27)

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