The red carpet was bright green in 2019 when Always Be My Maybe stars comedian Ali Wong and actor Randall Park spoke to reporters and posed for photos.
Some of them would send shockwaves across social media three years later.
On Wednesday, Wong announced her divorce from her husband of eight years, entrepreneur Justin Hakuta. But in sharing the news, Parade magazine used a photo of Wong and Park from the 2019 premiere. MSN went a step further and shared a shot of the actor — with no Wong in sight.
Both publications have since deleted their original tweets and replaced the photos. But her mistake sparked outrage, and people took to Twitter to debunk how the outlets got the #WrongAsian.
“Come on! Can’t we ruin the news of Ali Wong’s divorce with Wrong Asian racism?” tweeted Phil Yu, a Korean-American blogger and author.
Park isn’t the first Asian celebrity to be misidentified by the media. Last year, Letterboxd, a movie review app, shared a photo an actress identified as Michelle Yeoh. It was actually Fala Chen, who also starred in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. 2019 Crazy Rich Asians actor Ronny Chiang exclaimed People magazine for mistaking him and his wife Hannah Pham as Park and Jae W. Suh.
Twitter users shared their own stories of being misidentified. An Asian woman said she received the wrong diploma by her principal; One Asian man said he was asked weekly if he “had was just the night before or earlier that day.”
It’s this mix-up that makes many people of color feel interchangeable.
“You feel kind of invisible because they don’t know who you are even though you work so hard,” Nicholas Pilapil told The Washington Post in 2019 about being misidentified by his peers.
It ‘makes you invisible’
On Wednesday, Parade apologized for the mistake.
“We understand how hurtful this photo error was and the impact it can have, and we sincerely regret it,” the magazine said posted on Twitter. “We want to apologize to Ali Wong, Justin Hakuta, Randall Park and anyone who may have been hurt by our mistake. We will take stricter measures in the future to ensure this does not happen again.”
Anger at the mistake eclipsed the news of Wong’s split — which resonated deeply considering the comedian has often gushed about her husband.
Wong met Hakuta in 2010 at a friend’s wedding reception. The two married four years later and welcomed daughters Mari and Nikki in 2015 and 2017, respectively. Her journey through marriage and motherhood is often the inspiration for her jokes.
In her 2016 Netflix special Baby Cobra, a heavily pregnant Wong — dressed in her signature form-fitting mini dress — quipped that she hatched a plan to “capture” Hakuta after learning he was attending Harvard Business School visited. Two years later, in the Hard Knock Wife special, a re-pregnant Wong joked about the prenup that Hakuta’s parents insisted on signing. (The joke is on her, she said, because she’s the breadwinner of the family.)
While Wong’s jokes can be sexually explicit and crude, they’re full of honesty about the difficulties of balancing a career with marriage and motherhood. She has often highlighted the unequal expectations placed on women.
“My husband changes diapers occasionally and when people hear this [mimics explosion sound] ‘Oh my god, confetti everywhere,'” she said on Hard Knock Wife. “‘I can’t believe your husband is changing diapers. What a doting modern dad. Lucky you!’ When my little girl was born, I made skin-to-skin contact every day to bond with her. she [pooped] on my chest Where’s my confetti?”
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During her latest Netflix episode, “Don Wong,” which premiered in February, the comedian opened the show by saying that she thinks about cheating on Hakuta “every five minutes.” Later in the stand-up routine, which focused on the concept of monogamy and the double standards in it, she said she was still very much in love with her husband.
Explaining that Hakuta is her type, she said, “I like guys who look as close to Keanu Reeves as possible.”