Nothing Will Stop Jiaoying Summers from Speaking her Truth

In fact, Summers has found her voice through subverting the norms expected of her: Onstage, she delivers a Joan Rivers’ brand of brash, raunchy comedy that blasts her personal struggles and turns many of the offensive stereotypes she encounters inside-out. In one popular joke, she mocks the Asian beauty standards—“Chinese people like tiny lips like a baby bird asshole”—she’s been held up against. In another, she questions people who ask her whether “all Asian men have small penises.”

The punchline: “All Asian men? Did you get on your knees and give one billion Asian men a blowjob?” It’s obviously funnier when she tells it.

On her podcast (aptly named Tiger MILF) and in interviews, she acts like an archetypal immigrant mother: blunt, quick to call out hypocrisy, but always with an undercurrent of compassion for the underdogs that makes it difficult to refute her candid opinions. “When you treat people below you like shit, you are nothing to me,” Summers tells me in our Zoom call.

Summers’ ability to thrive on her own terms has been developed in many ways as a survival mechanism. Growing up in Anyang, on the border of China’s Henan province, she built and retained a fierce confidence from a young age, despite being continually reminded that she wasn’t pretty enough to be an entertainer. Summers was too dark-skinned and square-jawed to fit Chinese beauty standards, which demand extremely fair skin and a V-shaped face; she tells me her nickname was “cage fighter” as a child, and she was forbidden to wear pink by her mother because it accentuated her skin tone.

“I was an ugly girl,” she says. “You know, it didn't stop me from thriving in life. I was just like, I need to learn and be smart because my looks are not gonna give me a rich husband to take care of me. If you’re smart and witty, people like you. I always wanted to be liked.”

A natural leader and performer, Summers inherited her businesswoman mother’s hustle and started her first business when she was 6 by organizing the neighborhood children to catch scorpions, which they sold to traditional Chinese medicine shops. She excelled in classical calligraphy and painting, and communicated with male crushes by writing letters and doing their homework, although she was once rejected by her crush for being too dark-skinned to go out with in public.

However, she discovered a world where her talent and look could be celebrated, by watching Hollywood films at her babysitter’s DVD store. If Halle Berry and Beyoncé were beautiful, why couldn’t she be? With dreams of Hollywood firmly planted in her head, she begged her mother to send her to the United States for school. At the time, it was unheard of to send a daughter abroad all alone, so her mother attempted to dissuade her with the impossible task of raising $20,000 in a week towards her school fees. Her best friend’s extremely well-to-do father gave her the money, and she landed in Kentucky at 18 to study finance with a minor in theater, where she met and married her first husband and eventually getting a corporate job in Los Angeles (and divorcing her first husband) after college, before marrying her second husband and reluctantly acquiescing to his demands of being a stay-at-home wife. During this time, she took acting classes with Howard Fine but hid her aspirations from her mother.

“I just knew it was going to be an endless fight, so I just never told her,” she says. “She was like, ‘Can you imagine anyone being an actor?’ I was like, ‘That’s disgusting, mom.’”

After she got married, she continued going back and forth between LA and Beijing while auditioning for onscreen parts. She quickly found that her accent automatically excluded her from many roles, but a fortuitous audition with director and screenwriter John Singleton in 2017 helped her discover comedy. Singleton didn’t find her right for the part, but saw in her an instinctive sense of comedic timing. “He was convinced that I would be a star, because I improvised a thing for a role on a TV show,” says Summers. “I didn’t understand what he meant. If you think I was great, why wouldn’t you just cast me? When you’re young, you’re always the victim when you don’t get what you want.”

Two years later, she took his advice to heart and moved to LA permanently to begin performing standup. It was a revelation—rather than being held to unachievable beauty standards or rejected because of her accent, she realized that all that matters in standup is being able to make your audience laugh. “They forget that you are a woman, an Asian woman, that you have an accent. All they care about is that I’m funny,” she says. “And it’s a business—the club wants you to sell tickets, and I can sell tickets.”