LOS ANGELES — Comedian Jiaoying Summers remembers her first time being kicked off a platform. It was on an open-mic stage at a bar in Koreatown where she bombed. Under the spotlight, nervousness gripped her vocal cords and feeble one-liners fell flat in front of a snickering crowd. Two minutes felt like two hours until she got "the light" — a polite comedy club version of the stage hook.
"It was really bad," she says, her bubbly voice suddenly weighed down by embarrassment. "I could barely talk — all my trauma, the lack of confidence of growing up a little girl in China, being unwanted and nearly thrown in a dumpster … I was horrified."
That last part of her statement is no joke — though it rolls off her tongue between nibbles of bread from a charcuterie board at a sunny beachside restaurant in Santa Monica. Today she's far from the brutal reality of being born a girl in China during the country's one-child mandate allowing only one child per household — preferably male. For years she didn't talk about memories of nearly being killed as a baby that stained her subconscious.
