Los Angeles comic Jiaoying Summers had a booking at a Hollywood club on Sunday night, but she canceled it, left her two small kids with her mother and caught a 7:30 a.m. flight to San Francisco — to perform a 20-minute set for free in a drafty upstairs hall at the Ferry Building on Sunday afternoon.
“When a comedian is willing to wake up at 5 a.m., that is true love,” said Summers, 33. She was also willing to pay her own airfare to show her love for “Our Time,” a first of its kind empowerment celebration of Asian women organized by the San Francisco nonprofit Asians Are Strong.
“Whatever I have achieved, I want to show Asian women that they can do better,” said Summers, who has achieved a 30-minute special on Peacock TV, and was considered a headliner at an event that didn’t have one. All Asian women were treated as equals at the free event.
The event, which ran from 2 to 5 p.m. and included 19 exhibitors, came together in two weeks, put together by Zeien Cheung, a co-founder of Asians Are Strong. She and five others founded the group at a Japantown bar where they gathered to commiserate about the rash of senseless attacks on elderly Asians in 2020.
Since then, the group has led vigils, rallies and outdoor events. Known for their black T-shirts with orange block lettering spelling out “Asians Are Strong,” they chose jade-green T-shirts bearing the tweaked slogan “Asian Women Are Strong” for Sunday’s event.
“There has never been an event that spotlights and celebrates Asian women,” said Cheung, who lives in San Francisco and works for Amazon Web Services. “We’re always in the back seat, a footnote, or on the side. But today we want all Asian women to be proud of their successes.”
The first sign of that success was to be the traditional dragon dance in front of the Ferry Building. The 10 people forming the dragon from head to tail were high…
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