‘Wong Street Journal’ satirizes Western ways

“So what does any American do when they are feeling jaded?” Wong asks in her signature self-deprecating style. “They go to Africa because it is so easy to go fix other people’s problems and feel important and useful!”

In The Wong Street Journal she works through the online ennui that caused her to take the trip in the first place, performing on a set she crafted by hand from felt. She engages the audience in a hashtag war, complete with felt hashtags she sends hurling through the air. She uses felt flip charts to demonstrate the economics of NGOs and where your money goes. She also confronts what happened when she found herself wielding the kind of power and privilege that she had always felt oppressed her, after Ugandans referred to her as mzungu, or white.

She was confronted with her “mzungu-ness” throughout her trip, most notably one night when she met a group of musicians at a food stand and teased them not to charge her the mzungu price. They struck up a friendship and invited Wong to their studio to record. That accidental encounter led to her recording her first rap album, with the first single Mzungu Price (which is featured in her show), becoming a hit at Ugandan nightclubs.

“This only could have happened, not because they saw me and thought ‘Oh, this woman can rap!’ but because there was a curiosity around me,” Wong says. “What I witnessed there was what true community looked like.’’