Bowen Yang Is Making Saturday Night Live a Little Bit Weirder

It's a crisp morning in January, and Bowen Yang and I are eating lunch in a rustic little Italian restaurant in one of those quaint Brooklyn neighborhoods where your statistical risk of getting maimed by a $700 Baby Jogger shoots up like a hockey stick. He used to live around here. Misses the easygoingness. But he upgraded not long ago to a nicer apartment in another trendy neighborhood—one of the many things, big and small, that have changed for the 29-year-old in the months since he transformed into a breakout star on Saturday Night Live and debuted as the show's first Chinese American cast member.

It's just past noon, and the joint is mostly empty, save for a specific phylum of middle-aged male (stringy white hair; indoor scarves; “working on a novel” energy), and then there's us, two Asian guys of the mid-millennial variety, discussing what it's like to inhabit New York's creative spaces. We note that even in a city that prides itself on its diversity, it's rare and refreshing to work with people who happen to look like us, to be in rooms full of peers who aren't mostly white. Bowen had one such memorable experience while filming Comedy Central's Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens—a new show he's in alongside Awkwafina, BD Wong, and Lori Tan Chinn—that involved non-psychedelic mushrooms.

“Do you know what wood ears are—like the fungus?” he asks me. “In between takes, we were all talking about wood ears and all the different culinary experiences we've had in Asia. And then, in that moment, I was like, ‘Holy shit, I've never been able to talk to someone about this on a set before.’ ”

Bowen joined SNL as a writer in 2018 and became a cast member last September. According to the show's creator, Lorne Michaels, there was no doubt he would end up in front of the camera. “[I just wanted him to have] the confidence and the poise onstage, and that he was comfortable out there, before it happened,” Michaels tells me. Once in the spotlight, Bowen quickly emerged as an electric talent, playing roles as varied as a bitchy Kim Jong-un, a turbocharged Barry's Bootcamp instructor in training, and onetime presidential candidate Andrew Yang (no relation). Perhaps most famously, though, Yang brought to life the admonishing boss of a diminutive social media manager played by Harry Styles, in a demented and unabashedly queer sketch simply titled “Sara Lee.”

In it, Bowen and a colleague reprimand the ex-One Directioner for mixing up the company Instagram with his own account, posting comments like “Wreck me daddy” and “Destroy me king” under, say, a photo of Nick Jonas. Bowen cowrote the sketch last year with his old colleague Julio Torres. It got shelved until Styles was brought on as host: He came into Bowen's office, flipped through the script, and purportedly couldn't stop laughing. “Harry, who has sort of been gleefully straddling the line between queerness and whatever else, seemed like the perfect person for it,” says Bowen. “The sketch was just this completely insane, loud dog whistle to the queer community, with all of the specific depressed gay voice.”

Bowen's onscreen creations veer toward the weird and inane, but in person he's attentive, thoughtful, inquisitive—a patient observer attuned to the ambient absurdities swirling around him. He speaks multiple languages and seems to possess the vocabulary of a North American Scrabble Champion, effortlessly dropping words like “matriculating” and “jejune” into conversation about like Mean Girls. “He's definitely one of the smartest, most intuitive people I know,” says Matt Rogers, Bowen's best friend and his cohost on the cultishly popular comedy podcast Las Culturistas. “He is so smart that he also really knows how to be stupid.”

One could reasonably assume that brains run in the family: Dad was born in China, earned a doctorate in mining engineering in Australia (literally a scientist who specialized in blowing shit up), and came with the family to America by way of Canada. Mom was a successful ob-gyn back in China. Bowen spent his teen years in Aurora, Colorado. His parents were always big on academics and as a kid he remembers being drawn to the comedy of “understatedly weird” late-night TV hosts like David Letterman (“a charming asshole”) and Conan O’Brien (“a charming nerd”). He describes his younger self as something of a ham who was voted Most Likely to Be a Cast Member on Saturday Night Live by his high school classmates.

At one point during lunch, Bowen tells a story about how his parents found an “open chat window” on the family computer, which is how they learned that Bowen was gay. “I had never seen my dad cry before up until that point,” says Bowen. “And I was coming home from school every day to him sobbing.”

Soon, Dad pitches Bowen on the idea of conversion therapy to “fix” his queerness. It wasn't that the family was religious or anything. It was more: “We solve problems in this house, and this feels like a solution,” explains Bowen. “We're not really going to look into how it's destructive or bad or terrible.” So a 17-year-old Bowen, perhaps implicitly understanding that his parents may be operating from a place of fear, opens up a little bit of space in his heart and goes, “Okay, if it means you'll stop being this sad…then sure.”

Therapy was two hours south in Colorado Springs, where the megachurches are visible from space. Dad waited in the lobby while Bowen would visit with “some quack,” and then father and son would make the drive back up I-25—which strangely enough “became a fun bonding experience,” Bowen says, even if the therapy itself didn't do all that much. “The irony is that I end up at NYU,” he says, “which is like the gayest undergrad in the world.” (Dad asked the quack for recommendations for other quack therapists in NYC, and he was told: “Unfortunately, there aren't that many people in New York who do this…”)

It's a common kind of conflict for first- and second-generation kids: Your parents are operating from a place of love, just trying to protect you, but it's a hard concept to articulate, at least at first. “Any distortion of what they saw as a normative sexual existence was so foreign to them that they were just trying to figure out how to make sure I was going to be okay,” says Bowen. “And the more I've understood that, the more they've expressed that in their own words.”

“Now we have a great relationship,” he adds.

These days the family is close-knit. They take frequent vacations together—Disneyland was a favorite destination, and the holidays this year were spent traipsing around Paris—but at the end of the day they're still, y'know, his parents. “My dad every now and then will toe that line and be like, You could try women!” says Bowen, laughing. “And I'm like…Don't. It's almost an endearing kind of homophobia, if such a thing exists.”

Back in September, when SNL announced additions to its lineup—Bowen, Chloe Fineman, and Shane Gillis—there was an air of excitement. Notably around Bowen, the first Asian American person to join the cast provided you discount things like the one-fourth-Filipino part of Rob Schneider. But the mood shifted when the internet uncovered a video from 2018 in which Gillis was heard participating in a rambling tangent about Chinese food, Chinatown, and the people who inhabit it. Gillis said the word “chink” in the clip, and soon his name became a trending topic on Twitter. “It was hurtful, but at the same time it wasn't even that surprising,” Bowen says, remembering the incident. “It's shit I've heard all my life.”

Gillis was ultimately removed from the show. As the chaos swirled around them, Bowen tracked down Gillis's contact info, opened up some space in his heart, and texted him something along the lines of: “Hey, this is all really crazy.… Let me know if you want to talk.” Bowen didn’t hear anything that night. The next day, in an odd bit of cosmic symmetry, he was on the set of Nora from Queens for the last day of shooting, surrounded by his Asian cast mates, when Shane finally hit him back. Bowen had even gone to Pearl River Mart in Chinatown (“best store in New York!”) to get a few gifts for the rest of the crew.

When they talked, Bowen says Gillis was contrite. The two reached an understanding, and that was that. “He deserves some level of progression out of this,” says Bowen. “We both deserve to not live in this moment that was unfortunate for everybody for the rest of our careers.” Folks on the internet (myself included) pitted Shane against Bowen when neither of them asked for it, inadvertently showing how tricky it is for a young artist burdened with being a “first”: You might be a product of your different overlapping identities, but you don't want to be defined by any one of them. All you want is the basic human luxury of being seen as multidimensional—to have the opportunity to grow and live in your complications.

“I think the sooner you take responsibility for what reaction you want to get out of an audience, the better,” says Bowen, contemplatively, about the path forward for a boundary-pushing comedian trying to do work of any consequence. “There's this joke that Anna Drezen wrote for Melissa Villaseñor, where Melissa plays every teen-girl murder suspect on Law & Order. And there's this joke in there that is like, We stabbed her as a joke, but she took it the wrong way and started bleeding! If your intention is to stab someone, do it. You can't absolve yourself from the consequence of someone bleeding, you know?”

The briefest pause, and a redress.

“Does that metaphor track?”

Chris Gayomali is an articles editor at GQ.

A version of this story originally appeared in the April 2020 issue with the title “Live From New York, It's Bowen Yang.”

PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Katie McCurdy
Styled by Ian Bradley
Grooming by Kumi Craig using La Mer at The Wall Group
Tailoring by Victoria Yee Howe

Originally Appeared on GQ