At 35, Kiki Wong Got the Rock Star Break She’d Been Chasing for Years

Kiki Wong will forever be my “sister.” We were road warriors in an all-Asian girl rock band called Nylon Pink for almost ten years, traveling the world and creating chaos together.

I first wrote about meeting her in my memoir, Fetishized. We had booked her as a model for our band’s jewelry campaign. She showed up at the door quiet and shy, but once she got in front of the camera, she completely transformed. I remember pulling up her Model Mayhem profile during the shoot and realizing she was a guitarist. “It says she was a metal guitarist!” I whispered to my bandmate Katt Lee. After the shoot, I told Kiki, “We have a band!”

The first time we met Kiki

That chance meeting turned into years of touring together, a lot of trial and error, plenty of humiliation, and now one of the most mind-blowing career trajectories I’ve ever witnessed.

I wanted to interview Kiki because she’s such a great example of fearlessness and refusing to give up. We talked about the years before the arenas, the embarrassing failures along the way, how TikTok changed everything, and what happens when your dream finally arrives from completely out of left field.

Note: This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

KAILA: Did you ever imagine you’d end up playing for the Smashing Pumpkins? How did that even happen?

KIKI: It’s really funny because I think about Nylon Pink a lot at this stage. The fact that we’re all still friends and so tightly knit is such a rare and beautiful thing. I cherish our experience so much because that was the foundation of everything. We took so many hits, but we kept going and fighting.

KAILA: I still can’t get over the fact that our sound guy filmed Nylon Pink’s entire first tour and we’ll probably never see it.

KIKI: Our tour manager and sound/guy videographer went crazy.

KAILA: So how did the Smashing Pumpkins happen?

KIKI: Funnily enough, my baby was probably eight months to a year old. I’d put him to bed, and I was playing Call of Duty with some of Neil’s friends just to wind down.

Then I got a text message: “Hey, the Smashing Pumpkins are auditioning for a guitar player.”

At that point I honestly felt like I was done. We’d done the tours. We’d done all of it. I was 35, and I thought, “That chapter of my life is over.”

Then he sent me the post. I zoomed in and saw the blue checkmark. I paused the game, threw together a résumé as fast as I could, and submitted it. The audition post had already been up for eight hours and had something like 5,000 likes. I thought, “There’s no way.”

So I sent it in and let it go. In L.A., you do a thousand auditions and maybe get three jobs. Then I got a call from the band’s management asking if I’d get on Zoom with them.

KAILA: And they already knew who you were!

KIKI: Yeah! That was honestly one of the most flattering and insane things. I felt like I was batting way out of my league. I remember thinking, If I just get to talk to these guys, that’s cool enough.

I was trying to play it cool, but we ended up talking about metal, Dimebag Darrell, guitars. We barely talked about work. We were just vibing.

They told me they’d let me know about auditions in LA. Three months went by, and I thought, Okay, it’s probably done. I was fine with it. I’d already gotten farther than I expected. Then management emailed me: “Can you come to LA for the audition and learn these songs?”

Obviously, yes. We packed up the whole family, put the baby in the back, and drove from Arizona to LA. The morning of the audition, I walked in and Vic, their drum tech, came up to me. I didn’t know him yet. He said, “I just want you to know that no matter what happens today, you made it here and you deserve to be here.” That absolutely calmed me down.

Then I walked in to play with the band, and I was just cheesing, grinning ear to ear. I completely forgot to turn on “performance Kiki.” I was basically standing there thinking, Oh my God, this is so cool.

Afterward they said, “All right, we’ll let you know.” And I left thinking, If this is as far as I get, I’m happy. The experience alone was insane. I went to get a tattoo afterward, this little lucky cat because I kept thinking, I’m just lucky enough to be here.

I’d been talking to the tattoo artist Candy Kenobi for a few hours when my phone rang. They said, “You got it.”

It was a whole-body experience; I couldn’t believe it. I walked back inside almost crying, and the tattoo artist was almost crying. I had met her three hours earlier. And then suddenly I was in the Smashing Pumpkins.

KAILA: What happened next? Did you immediately go on tour?

KIKI: Pretty much. A couple of months later we went out on an arena tour with Weezer.

It was stressful for me. What’s really, really interesting about Pumpkins’ music is the orchestration of it and how they write music. So there aren’t a lot of things that repeat. Usually you have A B A B. It’s not like that. You’ll have an A B C D E F, and it never comes back to A. But even though it sounds similar to A, it’s not A. It’s like A backward or something.

I had about two and a half hours of music to memorize. For five days, it was basically boot camp. Between rehearsal and practicing alone in my room, I was playing something like 14 hours a day. And rehearsal at that level was completely different from anything I’d experienced before. Everything was recorded. There were playbacks. Front of house was working. There were all these moving pieces I’d never dealt with. I was so nervous during rehearsal.

I’ll never forget this moment because I think the biggest show we’d ever played at that time was the San Francisco Pride show we played with Nylon Pink. Then we got to Birmingham in the UK for my first show. There were around 15,000 people there.

I walked in, and I had never seen an arena from the perspective of a performer. The backstage manager, Sarah, said, “Here’s your stage.” And I started tearing up.

Then I got up there and played. I was like, I’m home. I got it. This is fine. There were no nerves. I was so nervous in rehearsal trying to figure everything out, and then everything just kind of came together.

Our second show was the O2 in London. 17,000 people, sold out.

I’ll never forget that feeling. You look out, and all I could see were these tiny lights going up and up and up. You can’t see their faces; I was like, “Holy mackerel! Like we’re in! Like this is it! And then the next tour was stadiums. Now it was 40,000, 50,000, 60,000 people.

Another beautiful thing I’m so grateful for is Katt Lee, our former bass player in Nylon Pink. She was magical onstage. She could get anyone clapping. She was the energy, the vibe provider.

I used to think it would be so uncomfortable to ask the audience to participate and have nobody respond. But now I channel my inner Katt. I’ll just start clapping and try to get the crowd going, and I don’t care if nobody joins in. Even if I’m the only one clapping for eight bars, I’m going to keep clapping.

KAILA: You mentioned Nylon Pink; we really put in the years.

KIKI: Our first tour was eight of us piled into a van. Jamie, Yuki and I slept in the trunk like little hot dogs. You made yourself a little bed on the floor beneath the seats.

KAILA: Our very first show was also the highest-paying show on the tour, so we desperately needed the money to get started. I don’t think we even performed. We did a sound check, and they were like, “You’re fired.

KIKI: I’m crying (she says laughing)

KAILA: It was devastating. Then my mom called to tell me our dog had been killed by a coyote. I never even told you guys because we weren’t having discussions about anything. Everyone was in their own world of pain.

KIKI: That’s true. Remember waking up one morning, and there were thousands of dead mayflies covering our beds because someone had left a window open overnight.

KAILA: Tours were magnets for bad luck.

KIKI: Then after you left the band, our singer quit halfway through another tour. I wasn’t even a singer but had three days to learn the entire set as the singer. I was super sick, sweating through ninety-minute shows at some random bar in Kentucky, trying to get through it. It was at some random bar in Kentucky, and nobody cared. But I just got through it.

KAILA: We’ve already been humiliated so many times.

KIKI: Exactly. Sometimes if I mess up or something happens on stage now, I don’t get that feeling of nervousness or embarrassment anymore. I’m just going to do the best I can because this is the greatest thing that’s happened to me.

We worked tooth and nail to get to these places. We got to travel the world. We played Asia, South America, and anime conventions. It wasn’t all bad. But I really think those years are why embarrassment doesn’t affect me anymore. I’m just like, “Try again.”

KAILA: That’s a really good takeaway because a lot of people are perfectionists, and that keeps them from starting.

Nylon Pink at the main stage at Los Angeles Pride

KAILA: When we were doing the TikTok thing, I was pulling up some of our old videos and thinking, these are highly embarrassing. But we just didn’t care. Once you don’t give a fuck and you’re able to put things out there and test and test, that’s how you learn. You just fall on your face.

KIKI: Yeah. One of the greatest things was doing that 30-day TikTok challenge. We were at a point during the pandemic when TikTok was lame. It was for kids. Everyone was like, “Why are you doing TikTok? What are you, 15?” We did that 30-day TikTok challenge before anybody really had information about what worked. We learned so much by testing things and putting out all our crazy videos.

KAILA: So much jumping.

KIKI: So much jumping.

But you’re right. The way we figured TikTok out was by trying it.

KAILA: We made four or five videos a day for a year. That’s how we learned.

KIKI: And remember our TikTok site: TikTok Bytes? Holy mackerel. That was something crazy, like 2,000 words five days a week.

KAILA: We had a lot of free time.

KIKI: We did have a lot of time. It was the pandemic, in fairness.

But all of that stuff really became part of the foundation for how I was able to handle the Pumpkins. There’s a lot more that goes into it than just being able to play and perform. These are high-stakes gigs with a lot of moving parts.

I feel like we experienced every type of pressure. Being afraid to fail is no longer really a fear because we’ve done it. Most of the time, we build up all this anticipation and anxiety about failure before it happens. But if you actually do fail, that feeling is pretty limited.

I think because we were moving so fast and doing that all the time, I was able to jump headfirst into the Pumpkins stuff and feel prepared. If I had gotten this gig in my twenties, I don’t think I could have handled it.

KAILA: But for you, you basically went viral doing guitar videos. Were they all covers at first? What were the ones that really started popping off?

KIKI: The one I remember really taking off was a mashup. I don’t remember exactly what the two songs were, but it was some popular TikTok trending mashup, and I played a riff over it—maybe it was ACDC.

That started to generate some traction, and I was like, “Oh, I could do this.”

So I started doing mashups, and then I started doing heavy covers of pop songs. It was basically what we had already done in Nylon Pink. Something like Britney Spears’ “Toxic.” I was like, “Oh, I know how to do this. This is literally what Nylon Pink used to do.”

Then I started doing metal covers. Some of my favorite metal bands are a little more obscure, and those started blowing up too. It was pretty much stuff I already knew how to do from everything we had done in the past.

The weird thing is, then people are like, “Are you just a TikToker who plays covers?” And I’m like, no, man. We spent hours in the studio writing music and doing all of that. But that’s where it started, doing covers on TikTok and Instagram. And when you test things, you realize people sometimes don’t want to see your original material. They only want to see the covers, and it drives me nuts.

It becomes almost like a bell curve. You start creating covers, you keep going and going, and eventually you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I’m exhausted. I don’t want to play more covers.” But that’s still what everybody wants to see.

KAILA: Were you thinking of making it a career? Because you also did social media marketing for different brands, for a while, right?

KIKI: I worked for like seven different brands freelance, and I was barely making my rent even with that amount because it was really low pay. In fairness, I learned a lot working social media for all different types of brands, because I got different perspectives on how to run an account.

Then I did the OnlyFans stuff, which was crazy. It was PG-13, just pictures, nothing super scandalous. It was an interesting dynamic on OnlyFans because I put a massive disclaimer saying, “This isn’t going to be a standard OnlyFans experience, so if you’re here for that, please leave.”If they were too persistent, I would delete them or remove them.

But I found that probably 90% of the people actually genuinely cared about me doing the music. They’d be like, “I’m not here for anything weird.”

I don’t use it anymore. I completely stopped once I got pregnant. But I was able to get myself out of massive debt. At one point, I didn’t even know how I was going to pay my rent.

KAILA: You were just at Lollapalooza. How the fuck was that?

KIKI: It was amazing. Just an absolutely incredible experience. It was a lot of prep, a lot of work, a lot of anticipation, but we did phenomenal. And what an incredible lineup of artists. The new era of music is just full of talent and people really putting themselves out there.

Music itself has changed a lot. You can really become somebody without having to go through the steps that we used to have to go through. You can blow up from Instagram or TikTok.

KAILA: How was Olivia Rodrigo? She came on stage to play with Billy Corgan.

KIKI: Amazing. She’s absolutely talented, such an incredible performer, and a really good human being. It was so rad to be in her presence. She’s down-to-earth and just a total pro.

She’s absolutely killing it, doing these massive tours, and I feel like her music really embodies the rock and roll that we listened to while still bringing it into the mainstream. It’s giving this revival of ’90s and early-2000s rock with the new generation. She’s just absolutely badass.

KAILA: What about the other guy? Yungblud?

KIKI: Oh, Yungblud. Talk about energy and vibrancy and just an in-your-face performance. It’s amazing to be around these types of performers because they’re younger and part of this up-and-coming era, but they’re also so in the zone. I could hear every single note sung with an emotion that felt so real. I actually got to watch his set from side stage, and you could feel his energy in your pores. It was just radiating. What an honor to be able to share the stage with both of them.\

KAILA: I feel like he’s hot, but I’m too old to say that. There was also Jennie, right? And how do you pronounce beabadoobee?

KIKI: She’s amazing. I actually didn’t know about her until Lollapalooza. I saw some playback and was like, “Who is this?” I started looking her up and followed her. I was like, “Oh my gosh, what a queen.”

It was amazing to see how many acts are playing guitars again. A lot of girls too. We’re going through this massive revival of rock and roll. When you and I were doing music together, I feel like we were ahead of our time. We were in the guitar era, but the guitar era was slowly starting to fade.

KAILA: There were a lot of Asians this year too, right? Jennie...

KIKI: We were only there on Friday, so I didn’t get to see many people. The place was massive. I think getting from Charli XCX’s stage to ours might have been a 25-minute walk. But I thought it was so cool seeing how much K-pop has blown up. K-pop is a mega genre of music today. It’s worldwide.

Even when we were doing K-pop covers in Nylon Pink, the fandom in Mexico and South America was massive, and it still is. It’s crazy how much fandom goes into K-pop music. Everybody has the swag; they know the dances and the songs. It’s amazing.

KAILA: It’s crazy how much it’s grown. Jamie and I went to Coachella to see BLACKPINK a couple of years ago, and I think we both got teary-eyed because we were like, “This is crazy.” And it’s gotten even bigger since then.

KAILA: So what’s next?

KIKI: Next up we have a fall tour. I think it’s basically the end of September all the way to mid-November. That one’s going to be really, really fun. If you’re in LA, you should definitely come. It’ll be in November. I think it’s going to be pretty epic. This is going to be a fun one.

KAILA: And you’re working on your own music projects too, right?

KIKI: Yeah, I’m just going to go for it. I’ve never actually done anything for myself, so I spent some time in the studio with Eric Emery, who’s an incredible mixer and producer. I forgot how hard it is. I think about Nylon Pink and how quickly we were churning out songs.

KAILA: We were doing, like, two songs a month.

KIKI: Yeah. We were killing it. That was the beautiful thing about it. That’s something I f lack now because I don’t live in LA anymore, and I’ve got my kid now, so it’s harder to keep that kind of schedule. I finally finished and mixed one song, which may be featured soon, so we’ll see. I’m working on some other stuff too.

KAILA: It’s amazing to see. It’s mind-blowing. Where can people find you?

KIKI: Just Kiki Wongo on Instagram and TikTok ... and the Smashing Pumpkins.