Still Not Geriatric: Archiving a Teenage Riot Grrrl Band

Martin Wong catches up with SoCal punk band Emily’s Sassy Lime upon their reunion for the California Biennial.

By Martin WongNovember 30, 2025

• Art & Architecture

• Music

“WE DIDN’T PLAY for more than 25 years and then came back onstage with technology that didn’t exist before,” recalls Wendy Yao. “It felt like we were in Encino Man.”

“Or The Gods Must Be Crazy,” says her longtime friend and bandmate Emily Ryan.

I’m having tea with Emily’s Sassy Lime (a.k.a. ESL), a trio that also includes Wendy’s sister, Amy Yao, at the UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA). They formed the band as teenagers in Orange County in 1993. It is the stuff of DIY legend that these Asian American first-wave riot grrrls told their parents they were studying at the library or attending math camp when they were actually going to punk shows—and eventually playing them. Borrowing most of their gear and writing songs by leaving messages for each other on answering machines, ESL found an audience and community in all-ages clubs, like Los Angeles’s Jabberjaw, and DIY scenes like Olympia, Washington; they put out records on the Kill Rock Stars label and toured with bands such as Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, and the Make-Up. The band stayed together through high school, ultimately breaking up in 1997 after they’d all gone off to different colleges. We knew each other back then through zines and shows and stayed in touch over the years, but I hadn’t seen all three of them together for decades.

It was for the opening of the 2025 California Biennial at OCMA that the band reunited onstage. At the heart of the exhibition, which takes its title from their 1995 LP Desperate, Scared, but Social, is an Emily’s Sassy Lime installation and archive. It takes the form of a teenage bedroom, with shelves jam-packed with books, videotapes, toys, and ephemera. The walls are plastered with blowups of photos, flyers, and art from back in the day. One manifesto is titled “G.U.S.T.O. - The G Does Not Stand for Geriatric.” The ESL installation sets the themes for the rest of the exhibition, including adolescence and rock ’n’ roll. There are drawings, photographs, writings, and videos by artists such as Laura Owens and Seth Bogart, made when they were in still high school. Deanna Templeton’s portraits of teen skaters, surfers, punks, and goths are placed in conversation with relics of her own adolescence—calendars with punk shows scribbled onto them, flyers, and diary entries under glass. Teen rock group the Linda Lindas contribute costumes from performances, props from music videos, and album cover art.

A few months after the exhibition opening and concert, I’m having matcha with ESL on the museum patio. Looking back, Wendy says, “It’s funny because we were preparing for this moment our entire youth. All we’ve talked about since 1992 is geriatrics and Centrum Silver. We didn’t know what perimenopause was yet, but if we knew, we would have been there.”

Emily recalls how the exhibition began: “The curators, Christopher Lew, Courtenay Finn, and Lauren Leving, had a conversation with us, saying, ‘You’re going to want to look at everything you have.’ We didn’t think we had shit. And then now look at this!”

“I thought I had shit,” recalls Amy. “But the problem was I was pretty sure a rat had shit all over it! I didn’t know what was in good condition. I didn’t know what wasn’t going to give us hantavirus.”

“I knew I had stuff, but it was so disorganized and scattered in different locations from multiple moves.” Wendy admits, “I still haven’t finished.”

The installation takes visitors on a trip: first into a fantastic reimagining of a teenage bedroom, and then, as the visitor engages with the band’s vast archive, deeper into the subculture of 1990s underground music, revealed in handwritten postcards, traded cassettes, and Polaroids—artifacts of a time before cell phones and social media.

“I had so many scraps of paper where people had written their phone numbers because everything was analog,” explains Wendy. “So, I had three different scraps from Raquel Gutiérrez [from L.A. band Tummy Ache], and then a phone number and address from Brian Girgus of lowercase.”

“What about the letter with the request from k.d. lang?” asks Emily.

Wendy replies, “Oh, from Nikki McClure. It said, ‘It sucks that you’re grounded for sneaking out of the house to play shows. This is what happened to my sister when she was grounded …’ And then the next part was like, ‘I got a message that k.d. lang is looking for an Asian bassist’—which was maybe a true story that she jokingly pitched to us, because it sounded so ridiculous.”

There’s more correspondence, from Olympia (Bikini Kill, Lois, Kicking Giant), the Bay Area (the PeeChees), and Washington, DC (the Make-Up), as well as from me (on Pochacco stationery).

Emily says she just saw Michelle Mae from the the Make-Up, Weird War, and the Frumpies: “We just went to see Ian Svenonius’s new musical and Michelle was a special guest on piano. Afterwards, we caught up with her and said, ‘By the way, you are in our show.’”

“We are reconnecting with a lot of people that way,” says Emily. Just a few weeks ago, I saw Rop Vazquez of the PeeChees, who reported that a lot of friends were texting photos of him from OCMA. Amy says, “Out of the blue, James Canty [also from the Make-Up] said, ‘Hey, we’re playing a show. Maybe you guys want to play with us?’”

The Asian American punk zine I used to work on, Giant Robot, makes appearances in the ESL installation too. There weren’t a lot of us doing DIY stuff at the time, so we made an Asian American mini scene with J Church, Kicking Giant, Versus, and other bands. In the exhibition, punk artifacts such as postcards, cassettes, and flyers are mixed with pop culture items like Snoopy lunchboxes, Garfield dolls, and tchotchkes from Disneyland, and Asian American touchstones like a CK One postcard featuring Jenny Shimizu, a blown-up poster of Ke Huy Quan in The Goonies, and 21 Jump Street stuff with Dustin Nguyen.

“How’s this for a headline? Emily’s Sassy Lime: Your Trash, Our Treasure,” suggests Wendy.

Amy follows up: “We’re three Asian American hoarders, and anyone who goes to the show might think, ‘I relate because my immigrant family also saves and repurposes margarine containers and cookie tins. Americans are so wasteful.’ But also, ‘How do you have all this? Literally scraps of paper?’ That was the big question on opening day. I just assumed everyone else also kept everything. I realized at the opening that that was not true.”

“When we were installing,” Emily remembers, “I wanted to help Amy but could not tell what she was using and what was the discard pile. Like, ‘Oh, there’s a Tower Records bag. I think that’s going in the show. But wait, there’s an L.A. Gear box. Is that trash?’ And she’s like, ‘No. Don’t touch.’ It was really tricky.”

Each member has loaded about 15 feet of shelving with handpicked stuff. There are hundreds of rabbit holes to go down, and you get the feeling that this is just the tip of the iceberg. “There’s stuff that I couldn’t even get to because my boxes in storage were too heavy and I was alone,” says Amy. “There could be even better stuff!”

For the exhibition, Amy remade a five-foot-tall anthropomorphic steak that she originally created as an artwork in the mid-1990s and had used as a frequent stage prop in ESL’s live shows. The oversized, smiling papier-mâché rib eye now leans against one wall in the gallery. Emily worked with a UC Irvine sculpture student, Emiko Groder, on a gigantic clamshell covered with papier-mâché that nests a life-size bed, an old TV, and DIY recording instruments inside, with punk flyers on the outside, inspired by the real-life bedroom of a teenage record store owner they crashed with in Lincoln, Nebraska.

 
Wendy breaks it down: “Steak or clam? Surf or turf?”

There are untold inside jokes and references for every item in the Emily’s Sassy Lime room. In this case, Amy reminisced about how her and Wendy’s deceased ye-ye [paternal grandfather] loved rib eye steak a little too much. Wendy added that there was also a diner that the band would go to in Olympia called the Rib Eye. And then they were really into the scene at the end of I’m Gonna Git You Sucka where Chris Rock goes to Isaac Hayes and asks for “one rib.” “That’s in part of the video loop showing in Emily’s clam!” adds Amy.

Making an art installation might have come more naturally to them at this point than playing music. Amy is an artist and teaches art at Princeton, and Wendy has curated exhibitions and for years had an art-focused bookstore, Ooga Booga, in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, now in residence at the museum for the duration of the show. Emily went on to act in a Jon Moritsugu movie and make home-recorded covers­. But, Wendy admits, “being convinced to play was probably the hardest part.”

“Middle-aged people. Twenty-five years. Think about that,” says Amy.

Wendy piles on: “Rusty old soccer moms.”

“In the end, we decided to just try it,” says Amy. “Why not? We started off with a low bar, like two songs, and then decided, ‘Okay, maybe another. One more rib.’”

It wasn’t their biggest venue—Emily’s Sassy Lime played some big shows with the Make-Up and Bikini Kill—but it was special and had a higher production value and newer technology than anything they had experienced in their scrappier DIY days. The museum asked if they would be bringing their own “in-ears” and the band had to look up what that even meant. A fan that was too young to have seen them the first time around flew in from Chicago. Bogart and Brontez Purnell (who had art in the exhibition and performed at the opening too) danced in front with members of Bratmobile and Bikini Kill, as well as the Linda Lindas.

“When we started, it wasn’t fully dark yet,” recalls Emily. “It was like we were playing a pancake breakfast, but catered with har gow, and everyone was making eye contact. And then we tentatively said, ‘Hello?’ and started with the first song we wrote, over 30 years ago, ‘Pineapple Boys Need Not Apply.’ In front of the stage, Brontez said, ‘Okaaaaay!’ Then we knew we were among friends and it would be okay. That’s when we came alive.”

During the show, Allison Wolfe from Bratmobile took out a Sharpie and tried to add a song they didn’t practice to the set list. “It was really nice to be surrounded by friends and family,” says Wendy. “It’s true,” says Amy. “I think our friends made a huge difference in terms of actually playing on the stage. It was like, ‘This is why we're doing it.’ And also, we were in a cozy place even though it was so vast.”

“Literally in front of a skyscraper!” says Wendy. “That was the funniest thing, to feel so cozy in this completely hardscaped corporate environment.” It was loose, sloppy, and fun, just like the old days, and Emily’s Sassy Lime played in front of their moms and their actual children for the first time.

Emily reveals, “My mom said ‘I knew you were in a band but why doesn’t it sound like the Linda Lindas? They sound really good.’ They are objectively good. But Emily’s Sassy Lime, what is this? Voice lessons.”

“And we got it from both sides!” adds Wendy. “Our children must have talked amongst themselves because they all had the same feedback from the back seats of our cars: ‘So, you know the Linda Lindas? The good thing about them is you can really understand their lyrics. They sound really good. Why can’t we hear your lyrics?’ I don’t want my child to hear the lyrics quite yet, so it’s a good thing.”

Emily’s Sassy Lime aren’t even rock stars in their own homes, but that’s not the point. Amy asserts that “even though we’ve now been on National Public Radio and mainstream television, they can’t make us not underground.” It was their first gig in a long time. Their first exhibition, period. But the DIY mentality they embraced as children was life-changing, and this show celebrates that spark, the art that has come out of it, and the friendships that endure. Amy sums up: “When you’re a teen and you feel like everything’s horrible, it’s your one way out, you know?”