Jackson Foo Wong: The Boy Who Defied Every Odd Before He Could Even Breathe on His Own

Table of Contents

Quick Bio

Detail	Info
Full Name	Jackson Foo Wong
Date of Birth	May 28, 2000
Birthplace	Modesto, California, USA
Nationality	American
Known For	Son of actor BD Wong and talent producer Richie Jackson; subject of BD Wong’s acclaimed memoir Following Foo: The Electronic Adventures of the Chestnut Man (2003)
Twin Brother	Boaz Dov Wong — who passed away shortly after birth
Education	New York University
Sexual Orientation	Openly gay (came out at age 15)
Family	Raised in a three-parent household across Greenwich Village and the West Village, NYC; stepfather Jordan Roth (Broadway producer, president of Jujamcyn Theaters); half-brother Levi Roth (born 2016)
Extra Key Facts	Born eleven weeks premature; spent three months in neonatal intensive care at UCSF; nicknamed “Chestnut Man” by his father; grew up in one of New York’s most celebrated LGBTQ+ families

Why Jackson Foo Wong’s Story Still Matters

Here’s the honest truth about Jackson Foo Wong: he never asked to be famous. He never auditioned for anything. He didn’t post a video that went viral, he didn’t win a competition, and he didn’t launch a brand.

He simply survived.

And in doing so, he became the living heart of one of the most emotional and widely read parenting memoirs of the early 2000s — a book his father BD Wong wrote about the terrifying, heartbreaking, eventually miraculous weeks surrounding Jackson’s birth. The story reached millions of people, became a touchstone in conversations about LGBTQ+ parenthood, surrogacy, premature birth, and the nature of love under impossible pressure.

What makes Jackson’s story genuinely worth telling today isn’t just what happened in those first three months of his life. It’s the whole arc that followed: growing up at the center of an extraordinary, blended, thoroughly unconventional New York City family, coming out on his own terms at fifteen, attending NYU like his father Richie before him, and carrying the emotional weight of a story that was his before he was old enough to understand it.

He’s in his mid-twenties now. He belongs to himself in a way that the infant nicknamed “Chestnut Man” never quite could. That journey from survival to selfhood is genuinely worth knowing.

Born Fighting: The Beginning of Jackson’s Story

To understand Jackson Foo Wong, you have to go back to May 28, 2000, in Modesto, California. Not a hospital in Manhattan, which is where his parents BD Wong and Richie Jackson lived and worked and built their lives — but a hospital in Modesto, because that’s where the surrogate carrying his babies had gone into labor, weeks and weeks too early.

The twins arrived eleven weeks ahead of schedule. Their names were Boaz Dov and Jackson Foo. Both of them were desperately small. Boaz weighed around two pounds five ounces. Jackson came in slightly heavier — closer to two pounds fourteen — but neither of them was anywhere close to ready for the world outside.

The birth had been complicated in a particularly cruel way. The twins shared a vascular network in the womb, and what doctors call twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome had developed — a condition where one twin effectively drains blood from the other through those shared vessels. Boaz, in this case, had been the donor. He died just ninety minutes after he was born.

Jackson survived. Barely, and not without a long, brutal fight.

He was airlifted from Modesto to the University of California, San Francisco — one of the country’s leading children’s hospitals — and placed in the neonatal intensive care unit. He was so small, so fragile, that his appearance reportedly reminded his father of the little old men who sell chestnuts on New York City street corners in winter. That image gave him his enduring nickname: the Chestnut Man.

For three months, he lived in that NICU. He fought pneumonia. He fought the ordinary impossibility of being a body that wasn’t ready to be a body yet. BD Wong flew back and forth between San Francisco and New York, keeping friends, family, and colleagues updated through a stream of emails — raw, honest, sometimes funny, always desperate — that would eventually become the foundation of his memoir.

Jackson, obviously, has no memory of any of this. But the story was waiting for him when he was old enough to receive it.

The Parents, the Partnership, and How It All Fit Together

Before we go further, it helps to understand exactly who Jackson came from, because his family is genuinely unusual even by New York City standards — and in the best possible way.

BD Wong — full name Bradley Darryl Wong — is a Tony Award-winning stage actor, most recognizable to general audiences as Dr. George Huang on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and from his roles in Jurassic Park, M. Butterfly on Broadway, and later Gotham. He was born in San Francisco in 1960, grew up in a Chinese-American family, and built one of the more quietly extraordinary careers in American theater and television.

Richie Jackson — Jackson Foo’s other biological parent — came into BD’s life in 1988. Richie is a talent manager and Broadway producer, born and raised in New York, a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts who lived through the early AIDS crisis in Greenwich Village and came out the other side with a deep commitment to LGBTQ+ advocacy. He would later write his own book — Gay Like Me — directly addressed to Jackson, offering the accumulated wisdom of a gay father to his newly out gay son.

The two men were together for sixteen years before separating in 2004, when Jackson was just four years old. The breakup happened quietly, and what followed it was something that doesn’t get talked about enough: they co-parented with genuine grace.

Richie eventually fell in love with and married Jordan Roth — a Broadway producer, Tony Award winner, and president of Jujamcyn Theaters, one of New York’s major theater ownership groups. Jordan is also a bona fide fashion icon in LGBTQ+ circles, known for his bold red carpet choices. He and Richie married in September 2012 at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre on Broadway — not a metaphor for their world, just literally the space they chose. Melissa Etheridge performed at the wedding as a gift to the couple.

Jordan became Jackson’s stepfather, and what emerged was what BD himself described as a three-parent household. Jackson spent weekdays in the West Village with Richie and Jordan, and weekends downtown with BD.

Growing Up in Greenwich Village: A Childhood Unlike Most

Jackson Foo Wong grew up in one of the most culturally saturated zip codes in America, during one of the most significant periods in LGBTQ+ history.

He was a toddler during the years when same-sex marriage was a political flashpoint across the United States. He was a school-age child when the first states began legalizing it. He was a teenager when the Supreme Court made it the law of the entire country. And through all of that, his own family — openly gay fathers on both sides, a stepfather who owned Broadway theaters, a biological father who was a recognizable face on network television — was living the change rather than watching it.

That context shaped him in ways both obvious and subtle. He grew up knowing that his family structure was unusual by American standards but completely normal within his own world and neighborhood. He attended school in New York. He watched his parents work. He learned what it looked like to be openly, confidently gay in a professional and public life.

Richie Jackson has spoken candidly about the difference between his own coming-of-age — in the early 1980s, when being gay in Greenwich Village meant watching your community devastated by AIDS, when the fear was constant and the stigma was crushing — and the world his son inherited. The contrast was the entire emotional engine of Gay Like Me. Richie wanted Jackson to understand the history he stood on, the people who lived and died so that his life could be easier than theirs.

Jackson, for his part, grew up with that history as context rather than lived trauma. Which doesn’t make it less important to him — but it does make his relationship to it different.

Coming Out at Fifteen — and a Father’s Response

When Jackson Foo Wong came out as gay at fifteen, his father Richie could not have been more delighted. That’s not a figure of speech — multiple interviews and the framing of Gay Like Me make clear that Richie received this news as something close to joyful recognition. Here was his son, walking the same path, and Richie felt both the weight of that and the privilege of being someone who could actually help him navigate it.

BD Wong has also spoken about Jackson’s sexuality with warmth and pride. This was not a family where coming out required courage in the sense of fearing rejection. It required honesty, and Jackson gave that. The response he received was love.

His stepfather Jordan Roth and Richie had already received the Trevor Project’s Trevor Hero Award in 2016 for their LGBTQ+ advocacy work — the same year Jackson’s little half-brother Levi was born through surrogacy. The family’s public commitment to visibility and support for LGBTQ+ youth was not performative. It was structural, woven into how they spent their time and money and attention.

Jackson came out into a family that had been waiting to celebrate him exactly as he was.

NYU, Education, and Walking His Own Path

After completing his schooling in New York City, Jackson Foo Wong enrolled at New York University — the same institution his father Richie had attended, though under circumstances that couldn’t have been more different. Richie arrived at Tisch in the early 1980s during the most devastating years of the AIDS epidemic. Jackson arrived at NYU as a young gay man in an era of marriage equality, growing representation, and legal protections his father’s generation had fought for and often died before seeing.

His specific field of study or graduation date has not been widely documented, which is itself a reflection of the fact that Jackson has lived a largely private life despite the very public story that surrounded his birth. He is not an entertainer, not a public figure in his own professional right. He is a young man in his mid-twenties who happens to have two fathers who are very well known, and who carries the legacy of a book written about his first three months alive.

The Family He Has Now

As of 2026, Jackson Foo Wong is 25 years old. His family structure remains warmly intact across its various configurations. BD Wong married Richert John Frederickson Schnorr in October 2018 at a waterfront ceremony in Brooklyn — Richert works as a director of digital media for the New York Public Library, and the two have been together for years before formalizing things. Jackson gained another parental figure in Richert.

His half-brother Levi Roth — Richie and Jordan’s son, born in 2016 through surrogacy — is now approaching ten years old. Jackson is a big brother, and by all accounts the family has maintained the close, overlapping dynamic that BD publicly hoped for when he called it a three-parent household.

The family that was pieced together through loss, surrogacy, separation, and remarriage has turned out to be genuinely cohesive. Multiple adults who love each other enough to keep showing up for a child they all share. It doesn’t look like any family structure that gets depicted in standard media, and it works.

The Weight of a Story That Isn’t Quite Yours

There is something genuinely complex about growing up as the subject of a celebrated memoir. Jackson Foo Wong has been a character in the public imagination since before he could form words. Hundreds of thousands of people read about his pneumonia, his weight gains and setbacks, his first weeks of life documented in his father’s emails. People cried for him. People prayed for him. People bought a book about him.

He had no say in any of that.

BD Wong has handled that complexity with real thoughtfulness in interviews — acknowledging that Jackson’s story was his to tell but also always Jackson’s own life. The memoir was never meant to define Jackson, just to document what his birth meant to his fathers and to the community that rallied around them.

As Jackson has grown up, the story has quietly shifted from something done to him into something that belongs to him. He can read Following Foo now as a full person and decide for himself what it means. The fact that he has kept his life largely private suggests he’s doing that integration on his own terms, which seems exactly right.

The Money Picture

Jackson Foo Wong’s personal net worth is simply not documented. He is not a professional entertainer, not a public influencer, and has no known independent business or career that generates a traceable income. He is a young adult from a wealthy family — BD Wong has had a decades-long career in TV and theater; Richie Jackson and Jordan Roth work at the very top of the Broadway and television production world — who appears to be building his own life at his own pace.

The financial comfort of his upbringing is not in question. The specifics of what he does with that foundation in his adult life remain, appropriately, his own business.

Life at Twenty-Five: Private, Purposeful, and His Own

Today, Jackson Foo Wong lives the kind of adult life that most famous people’s children actually want: a quiet one. He’s not on reality television. He isn’t chasing an acting career to follow his father. He isn’t publicly documenting his every move on social media in ways that generate tabloid headlines.

He was born into an extraordinary story. He survived something that kills most infants in his situation. He grew up inside one of the most publicly visible LGBTQ+ families in New York City. He came out on his own timeline and was celebrated for it. He attended university in the city that has always been home.

And now he’s 25, building whatever comes next, surrounded by a family that has always been messier and more creative and more loving than any conventional version of the word would suggest.

Final Words

Jackson Foo Wong’s life began with the most dramatic possible opening chapter — two pounds fourteen ounces, a twin who didn’t make it, three months in a hospital in San Francisco, a father sending emails to everyone he knew because he didn’t know what else to do. That story was read by hundreds of thousands of people before Jackson could walk or talk.

What’s quietly remarkable is what came after. A family that found ways to stay connected through breakups and remarriages and step-parenthood and half-siblings and all the ordinary complications of human love. A young man who came out into a room full of people already cheering for him. A life that is, by every indication, genuinely his own.

He didn’t choose the beginning of his story. None of us do. But everything since then has been his to write. And he seems to be writing something private, and warm, and worth living.

FAQs

1. Who is Jackson Foo Wong?

Jackson Foo Wong is the son of American actor BD Wong and talent manager and producer Richie Jackson. He was born on May 28, 2000, in Modesto, California, through surrogacy, and became the subject of his father BD Wong’s memoir Following Foo: The Electronic Adventures of the Chestnut Man (2003).

2. Why was Jackson born in Modesto, California?

His surrogate mother went into premature labor in Modesto. The twins arrived eleven weeks early. Jackson was subsequently airlifted to UCSF (University of California, San Francisco) for specialized neonatal care.

3. What happened to Jackson’s twin brother?

His twin, Boaz Dov Wong, died approximately ninety minutes after birth. Both twins were affected by twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome — a rare and serious condition in identical twin pregnancies where blood passes from one twin (Boaz, the donor) to the other (Jackson, the recipient). Jackson survived after three months in neonatal intensive care.

4. What is the book Following Foo about?

Following Foo: The Electronic Adventures of the Chestnut Man was written by BD Wong and published in 2003. It is built around a series of emails BD sent to friends, family, and colleagues during Jackson’s three-month hospital stay — documenting Boaz’s death and Jackson’s fragile fight to survive. The book also served as BD’s public coming out.

5. Where did “Chestnut Man” come from as a nickname?

BD Wong noticed that the tiny, wizened baby Jackson resembled the elderly men who sell chestnuts from sidewalk carts on New York City streets in winter. The nickname stuck and became the subtitle of his memoir.

6. Who are Jackson Foo Wong’s parents and stepparents?

He has two biological parents: BD Wong (actor) and Richie Jackson (talent manager and producer). After BD and Richie separated in 2004, Richie married Broadway producer Jordan Roth in 2012. BD married Richert John Frederickson Schnorr in 2018. Jackson was raised across both households in New York City in what BD described as a three-parent family.

7. Is Jackson Foo Wong gay?

Yes. He came out openly at the age of fifteen. His father Richie Jackson has spoken warmly and publicly about receiving that news. Richie went on to write Gay Like Me — a book addressed directly to Jackson — exploring what it means to be a gay man across generations of very different LGBTQ+ experiences.

8. Does Jackson have siblings?

He has a half-brother named Levi Emmanuel Roth, born in 2016 to Richie Jackson and Jordan Roth through surrogacy. His twin brother Boaz Dov passed away at birth.

9. Where did Jackson Foo Wong go to college?

He attended New York University — the same school his father Richie had graduated from (Tisch School of the Arts), though under vastly different social and historical circumstances.

10. What does Jackson Foo Wong do professionally?

He has not publicly established a known career or professional identity. He maintains a private life, and his current occupation is not documented in public sources.

11. What is Jackson Foo Wong’s net worth?

His personal net worth is not publicly documented. He comes from an affluent family with parents at the top of the entertainment and Broadway industries, but his own financial situation as an independent adult is private.

12. What is the significance of Jackson’s story for LGBTQ+ families?

Jackson’s birth, survival, and upbringing represented a landmark moment in early-2000s conversations about LGBTQ+ parenthood. His fathers navigated surrogacy, premature birth, grief, and same-sex co-parenting in a very public way at a time when those conversations were still deeply contested. The memoir Following Foo became an important cultural document for LGBTQ+ families and remains widely cited in discussions of non-traditional family structures and the history of gay parenthood in America.

Read stories that climb higher than expectation with The Madrid Magazine.