Host: So Margaret, this show is called The Me I Used to Be.

Margaret Cho: Yeah.

Host: Our second guest tonight is a very, very talented woman. Say hello, please to Margaret Cho.

Host: It's about looking back at your life. Not just what happened, but how those moments shaped what you believed about the world, about people, and about yourself. We call this your perception box. And as you look at these images and clips,

Margaret Cho: Oh my god. oh no, I don't know.

Host: All we want is your real honest take on what you thought back then.

Big Bird: Do you ever get sad?

Margaret Cho (Clip): Oh, of course I do, Big Bird.

Host: What it meant to you, how you see it now, and why? Thank you very much. Are you ready to start?

Margaret Cho: Yes.

Host: Let's bring up the lights, please.

Host: How did it feel to see clips of your life played back to you?

Margaret Cho: Well, like a lot of the younger clips of me as a stand-up comedian, you hear my voice is like so high.

Margaret Cho (Clip): Maybe someday I could be an extra on MASH.

Margaret Cho: Everything kind of was lifted at the end like it was a question. Like I think I used to say, do you know what I mean? Like at after at every juncture say, you know what I mean? because I couldn't sit there in the statement of what I was saying alone without agreement or without assurance. And a lot of the younger me was very concerned with a feeling of being out of place, out of time, being unlovable, being unwanted, being not not needed. um you know, maybe my father getting deported and us having to leave this country that sort of that the that the that original wound. One of the first photographs of me and my father that was right when he got deported. My father was deported when I was born and he actually took me back to Korea with him. My mother stayed behind and she was in America. So we had been separated and I think that was very tragic. And then also growing up in a gay bookstore in the middle of the AIDS crisis and losing all of the people around me and the rhetoric is pushing this idea that gay people brought this up amongst themselves. That mentality combined with the death around us. You feel like we are unwanted on the earth, you know. So there's just something about that that I think has stayed with me. But yeah, so all of those feelings of like the very core unlovability, unwanted, undesired that that's always always there.

Host (Clip): Come down to the front microphone. Margaret Sam,

Host (Clip): we don't have all night. Margaret.

Margaret Cho (Clip): Sam.

Margaret Cho: Oh my god. Margaret. with Sam there. I'm probably about 15 and I was a comedian so early in life and so committed to that career already as a very young teenager that no matter what I had endured whether that was rape and sexual assault as a very very young age having something happened with my body that was like really um uncomfortable and terrifying and all of the trauma there.

Margaret Cho (Clip): The one thing that was good was that I was a comedian.

Comedy Clip:

Snake snacky wacky. You remember? Yeah. Hey, how about this? Yeah. What? Mutant India Zimbabwe bird in sacrificial habitat dance and Peter Hunahar.

Margaret Cho: It's a place of power. It's a place of safety because there's safety if you're being watched by an audience. there's people that can protect you because everybody's enjoying what you're doing. I was kind of consumed by that. Um the trauma from my childhood sort of probably did not take full effect until much later in life.

Host: And what did you notice later in life in the way that it manifested?

Margaret Cho: I think what I what I now realize was there was a continual need to escape from all feeling. If I had an emotion or a like some kind of reaction to something emotionally, I would just I want to like get rid of it because you can't feel like there's anything good can happen in this body. So the the prison is in the body of like sensation and emotion kind of wrapped up in shame and fear around it. like even your shoulders would go up and you would just want to protect yourself from the memory. I was sort of caught up in drinking and doing a lot of drugs, partying a lot to remove the sensation. I mean, even comedy is a deflection of emotion. Like even a joke is like a way to distract and cause a commotion over here so nobody actually has to look at what's happening inside.

Clip (All-American Girl):

You don't think I should move in with him, do you? I have confidence that you'll do what is right. Based on what? Oh, my skin is great. I mean, I look so good.

Margaret Cho: You just don't appreciate it when you're in that age. Like, I didn't appreciate it. Like, I thought I was ugly. I thought I was fat. I thought I was just so unattractive. It's really too bad.

Host: Where do you think that inner voice came from? That voice that was so critical.

Margaret Cho: I don't think it was mine. I mean, that was like the main story that was being not just that I was telling myself, but was being told to me, that people on the show were making it clear that if I didn't lose weight, we couldn't continue. the perception of Asian women in general. Like if you were an Asian woman, you were supposed to be petite. You were supposed to be quiet. You were supposed to be like this exotic flower. And I'm definitely a flower, but I'm a nightclub crass rotten comedian. Like I'm nasty. Like I'm about that. Like I'm not made for 8:00 p.m. Family hour television. I never was. It's a hard thing when you're trying to conform and there's no way to do it. It it took everything in me.

Clip: You know, I uh used to have a television show um All American Girl, which unfortunately has been cancelled. Sort of sad. I know. I panicked when I heard it. I'm like a worrier. I'm one of those people that just worry about everything. When I heard my show got cancelled, I had nightmares, you I I saw myself on late night TV going, "Well, when I first called Dion psychic friends in my 40s, my addictions were

Margaret Cho: just as powerful as I was as a person, and it was really controlling me. So, for me, oddly, my suicide attempt is actually like not the worst thing that I've been through. That's just kind of like one of those things where it's like, well, yeah, but I mean, like I don't even really count it as like suicide because I was so high and so drunk. I hung myself in my shower curtain rod and the shower curtain started bending. The rod started bending and I'm like, "Oh [ __ ] I'm too fat to kill myself." So, I got down. I'm like, I'll try again when I reach my goal weight. Fat joke, but there's no way that I could have pulled out of that on my own. You know, the way that I got sober is I went to treatment and I stayed in a facility for u 22 months.

Host: Now that you're sober, do you think you feel those things more intensely because there's nothing numbing you?

Margaret Cho: I don't know. Like I think what it is is that I have to come completely accept and confront all of these demons every day. I can't avo there's no avoidance anymore. So when you have to head on face something like sexual abuse and you uh see it as part of your life and it doesn't destroy everything, you know that I could endure something as like damaging and disgusting yet somehow take what I've learned from it and keep growing, you know, that that's powerful. It's an emotional kind of a triumph, but at the same time, it's like, of course, she's going to do it. She's going to she's going to rise above because she does it always. I mean, I think the beliefs that I outgrew is that I was not enough, that I couldn't handle this, that I couldn't last. None of that has turned out to be true. I always had it. It was always inherent. The truth of it was always there, but that was so hard for me to grasp that everything would be all right. And like the high voice with the question is what if? What if? What if? When you sort of go back to that young person questioning,

Host: if you could go back to your younger self, what would you say to her?

Margaret Cho: I would just say everything is going to be all right. That's what I love. Like I would love would have loved for something to say that to me in a statement that there's no question to it. Everything is going to be all right.