Hello Again #12: I met Margaret Cho and she made me cry
in a good way :,)
Hello yet again,
I am writing to you from the beautiful yard of my friend Leah’s beautiful home that she shares with her husband and overprotective Papillon, Gouda, in LA. The heat has finally broken, and it is a gorgeous, balmy, sunny day. Mariachi music is playing from the neighbors’ house next door. At any moment, the tree providing me shade might drop a ripe avocado onto my head.
Like any coastal elite NYC based artiste, I am constantly yoyo-ing back and forth between desperately hating LA and wondering if I should move here. Right now I’m in “wondering if I should move here.” I have an outsized expectation of LA quality of life because I’m always staying with rich friends. I have to constantly remind myself that this life, with the manicured yard and the guest room and the guacamole tree, is not what my life would be if I moved right now. These days I’m living on a modest budget—let’s just say I’ve been limiting the number of Ubers I take here, which makes this yard my sun drenched, landscaped, wildlife-bearing prison. But you know how it is—the sun hits a New Yorker’s skin and suddenly we believe anything is possible.
I’m here for CAPE’s Belly Laughs Festival, a two-day Asian comedy-slash-food festival that happened this past weekend.
It was all the chaos and fun one expects from a first year comedy festival, and then some. Some highlights from Saturday: Dylan Adler and me eating mountains of Din Tai Fung catering shirtless in our dressing room, so as not to splatter chili oil on our show clothes. Dylan, me, and Sabrina Wu performing one after another on an outdoor stage to increasingly perplexed aunties and uncles who came to eat skewers and now found themselves learning about ketamine and gender theory. Andrew Yang (I know) randomly doing a comedy set(?) that was described to me as “profane” and “sexual.” Watching a 6000 seat theater fill to the brim with people buzzing to see Atsuko Okatsuka tell a story from what will undoubtedly be another brilliant hour. And of course chilling with all the comics.
On Sunday, having completed my set, I came back to the festival to hang out and eat more free food. I was slinking down the hall with a 99 Ranch tote bag full of pilfered Din Tai Fung when I spotted Dylan in the doorway of the green room shared by Atsuko and Margaret Cho. Inside, Margaret was sitting on a couch surrounded by her entourage of girls and gays and at least one small dog. I was excited to find Dylan there—though at this point Margaret and I share many friends and colleagues in common1 (and obviously I’ve been a fan for most of my life), we had yet to meet. And now I had my perfect chance.
As I hugged Dylan hello, Margaret looked up and caught my eye as though she already knew me. She stood up. “I’ve been waiting to meet you,” she said. “I’m such a fan.”
There are a select few people in the world who I believe have altered the trajectory of my life, without whom I am sure I would be a totally different person. One is my friend Bellz from middle school, who wore Hot Topic and listened to Nirvana and taught me it was cool to rebel against the mainstream. The other is Margaret Cho.
When I was in high school in the mid-2000s, I would go into empty classrooms during lunch, hook my laptop up to the projector, and watch Margaret Cho clips with my friends. I knew all of her iconic bits by heart, though mostly out of order from watching random clips from her various specials on first generation YouTube, piecing together her stories like a puzzle. I was a queer Asian American teenager in San Francisco, and it felt like she had come from the exact same world as me. She briefly attended the same high school my sibling went to. Her parents owned a bookstore in the Castro, the gay neighborhood where my best friend and I would go to eat gelato and people watch. She was a lesbian, and at the time, so was I. And she was a famous, successful, hilarious comedian.
I strongly believe that had I never seen Margaret Cho’s comedy, I would not have been bold enough to pursue standup, and certainly not to dream of wild success. There are so many things I want to “try” that I lack the follow through to actually do. I want to learn to speak Mandarin2, or practice jujitsu, or sing at least well enough to be cast in a movie musical3. Have I done any of those things? So far, no. Who’s to say, without a clear example of an unapologetically queer Asian woman comedian, that standup wouldn’t have been the same—just a cool thing I “always wanted to try” but never had the guts to follow through?
Without Margaret, I think I’d be a drama teacher at the private high school I went to in the Haight. The students would love me because I have cool hair and an eyebrow piercing (in this universe I still have an eyebrow piercing) and I tell good jokes. We would do experimental, devised plays that are like, Agamemnon set during the 2016 Trump presidency. Maybe in my 30s I would work up the courage to do my first comedy open mic, and go on to have a mostly satisfying micro-career4 in the San Francisco Bay Area comedy scene. My students would want to come to my shows, but I’d make them wait until senior year, when they can handle my ~edgy material.
It’s not a bad life! But it’s not my life.
From Margaret, I inherited the audacity to be myself onstage, the audacity to believe I belong even when the world tells me otherwise. The audacity to believe I deserve my dreams. Because I saw Margaret do jokes about gay porn and eating pussy on a ship while I was a literal queer Asian teen in SF, I never ever believed I would be an outsider in comedy. To me the ground was already broken. (The harsh truth of our industry would come later.)
This audacity has carried me far. My life as is so expansive, at this point I’ve met and worked with so many of my heroes. Just tonight I did an awesome show with Bob the Drag Queen and Joel Kim Booster, both heroes turned peers. Sometimes I lose sight of how cool this is, as experiences I once only dreamt about have become commonplace.
But now I was meeting Margaret Cho. And not just that, she knew my comedy. I could never take that for granted.
In the dressing room, as she pulled me into a hug, I ineloquently searched for the right thing to say. “This is awesome,” I said, and then added emphatically, “I’m from San Francisco.” What I meant was, I am walking the path of your legacy. You made me the person I am. There is NO James Tom standup comic without Margaret Cho!
She looked into my eyes and said, “I know.”
All Asians know each other—I’m allowed to say this
As a scam to become more castable. My Chinese family is Toisan & Shanghainese, Mandarin is not even my cultural language
Wicked really messed this up for us non-singers, but at least there’s still Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Yeoh
“hobby”
weeping btw