BLOG « Margaret Cho

Chop Suey Font

March 21st, 2012

Oh if I had a dollar for every time I have seen ads promoting me with racist caricatures, fonts or descriptions – I would have many, many, many dollars, flying off me like lettuce leaves that you could roll up some rice and dried shrimp and chili paste in. The first time was when I was about 16 or 17, on a wall of hastily pinned up notices for upcoming shows. My name blazed in big bright letters in the Chop Suey font, pointy, sword shaped lines to create words, familiar from Chinese restaurants and pretty much anything of Asian origin repackaged and sold everywhere that is not Asia.

Under my name, which was tremendously exciting to see in print, way back then, no matter what font it was in, was a small caricature of a coolie, in a rice paddy hat, with bucked teeth and holding chopsticks, rice spilling out everywhere. The futility of rice eaten with chopsticks – this has never made sense to me. It’s very hard to pick up these tiny pieces of food with sticks. I haven’t gotten the hang of it yet. I am not sure I will ever, if I haven’t by now.

The description of the show continued in smaller typeface which still had an ‘Oriental’ flavor, but was not as boldly racist as the Chop Suey font. It said, “proof that that the Chinese are no laughing matter!” and this was wrong for a number of reasons. If we are no laughing matter, then that is not the function of a comedy show, which is ostensibly all about laughing matters. That was the statement that bothered me the most. I would like to be a laughing matter, no matter what.

Also, I am not Chinese, well, not really. I am of Korean descent, and it was recently discovered through very complex DNA testing that I am actually Chinese. But the people who put this ad together would not have known that. I didn’t even know that until about a month ago. All this time I thought I was Korean, but my genealogical profile states that my DNA is Chinese, so this proves that we are all the same inside, we just have different sauces.

There’s the racist caricature, which went beyond the bounds of any kind of reason or taste. He’s a man, not even a woman. He’s got a long braid and glasses. I have neither. His image is taken from the railroad workers who came to America to build the rails in the 1800s, as then he must have looked as mysterious and foreign as anyone could be, in that day and age.

It was all fairly awful, extremely racist and disturbing, but I remember still being pleased. Seeing my name up there took the sting of all the other insults away. The fact that I would be on the stage that particular night, that my performance would contradict and control the messages sent – it made up for it, at least to me. I thought I would correct it in the telling, that the people would come for one thing and leave with something else. The show didn’t turn out like that, as they never are what you think they are going to be. It wasn’t a good night, but early on, there weren’t lots of good nights. Everything is much better now, except for the fonts!

I am doing a show soon at Cornell University, which is exciting, and the advertising for it originally used the chop suey font to spell out my name. I guess I am numb to it, but I don’t feel anything when I see it anymore. I am so used to having things this way, the way it’s always been, accepting and swallowing racism down without argument or splatter. I am not sure what to do when this type of ignorance is fought against. The poster was written on, telling everyone off and circling the sword like letters “this font is not ok”. I appreciate the effort that someone has gone to on my behalf, and for the Asian American students on campus who don’t need to be bombarded with racist imagery. It makes me think that things are changing for the better, and I think that anger is a great tool to make wrongs right. I realize how many times I have let stuff like this go, because it’s happened more than I like to admit. In the constancy of my racial awareness, I have been worn down, the grooves in me low and smooth. I leap into rage whenever women’s bodies are scrutinized negatively but I am slow to defend my ethnicity and my queerness. I am only one person. I cannot fight all these battles myself. I need an army.

Tags: Racism
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TV Dinner

March 20th, 2012

I could really go for a tv dinner right now. The 70s kind, like the Hungry Man dinners from Swanson – Salisbury steak that has the compartments with the meat in the middle then peas, mashed potatoes, a corn bread puff or chocolate cake above the meat like word balloons. What was that corn bread puff? It was like cornbread but also usually soft inside and sweet like a dessert. Did I dream it? Maybe. I am not sure. Food memories can be dreamlike and misleading. It could have been what I wanted it to be instead of just a small portion of creamed corn.

It’s been so long since I had one, the containers then weren’t microwaveable! That’s so crazy. They had to baked in a convection oven. I loved how everything kind of tasted the same and it was like a home version of the airplane meal, but unpredictable, since you would have to do the heating, and usually I burned the meal slightly, just to brulee it, bringing the prodigious sugar to the surface and adding crunch and caramel. If I had a propane torch then I would have just defrosted it on the counter and seared the top.

The salisbury steak or turkey tv dinner was preferable to the turkey and chicken pot pie because even though the pies were delicious, after 40 minutes in the oven, the creamy white a’la king insides would get unbelievably hot and my tongue would be blistered for days because it took forever to cook and by the time it was ready your patience would have been tested and your appetite ravenous and unreasonable. I always took it out of the oven prematurely, and proudly persevered through doughy centers rather than put it back in because the wait was just too much for me.

Could you make these dishes yourself now? Yeah totally, but it wouldn’t have the same gravity, the emotional weight that comes from cooking for yourself for the first few times. The pulling of cold cardboard out of the freezer and reading of boxes and preheating. If you were real little, like me, you’d have pulled up a chair in the kitchen in order to reach the back of the freezer, dragging the legs across the floor and scraping up the new tile.

There was that scared, alone feeling, and the momentary envisioning of a twilight zone style apocalypse, where you are the only one left alive, and it’s just you and all these tv dinners. It’s like Burgess Meredith with the books and the oven is your glasses. Those first few times I was always afraid the oven would explode, but it was always ok. I ate a lot of these dinners and also hot dogs with American cheese – boiled and I must admit raw at times, which I didn’t mind. It’s kind of good and all the same really.

Tags: Food
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Online Shopping

March 16th, 2012

What am I doing? I am shopping online, which is only my favorite thing to do in the whole world. Isn’t that dumb? I am not trying to toot my own horn or fart out a reville or something, but I have done some fairly incredible things in my life. I am able to pursue dreams and actually live them, do them, be them, but what is my true passion? It is deeply embarrassing to admit.

I like to put objects into carts and never check out. I just put imaginary things in imaginary shopping carts and basically imaginary shop. Online shopping isn’t by its nature very satisfying for me, at least not for the money that is spent. Obviously it is awesome to find something you really do need and you are able to order it online and save yourself a trip to the store, but usually I shop for things I don’t need. In fact I would be better off if I had less of these things (i.e. shoes).

I am looking for the perfect shoe that I most likely already have or doesn’t exist in the world except in the glorious glitter universe of my shoe imagination. It’s like the opposite of Cinderella. I’m not looking for the shoe’s owner. I am the owner, looking for the shoe.

I have no fairy godmother. I have a real mother, who also loves shoes and I remember her buying a pair in the 70s for $134.00 which back then for our family might as well have been $1,000,000 and totally feeling justified about the purchase and the pride and entitlement and enjoyment and self esteem that went into her decision to buy them was a terrific example for me growing up. for my mother, and now for me, the spending of money was stating simply, “I matter.” And that felt good. And it still feels good.

I have to go get my own glass slipper – which never seemed practical in my opinion. It seems like glass shoes would hurt a lot, because glass wouldn’t give like leather, and the friction would make them squeak loudly enough to sound like you were farting with every step. So I want a proverbial glass slipper, not an actual one. Also, clear shoes fog up in an unsettling way. I have a bunch of different styles and they all make my feet sweat appallingly and slurp when you take them off.

In my mind, the right shoes will solve all my problems. In the right shoe, I am made whole, entire. Nothing is missing. The shoe will bring me all here. The shoe is what I need. I have a shoe shaped hole in my soul and I want you to step in.

The original shoe wound happened on a visit to Rome. I was moved to tears by Bernini everywhere in the streets, but what truly transformed me was a pair of platform pumps encrusted with rhinestones huge and irregularly shaped and placed, giving the shoe the appearance of a broken mirror. It was a disco ball morphed into a chunky heeled platform pump with a thin buckled ankle strap like a halo on top of this angel of a shoe. I was already late and I had no time to buy them or even try them. I retraced my steps later and I couldn’t find the store again. I wondered if they had been some kind of shoe mirage, a footwear fever dream. Perhaps they were. I have been in pain ever since I saw those shoes but couldn’t possess them. I have been looking for them ever since.

I want to hunt, stalk, close in on and capture the shoe, so I will order the shoe, but by the time it comes days later in a neat Fed Ex box, the shoe’s appeal has diminished. That delicious moment of wanting could not stretch itself across even next day shipping, so how much do I really need it? Almost every time, I forget that I have ordered the shit, and it arrives as a reminder of my own fickle heart. It comes and I don’t care. And I never return anything because that would require me to have tape which doesn’t exist in my atmosphere. I have none of the real ordinary day to day stuff that everyone has. Yes I may have a pair of handmade and autographed manolo blahnik peacock feather mules that are too precious and holy to wear so instead they straddle the altar above my fireplace, but don’t even ask for scotch tape because I never have that shit. You need to stick something together? Forget it. You have come to the wrong house.

Tags: Shopping
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Pinterest 2

March 14th, 2012

I am proud of my Pinterest boards and I pore over them. I think it’s feeding a similar impulse to the vast collections of stickers I would see girls in my grade school amass, huge books filled with adhesive dreams and wishes, aspirations and goals, fantasies and fancies, ready to apply. It can feel obsessive too, as I am merely the custodian of these images, not the creator of them, not the subject of them, but essentially, the janitor of them, and sweeping them all into the corner of the internet, I see them together for the first time.

I have trolled websites to find pictures that affected my worldview, which burned indelible into my mind and churned in me as I grew. As I see them all now dumped into this psychic dustbin, I find that it’s almost entirely white folks. I hadn’t had awareness of this before – that I had relied on one race so heavily to understand life. Coming to know what my tastes and preferences were, excavating my mind’s own archeology, I hadn’t seen how racially biased the source because I hadn’t thought to look. I had nothing to compare myself to. I had no idea of race and perceived all from a bubble of isolation. My parents worked mostly, and much of my youth was spent alone waiting for them. I watched television and ignored the sounds in the cellar and attic and thought about Elizabeth Taylor and David Bowie endlessly.

If you never see yourself in the media, and you are conditioned to invisibility to the point where you never even try to seek yourself, what does that do to the spirit? I am only just finding out now. I’m putting up pictures of Nancy Kwan and Tina Turner on my boards but women of color are rare butterflies. I can’t pin them down as readily and I don’t like this but this is how the world is made. How do I overcome racial disparity when it exists in my mind? Do I not even exist inside myself?

Tags: Pinterest, Race
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North Georgia

March 12th, 2012

Springtime in North Georgia sees many motorcycle riders, up on 400, weaving in between trailers and motor homes as the bright southern sun breaks through the clouds. It’s the first time most have had their bikes out in months, and they can’t wait to get out there, much to the chagrin of the local police, who now have instituted a zero tolerance policy regarding motorcycles. If you go even one mile above the speed limit you will get pulled over and likely go to jail until the judge can make time for you to make you do time, and he better not be able to see your tattoos when he does.

I have no plans to go fast here or anywhere, and I am still dreaming some Harley dreams even though I am today bouncing along on a dual sport machine, my first. With its high fenders and knobby tires, sporty lines crossing its navy blue chassis, I feel like a 14 year old boy. Even though I have been riding for a few months now, I only just got the concept of rolling off the throttle. You don’t just open it, you close it too. roll on the throttle, roll off it. go, don’t go. It’s like that. this is the missing link that had me lurching long into my advanced beginner status. Maybe I am intermediate now, that I have figured this out.

It’s blazing hot outside but that won’t last long. This heat is a temporary fix, burning the water off the roads in steamy lines. I couldn’t tell you where I found the faith to ride in the unpredictable chaos of early March here. The seasons fight for dominance as they change, one unable to let go, the other coming on too soon for comfort. I understand the need for churches and houses of worship that sit astride each other in neat rows, as people here go to god for help with the weather. Is there a tornado coming? God only knows.

I am riding now in a new state, yet another life that is a repeat of an old one. I come home to Georgia as I come home to California as I come home to London as I come home to everywhere I have been every night. To me motorcycling makes sense because I want to stay in motion, all my things with me, cleverly stored and concealed, packed up and moveable, going strong.

Tags: Motorcycles
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Lost

March 8th, 2012

I am scared when people get lost. There are small mysteries that remain unsolved because their smallness gets swallowed up in the bigness of the grand mystery that life is. What is the point of looking for a couple of people when we don’t even know why we are here?

I want to look for them though. I want to find them. I don’t care how small the mystery is. I want to know. I want to know why and how.

My friend is making a film about these lost guys. There’s a trailer and everything.

Perhaps it’s not a disappearance with metaphysical causes and complications, but it could be. The point of vanishing, the last time seen, the last footage taken – these all seem like psychic crisis and blues clues.

Do you remember Leonard nimoy’s series from the 70s? I get scared thinking about it and I still can’t sleep over certain episodes and I haven’t seen it in 25 years. Even though the show featured ostensibly scarier scenarios like poltergeists and alien abductions, that old series “in search of” terrified me the most when they talked about missing people, their final acts, on planes flying above the Bermuda triangle.

There was a blurry, oddly composed photo of Amelia earhart, nose of a plane almost touching the nose of her face. There was something about it, the look on her handsome visage, lost already somehow, before the camera, before she was lost to the rest of the world. now I won’t be able to sleep tonight.

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Move

March 6th, 2012

Every time I come someplace new, it takes me a little while to learn how to live in the space, like I am starting myself over again and have to retrace some steps. I retain tight connections to the last place I was in, volleying emails with re: back and forth like it’s a tennis match, the original subject line lost in the depth of the conversation, while still trying to forge new ground and tether myself to the present and then the future. I feel 16 and I feel 116 as I lay in bed and think of walking across the street for coffee and wondering if it is time to eat and start the day.

I do odd out of place things like start vacuuming at dawn and laying out clothes to save time. I feel myself starting to have a tantrum when I am talking on the phone and have to figure out when waking is and when sleeping is. It takes some adjusting. It’s not instant or easy.

My body misses the other bodies around it. My husband, my family, my dogs, their warmth evaporates from my skin and I fear I won’t remember their touch. The memory of my now long dead big dog’s silky chest fur still resides in my hands but he’s the only one that stays. Everything and everyone else vanishes.

I eat things I wouldn’t normally eat, as my life becomes a bread circus, and all my rules are thrown out the window, as if there is a new sheriff in town, and there is a period of lawlessness that is inevitable. Laundry is done hastily in the bath then clothes put on still slightly damp. I wear the same makeup for more than a day because there are no witnesses, no one to hold me accountable to my daily mess and mismaintenance. I can do anything, wear eyelashes overnight and look mysteriously fresh at 5am.

I wonder if the is the beginning of mental illness or signs that the disease has progressed. I am not sure if this is sickness because I don’t feel bad, just different, slight unease but not distress, like I am recalculating my route, trying to sync up to the signal of my satellite, because its having trouble beaming through all the tall buildings of the big city.

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