Blog Post 3: I’m the One That I Want

Posted on August 27, 2018 by by | 1 Comment
  1. In her book “I’m the One That I Want”, Margaret Cho chronicles the process of getting, starring, and ending her show ‘All-American Girl’ and how these events tie into her personal journey of finding herself, coming to grips with race’s role in media, and maturing into a woman who won’t be as easily influenced as in the past. She admits that she was trying to find her identity from opinions of those around her. Cho also mentions the combo of media expectations and her own Korean culture that drove her to nearly starve herself to death in order to live a life in which she wouldn’t be forced to go back to auditioning and touring.
  2. Cho specifically tells readers that before the pilot of her show, she “lost thirty pounds in two weeks” (pg 111). She felt deeply hurt by her parents’ constant phone greeting of “‘How is your weight?'” and her producer/friend Gail’s demanding of her to lose weight as well as her public denial of that fact in a later press conference (pg 117, pg 125). Cho tried everything (laxatives, unhealthy diets, excessive exercise, illegal diet pills), driven by her desire to hold onto this life of having ‘made it’ which she believed she could only do by being thin (pg 114-115). Cho also provides examples of her immaturity in the past – one being that her firing her agent Karen (who was very vocal about dropping All-American Girl after the weight loss request) because it was “the only thing I knew to do” (pg 109).
  3. While describing a conflict she once had with a Korean female journalist who had been spreading rumors about her, Cho mentions the term “internalized racism” (pg 127). This is racism in which the culprit and the victim are of the same ethnic group (it could also mean racism towards oneself). Cho introduces this term in her observation that “people of color making strides in a field run by the dominant culture tend to persecute others of their own background, because anyone else’s success makes their own achievement seem unspectacular” (pg 127).
  4. Sarah Moon Cassinelli’s article ‘”If we are Asian, then are we funny?”‘ describes the factors that contributed to the show’s lack of success and received criticism. She calls the show “a site of conflation between the troubling issues of ethnic marking and the ownership over the female body” (pg 133). Cassinelli acknowledges that Hollywood has a long habit of putting unrealistically thin leading ladies on screen, but she argues that the detail of the network having a problem with Cho’s face makes this issue about more than just weight. She also says “the show focused on the ideas they had regarding ethnic authenticity” and “seemed to overemphasize the characters’ Asianness”, resulting in criticism from both those who couldn’t connect with these flat characters making stale jokes and those who were outraged by the misinterpretation of their own kind (pg 131). Evidently, from “I’m the One That I Want”, this was criticism that Cho was not ready for at the time – however in hindsight she can understand where it came from.
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