Blog Post #3: I’m The One That I Want
- In Margaret Cho’s memoir I’m The One That I Want, she describes what it was like to be a part of the first Asian American sitcoms to air on American television and the struggles that came with it, specifically about Asian women beauty standards set by non-Asian women and also about trying to find her identity. Was she Asian or was she American? For her, it felt like she had to choose one or the other.
- Cho experiences many struggles in her journey to become an actress. It starts with her strict, traditional, Korean family, in which she lived in the basement of her household because her father couldn’t stand the sight of her (105). Stereotypically speaking, Cho may not have been her father’s “ideal” child since Asian people were supposed to be smart and get “good jobs.” Cho was unemployed and addicted to drugs at the time when she got the offer to be in All-American Girl. Cho puts her trust in the producers because “[she] thought they all knew what they were doing” (106). After her screening, she gets a call from the producer, who basically tells Cho that her face was too big and that she needed to lose weight in order to be in the show. So they put her on a ridiculously extreme exercise regimen and diet, causing her to lose 30 pounds within 2 weeks, which eventually led to kidney failure. Clearly, this was not good for her health or well-being.
- Cho mentions that she often checked the tabloid, which are like smaller versions of newspapers usually talking about some headline or sensational story. Throughout the memoir, Cho describes times when she was bombarded by reporters. One of them even asked if it was true that the network asked her to lose weight to play the role of herself. The fact that Cho was asked about such a sensitive topic was already distressing enough, but one of the producers answered the question for her before she could say anything and lied to the press that it wasn’t true.
- I think the struggle that Margaret Cho went through regarding living up to beauty standards and trying to find her identity is not something unfamiliar to Asians as well as Asian Americans today. In the Korean music industry, many female idols are pressured into maintaining a certain weight and having a slim figure and pale skin because that’s what people are attracted to.
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