I'm the One That I Want (14 page)

Many people in the meeting hugged me and kissed my cheek warmly. I had no idea who they were. It made me tired to be the center of so much attention. I sat there while the executives droned on and on about how we were going to create this amazing hit TV show by finding the right writers and the right actors, etc., etc., etc. All I could think about was the traffic I would have to face going home. My feeling was “Why do we have to talk about it? What is there to say? Why can’t we just do it?” This sitting around and theorizing about comedy doesn’t make it funny; you need to be down there, in the trenches, working it out.

Plus, the executives were the most humorless, dry, intimidating people I had ever met. They were the kind of people in an audience who wince instead of laugh. We were trying to talk about comedy, but nobody laughed once in the meeting. I had bad feelings about them all; they didn’t seem very nice.

But they wanted to do this show, this Asian-American family sitcom, and they wanted me to star in it. They said they loved me, that this was going to be a great show. I have to admit, I kind of felt like a child prodigy, like the Dalai Lama in a way. It was the miracle I had been waiting all my life for. I hated myself, but I thought that this show would somehow rectify that. If I got love from millions of people, then how could I still hate myself? Maybe I could be happy. Maybe this would do it for me. Maybe it was okay that I wasn’t white, tall, thin, blonde, gorgeous, or a guy. Maybe my ship was coming in. Maybe I would make it okay for Asians to be on TV. Maybe I’d really be the first to do it.

I stopped being tired of the attention and brightened up. The traffic would be hell going home, but who cared? I was going to be a fucking superstar.

The network deal made me think my life had been saved. I had paid my dues—and then some. The endless road gigs that exhausted and depressed me, the lackluster homecomings, the rejection at auditions, these were now all behind me. I looked at a future so bright I had to wear shades.

With the deal finally in place, things started to heat up fast. I got a publicist who escorted me to countless photo shoots and interviews. I took meetings with writers, all guys from the Valley wearing puffy new Reeboks and baseball jackets from other TV shows they’d worked on. The
Life Goes On
guy blended into the
Wings
guy. I couldn’t tell one from another.

We’d meet at Maple Drive or some other expensive lunch place, and they’d tell me they loved my tape, they wanted to do a great show, they had a girlfriend/friend/niece/manicurist/fuck who was Korean. They knew what it was all about. They would call my management. They went to school/played racquetball/Vegas/shared hookers with Greer. They wanted to get in bed with me and the network and the studio so we could have a three-way all the way to the bank.

Greer, who greeted me every day with smiles and long hugs and baskets of muffins from Fancifull, set me up with Gary.

“He’s just come off
Empty Nest
and he’s hot!” Greer said. As far as I was concerned, anybody would have been fine. I just did not want to return to my old life.

Gary was really nice, a man with innocent charm. He was different from the other writers because he wasn’t a sleazy, cigar-smoking story editor from the Valley. Gary was asthmatic, older, and lived in Beverly Hills. He said, “I get up at four every morning and write until ten.” He spoke with such gaunt solemnity, I believed him. His jeans looked like a size twenty-four.

He took me to a cheap diner, not a trendy Beverly Hills bistro. He ordered a house salad with the dressing on the side and got to work. He tried so hard.

The waitress came by and before refilling his coffee cup asked him, “More hot?” He started giggling like a maniac, then that giggle turned into a cough, then came the grand finale of a huge throat-clearing with a nose-blow encore.

It’s not his fault that he wasn’t funny. As he pumped me for information about myself, I wasn’t sure what to tell him. I really had no idea who I was. I just said whatever came to mind, made stuff up, none of which he used anyway.

He cranked out a pilot from five minutes of my standup, a sunny expose on what it was like to grow up a rebellious daughter in a conservative Korean household. I spared him the real story. The truth was that I lived in my parents’ basement when I was twenty because my father couldn’t stand the sight of me, and therefore banned me from the rest of the house, so that I peeped at the family through the cracks in the door under the stairs like
Bad Ronald
. I was unemployed and trying to kick a sick crystal meth habit by smoking huge bags of paraquat-laced marijuana and watching Nick at Night for six hours at a time. Now that’s a sitcom.

We were going for prime time—a family show in the 8 o’clock time slot. We would be the first Asian-American family on television, which gave us a lot to consider. How were we going to portray ourselves? It had to be wholesome, even though I had no idea what that meant. The closest I ever got to that was being a
hole
to
some
. I’ve never been wholesome in my life.

I just went along with it. I thought they all knew what they were doing.

I THOUGHT THEY ALL KNEW WHAT THEY WERE DOING!!!!!!!!

There was a screen test for me set up at the studio. It was on the
Home Improvement
stage. I dressed up that day in a miniskirt and a midriff sweater with a long vest. I looked great. Success suits me, I thought.

The stage manager and the cameramen were so nice to me. I stood on the set and walked back and forth as the cameras rolled. I arrived home feeling like a tired hardworking actor, after a long day of shooting.

Then I got a panicked phone call from the producer of the show, a woman named Gail, whom I had really grown to love and trust. Gail liked to smoke cigarettes with me in secret. If Greer was my dad, Gail was my mom. She was the head of the production company slated to do the show and very powerful in a world of men. This impressed me to no end. After meetings, she would hug me hard with her solid arms, and my fears about everything, my insecurity about myself, even my self-hatred, would melt away.

When Gail called, her voice had neither the friendliness or the warmth I had come to associate with her. She was all business.

“We need to do something. . . . I have to tell you. . . . The network has a problem with you. They are concerned about the fullness of your face. You need to lose weight. I don’t care what you have to do. We have two weeks before we shoot the pilot. I am so sorry but there isn’t any way to make this nice. And far be it for me to say anything. . . . But this is for you, for your future. If you want your own show, if you want to be a star, you’ll do it. We will do whatever we can. There is another test set up for you in a week. We told them you would lose some weight by then. And please, please, please do not wear anything that bares your midriff.”

One “please” would have sufficed.

How do you keep going when someone tells you there is something wrong with your face?

“The network has a problem with you. They are concerned about the fullness of your face.”

I will neer forget it, as long as I live. I don’t think Gail wanted to tell me. I knew the network executives were making her, because she was closest to me at the time, because she was a woman.

She was just trying to do her job, and I do not hold anything against her for that. Still, the “fullness of your face” was not even a kind euphemism. It was in no way subtle or tactful. What hurt most was that it was not a body part I could hide. There was no girdle or minimizer for your face. It is the part of you that cannot be changed or denied or altered. It is the very essence of you. How did I not want to hide my face forever?

I tried to lessen the shock of it, what it did to me. I tried to rationalize, like—“This is the big time, we are all gentlemen here, I can take it.” I obviously couldn’t.

My face. My face. We always hear, “Your face is your fortune,” “The face that launched a thousand ships,” “That face, that face, that beautiful face.” Even when I would get heavier, people would at least say, “You’ve got such a pretty face.” But not now. How did I not run and scream when the cameras were on me, to spare the world a glimpse at this huge face that could barely fit on the screen? I felt like the Elephant Man—my head, a gigantic monstrosity that I presented to the world, unavoidable because it was the very me of me.

The pain went deep. I wanted to kill my face from the inside out. At least a skull is small. A skeleton has a tiny face. I couldn’t look in a mirror without feeling rage at myself—why does my face have to take up so much space? How I tried to kill that reflection! Working out to exhaustion, feeling the sweat pour out of my face, touching my cheeks and chin to feel if they had gotten smaller, hungry and weak, trying so hard to please this network that had done nothing but make me want to kill myself. Kill my face. But it isn’t their fault, I told myself then. It is mine. I let myself react that way. I know there isn’t anything I could have done about how I felt, and I cannot apologize for how I hurt myself. Who is there to say sorry to, except my face?

I want to say sorry now. To my face. My poor face that endured so much and only wanted to be pretty and liked and maybe loved sometimes and certainly didn’t do any harm and could make people smile a lot of the time.

My poor face that would flush bright red from all the vodka and pills I downed so that I could pass out and not look at it anymore. My poor face that I could barely lift to have people see because I thought it was so
full
, so ugly, so wrong, so huge, so awful, so trying to be something it was not.

I kept having those feelings until they were just normal. They barely hurt, I was so used to them.

Years later, someone took a picture of me and I looked at it. Really looked at it. It occurred to me that yes, my face was full, but it was lovely. My eyebrows curved up inquisitively, sexy, like a ’30s screen goddess. I had alabaster skin that glowed and Cupid’s bow lips that shyly smiled.

My face was shaped like a heart, because through all of the injustices it endured, it still shined with love. Now I have finally learned how to love it back. The battle for self-esteem is a hard-won victory, because as human beings we tend to err on the side of self-loathing, but winning this war is the only way we can survive.

My agent, Karen, called almost immediately after I hung up with Gail. She was outraged and was urging me to pull out of the show. “Don’t you see? They don’t get you. You are making a big mistake. They can’t ask you to lose weight. They can’t do that! Don’t let them do that! It isn’t right. And if that is who they think you are, this show isn’t going to work!”

I did the only thing I knew to do: I fired her. I didn’t want to go back to auditions. I didn’t want to go back out on the road. She didn’t understand. Nobody did. If I could just lose some weight, then everything would be fine. I thought Karen was in my way, but that wasn’t true. I was.

I got some new, “high powered” agents from William Morris. They all hugged me for too long and sat me down in conference rooms to talk about my possible future in CD-ROMs. They sent me lists of directors and got me auditions for “girlfriend” parts. I didn’t book anything, but they said, “If it takes ten years, we’ll do it.” The expensive lunches and high-quality fag assistants bought my confidence.

The network mobilized the troops and launched a full-scale war against my body. A trainer named Vine came to my house six days a week at 7 A.M. and worked me out for four hours. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t gone on and on about his show-business development ideas. He was the ultimate pain in my ass. A trainer/pitcher. I just hated him so much. Seeing him every day, having to make ridiculous small talk and act friendly while he was making me do sit-up after sit-up and trying to get his perfect pitch down to twenty-five words or less was nothing short of torture.

Now when I walk my dog in the hills by my house, I see trainers just like Vine walking with their clients and it seems unholy to me. I can always spot them because one person is heavier and the other person is stupider.

In addition to the trainer, I had this diet company deliver food to my house in creepy white bags because I obviously couldn’t be trusted to make my own fatty choices. The portions were so small, it was hard to believe that people could survive on them. It also astounded me that I had been eating comparatively so much before. It was like I had been a gorilla, consuming my weight in bananas every day.

Now, everything that went into my mouth was carefully measured and monitored. When I finished my last meal of the day, I wanted to cry because I was still hungry. I drank so much water that my insides hurt and I stopped thinking about anything but food. I dreamt about eating spaghetti with ricotta cheese swirled into it and would wake up in a cold sweat, afraid I had actually eaten it.

I had a brand new body in days—but it didn’t look any different to me. I couldn’t see it, but everyone else could. “I hear Margaret Cho’s got a hot body now.”
Now?
What do you mean
now
?

I went to the Lava Lounge and a whole new school of guys was checking me out, which was totally terrifying. I don’t know if they thought I was cute or that I was skinny enough now to “make the grade.” Either way, it was scary and then it pissed me off, so it was unpleasant no matter how you looked at it or how it looked at you.

We started rehearsals for the pilot. I guess the network thought that my face could now fit on the screen and they wouldn’t have to letterbox it.