Transcript

Ai-jen Poo:
Welcome to Sunstorm, where we get real about what’s happening in the world and what we are doing about it because we are the light in the storm.

 

Alicia Garza:
Hi, I’m Alicia Garza.

 

Ai-jen Poo:
And I’m Ai-jen Poo. Today we have a legend on Sunstorm, and I am not exaggerating.

 

Alicia Garza:
No, you are not exaggerating. Margaret Cho is everything. She is a comedian, an actress, an activist, an author, and is groundbreaking in so many ways. The new season of her podcast, The Margaret Cho, is exploring the anti-Asian violence and model minority myth. She is the subject of the comedy documentary, Hysterical. And coming soon, you’ll be able to catch her starring in the rom-com, Good on Paper, on Netflix. Margaret Cho, hello. What’s up?

 

Margaret Cho:
Hello. Thank you.

 

Alicia Garza:
We’re so stoked to have you, Margaret. This is like a dream for us. And honestly, it’s rare that I get to meet people these days who are Bay Area natives, San Francisco natives in particular. I got to just give you proppers for that. I just do. I just do. It means a lot to me.

 

Margaret Cho:
Thank you.

 

Alicia Garza:
Yes. Thank you for receiving it.

 

Margaret Cho:
I receive them.

 

Alicia Garza:
You have made us laugh so much over the years, so please-

 

Margaret Cho:
Thank you.

 

Alicia Garza:
Tell us what is keeping you laughing now?

 

Margaret Cho:
I really love to watch old Key and Peele on YouTube. Like I watched the Church Ladies like so much. Oh God, it like really gets me. I really laugh at Bowen Yang on SNL. I mean, I laugh at Bowen Yang anyway, but I love him on SNL. I just really, really laugh, and it’s very satisfying.

 

Alicia Garza:
Do you remember the first time that you knew that you could make other people laugh?

 

Margaret Cho:
I don’t know if I really ever knew, but I really always loved comedy. I loved sitcoms, and I loved television. I loved Carol Burnett and Flip Wilson and Paul Lynde, all of the sort of game show queens. I loved The Gong Show and I just loved like the idea of show business. In a lot of ways, it was sort of my babysitter. I watched a lot of SCTV, a lot of Kids In The Hall. Comedy was sort of my love language anyway. I never was sure if I could do it, but I just knew that I wanted to.

 

Ai-jen Poo:
Totally. My grandmother used to say that if you laughed three times a day, like one of those deep belly laughs, that you would like live a super long, healthy life and then one day just drop dead. And that’s exactly how you want to live your life. So under her theory, you have kept so many people healthy.

 

Margaret Cho:
Well after there’s a sharp intake of breath that’s unexpected that guarantees you will be alive for the next breath. There’s a way to sort of look at life, like laughing is affirming your life status.

 

Alicia Garza:
That’s right. I live by those words.

 

Ai-jen Poo:
It’s a reminder that you are alive. One of the things we admire the most about you is your courage, your fearlessness, and your willingness to just try new things. It feels like you’ve just done it all. Stand up, books, TV, movies, burlesque, activism, podcasts. Is there something that you haven’t yet tried that you would like to?

 

Margaret Cho:
I would love to start to do animation. More animation. I’ve done some. My animated movie last year was nominated for an Academy Award, Over The Moon. To be a part of animation is such a magical world and such an important world too. It really is your ability to tell stories in a way that’s really moving and funny and relatable almost without language. It’s really powerful. This year, I’m in the jury for the Tribeca Film Festival, and I’m doing all of the animation. To me, it’s something that really speaks to people of all ages, so it’s something that I would like to do more of.

 

Alicia Garza:
I love that. It is Pride month, and I, as a fellow, Bi human… Bi to Bi. Yeah. Shake it out.

 

Margaret Cho:
Yeah.

 

Alicia Garza:
I want to know, what are you celebrating this Pride month?

 

Margaret Cho:
I’m celebrating our reach and our endurance. We’ve had our second Pride now in COVID, and a lot of this is going to be virtual. But there’s still this resilience and perseverance around our community. We’re still going to have it.

 

Alicia Garza:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

 

Margaret Cho:
And it doesn’t matter. Last year, I hosted the first-ever virtual Folsom Street Fair, which was amazing. That was actually a kind of a great opportunity because you could see everything. Usually if you go to Folsom, you’re only able to see part of it because everything’s happening at the same time. But since this was online, I was able to see the entire program of events. And I was so impressed.

 

Alicia Garza:
That’s awesome.

 

Margaret Cho:
The way that our community has rallied around this, we’ve already been through a pandemic with AIDS. We know how to live in a time of death and disease and thrive in a time of death and disease. Pride is really an important time and we embrace it this year just as strongly as if we were all physically together.

 

Alicia Garza:
I love this. I used to live right by Folsom Street and it often meant that I was like walking out my front door and you know, somebody was getting head. I’d be like, “Happy Folsom Street Fair,” crawling over somebody. But I can’t imagine it virtual.

 

Margaret Cho:
So awesome. Because everybody who would have been there were streaming now live or sending in videos of their play.

 

Alicia Garza:
That’s amazing.

 

Margaret Cho:
And it was amazing just to see what the kids are up to these days. It’s not your leather daddies S&M. Boy, times have changed. And for the better. It’s great. Lots of not using leather. They’re using a lot of plant material like cactus and succulents. It was a lot of cruelty-free cruelties.

 

Alicia Garza:
That is so interesting. They’re going organic. I’m into it.

 

Margaret Cho:
So organic.

 

Alicia Garza:
Plant-based.

 

Margaret Cho:
Plant-based.

 

Alicia Garza:
Plant-based S&M. This is amazing.

 

So we got to dive in because there’s so much to talk about. Speaking of resilience, we are certainly practicing our resilience. We are standing up, we are fighting back, and we are changing not just narratives but we’re changing policy. I know that you have been super, super vocal about anti-Asian sentiment increasing. You’ve also been very, very vocal about LGBTQ rights, especially in the 52 years since Stonewall. I was saying to somebody the other day, I totally get why people were throwing bricks because what is going on with these folks? What, yeah. Anyhow. I guess my question for you is, why do you think that some peoples fear, right? Because that’s what a lot of this is about. It’s about fear. It’s about anxiety, right? This isn’t totally about mean people, which is always how it gets framed. It’s about fear and anxiety and it’s about opportunism, right, that preys on that fear and anxiety. Why do you think that some people’s fear, particularly fear of sickness, manifests as hate, and what are some ways that this can change?

Margaret Cho:
Well, it reminds me a lot of during AIDS where a lot of people were lashing out at the gay community and it would manifest in homophobic violence, using AIDS as some kind of excuse. If you’re so afraid of a disease that is bloodborne, why would you go splatter the blood of someone who you believe has it? In the same way with coronavirus, if you believe that a group of people have it, have brought it to America, why would you get in their face and yell knowing that that’s how it’s spread? These things happen not because of people’s real fear of a disease or anything like that. It’s just justification to put actions to their already resident hatred. It’s something that already resides within them that they want to be able to use against others. It’s cyclical, this pattern of violence against all of these people who would be considered the other, whether it’s queerness, whether it’s Asian-ness, whether it’s race, whatever it is. It’s this unnameable fear.

Ai-jen Poo:
One of the things that I am so excited about that is happening right now is the second season of your podcast, The Margaret Show: Mortal Minority, which looks at incidences of anti-Asian violence in the past. These stories are so, so important, and so few people know about them. It’s insane.

 

Margaret Cho:
It’s so weird. It’s so hard to find out about a lot of these violent uprisings because America wants to rewrite their history. We don’t know anything about the lynching of Black Americans. We think, “Oh, it was a few isolated incidents.” No, this was a systemic practice in keeping black people from attaining status and economic status wealth. They would go after people who were prominent in the communities, people who were standing up to lead. Anybody who was showing some kind of exceptional worth in the black community, they would lynch. And we don’t have any awareness of it.

 

Ai-jen Poo:
Exactly. There’s a way in which, until you understand that history, you don’t really understand our culture and the roots of our systems and how racism and white supremacy shapes them. I think what you’re helping to do here is fill out a part of the story that’s about the experience of Asian-Americans in this country. I’m just curious, what are you learning and what are you hoping that listeners will learn and take away from the show?

 

Margaret Cho:
I’m just learning how much of America’s racist history is buried underneath the Founding Fathers, underneath the sort of Revolutionary War tales. They gloss over slavery. They gloss over all of the violence against Chinese workers here in this country initially. They gloss over the destruction of over 200 Chinatowns in America, completely erase all of Asian Americans contributions to reuniting the country after the Civil War. It’s a real disservice to who we are as a nation because we’re so much more than people understand. Also, the pain of all the things that we’ve experienced, and with lynching… That’s something that we’re just starting to finally understand. Systemic racism we’re just starting to understand. Asian American racism is behind that, starting to come into visibility. And it’s very painful and very hard to find truth about it.

 

Ai-jen Poo:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). I think one of the things, even in my own family, when I talk about facing into the truth of our history, the parts that are the most painful, the most dehumanizing, the most shocking and unfathomable, there are even differences within my own family of like, “Why do you have to go there? Why do you have to talk about that stuff? Why can’t we just move forward and move on?”

 

What would you say to those people? Why do we need to face into this history?

 

Margaret Cho:
We don’t do ourselves any favors by moving forward because we don’t know where we’re coming from, and we’ll just continue these patterns. We have to have a reckoning now. We have to have a reckoning with white supremacy and really dismantle it. It’s, to me, a real burden for white people actually, too, because they feel shame about things that they were never a part of yet still propagate because they refuse to look at the past as well. We all need to look at it so that we can all have a better society and understand each other.

 

Alicia Garza:
You know, this season of Sunstorm, it’s all about learning and unlearning. And I’m curious, because you had an excellent mentor, the late, great Joan Rivers. What is the most important thing that you learned from her?

 

Margaret Cho:
I think what I learned from Joan Rivers is that she emphasized the fact of my worth as a female comedian was only going to get bigger and better as I grew older. That it was the opposite of actresses, especially her from her day, ingenues whose luck would fade when they went into their thirties. To even think of that now is really astonishing, but she persevered and thrived into her old age. I was so grateful to have her in my life and to have her be so encouraging and supportive of me.

 

Alicia Garza:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). We’re in such a weird moment right now in terms of this pandemic. I feel like for the last year, I’ve been saying, “Contrary to popular opinion. We are still in a pandemic and now I’m like, “Wait, are we in a pandemic? Are we not in a pandemic?” People are out, people are getting vaccinated. Some people are masked. Some people are not. I mean, there’s progress that’s happening, but this has certainly been a year and a half now of lots of learning and lots of unlearning and lots of reckoning. I’m curious. From your perspective and your experience, is there one thing that you’ve learned in this pandemic that you hope to carry forward with you? Because we’re not going back to any like mythical time, right? Like 2019 is never coming back again. We’re never going to get January of 2020 again, right? The world has changed. Is there one thing from this period that you are going to take forward with you, and is there something that you are absolutely, absolutely leaving behind?

 

Margaret Cho:
I think that I’m coming forward with a sense of real gratitude and leaving behind kind of being jaded by life or sort of the small, beautiful joys, like going to the movies or going out to a restaurant. I think that’s really something that I would take for granted, and I can’t take that for granted anymore. That kind of freedom. But also I think we still are in a pandemic. I’m going to mask. I’m vaccinated and masked, cause we don’t know how this is going to change. You know, I don’t know how many people are vaccinated, who may have to get booster shots. Who knows what’s going to happen with the efficacy of these vaccines?We’re just all learning, but I’m really excited about going back to a life that I won’t take for granted.

 

Alicia Garza:
I love that.

 

Ai-jen Poo:
Yeah. I think gratitude is such an incredible, magical power that when you feel it and you allow it to kind of sink in and dominate your consciousness, everything is better. Like you feel better, you are better, you look better. I feel like Joan Rivers must have lived with a spirit of gratitude.

 

Margaret Cho:
Yes. I think so. She really knew it because she’s seen so much and seen comedy change and attitudes towards women in comedy change. She was one of the prime reasons why attitudes towards women in comedy changed. I know that she had tremendous gratitude for everything that she had built as well. Yeah. It’s something she definitely had.

 

Ai-jen Poo:
Speaking of comedy and changing, you’ve had four years of Trump, which was a lot of material. A lot of material. I wonder, what changes for you as a comedian and for comedy in general now that we’re kind of in a new era?

 

Margaret Cho:
Oh, so much changes. Also that people still believe in him, all of the death and destruction that he caused, yet still somehow people believe in him. That is the power of whiteness. That’s the power of fear-based propaganda. It is the fear of the other. It’s the same narrative of, “They’re taking our jobs. We’ve got to do something about it. They’re bringing us diseases.” This kind of mentality, it goes so deep. It uncovers how deeply racist a country this really is and how gullible people are that they actually think progressives are eating babies. In all of this craziness, the damage that he’s done to the Supreme Court, which truly affects women in the worst way.

 

Ai-jen Poo:
That’s right.

 

Margaret Cho:
That’s the worst crime, I think, that we’ll be reeling from for the next 50 years, I believe. That’s the part of it that really scares.

 

Alicia Garza:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Me too. Me too. Especially because as we talked about, right, if we don’t talk about what’s happened… If we don’t talk about what we’ve endured over the last four years, and what the impacts were, right, then we are absolutely doomed to repeat it.

 

Margaret Cho:
We’re so doomed, and it’s so awful to think about having to go back to Roe v. Wade, which they will do. Which they are doing. As if we need to assess again whether women are in charge of their bodies.

 

Alicia Garza:
Right. Right.

 

Margaret Cho:
Which obviously, Brett Kavanaugh, we know he doesn’t believe that women are in charge of their bodies. He doesn’t. So it’s really frightening.

 

Alicia Garza:
Let’s talk about the ways that we get resilient in these moments, because if you’re like me, you spend half your day doing deep belly laughs. Right? I seek them out. I seek them out. I feel like it’s the secret to good skin. But then you also spend the other half of your day like throwing your shoes at the television because there’s a lot of work to do. A lot of us take care of ourselves by kind of zooming in on the things that make us passionate, and you have said that you self-medicate through performing because it’s a way to combat anxiety and depression. So how have you been coping with the loss of like live performance over the past year and a half?

 

Margaret Cho:
It’s hard because you feel like you’ve lost your purpose. But I’ve been lucky in that I’ve done a lot of events online. I’ve done a lot of things streaming and on social media, which have really helped. I’ve also taken the time to do a lot of episodes of podcasts, my own and other people’s, which is really great. Yeah. The way that I think I can channel my anxiety into action, it’s like gold. It’s like, you can make gold because it’s really a noble effort, you know? Like I want to be afraid, but I also want to try to do something to help. When you can try to figure out how to do that, it’s really powerful.

 

Ai-jen Poo:
Yeah. That is powerful. Especially cause performing gives me anxiety and depression as opposed to alleviating it. So just even the idea that I could try to get to a place like you, Margaret, where it could like give me some reprieve from the anxiety seems awesome. And it sounds like it’s also about more than just performance. It’s about action for you. It’s about like being in motion, being a part of the solution, solving problems.

 

Margaret Cho:
Yeah. And speaking your mind. Like during the Biden-Harris campaign, I was so afraid that Trump was going to be re-elected, so I spent all of my time doing a lot of advocacy work and reaching out to AAPI political groups. It was really interesting because a lot of Republicans joined us. People who had voted for Trump who were coming to the Democrat side because he just went too far and we couldn’t support it anymore. I was so impressed by their rationality and humility to come. So they were the ones that I focus the most on. I’m so impressed.

 

Ai-jen Poo:
I think that that’s really smart and beautiful. I think sometimes it’s kind of like, when you’re doing a thing, and you’ve been doing it for a long time and people don’t get it. Then, all of a sudden, they get it and you’re like, “Well, where are you been” where you could have the posture of “What took you so long” in a kind of like negative, distrustful way or you could have a like, “Welcome, and we’re so happy you’re here” posture. I think that getting to this next phase in our democracy and in our country’s wellbeing is going to require all of us being like “Welcome! We’re so happy to see you.”

 

Margaret Cho:
We have to. Like, “Let’s eat this baby.” I really could not believe some of these people, but they were of that air… Sometimes there are immigrants who really buy into that white, aspirational dream, and they want to send their kids to Ivy league schools. They believe that being fully integrated into American society means trying to be as white as possible, which means being Republican a lot of times. Being politically conservative somehow is the answer to that. You know, the fact that they were so fed up by Trump, they realized they couldn’t do it through that party. And that’s so impressive.

 

Alicia Garza:
I really like that. I really like that. I feel like one of the things that strikes me too, about what happens when people really follow their moral compass, is that they also are trying to find their way, but they’re also trying to figure out if they can stay in the fight. You have been in this work for a long time. Not just in the work of comedy, right, but in the work of being active and raising your voice. I’m wondering if you can just talk about what are your survival tips? Like, how do you stay in it even though things get chaotic and you know, sometimes we throw shoes at the TV… At least I do. Maybe that’s just me.

 

Margaret Cho:
Yeah. That’s a good thing to throw.

 

Alicia Garza:
How do you stay in?

 

Margaret Cho:
It’s hard. It’s really hard. It’s really frustrating, especially with so many Asian American elders being attacked. And it’s not just a daily thing. It’s multiple times a day where you see these stories, and it’s so disheartening. Especially from the Bay Area, which is really awful to think about. It’s a very distressing thing, but we have to have hope. What this violence has done is really brought the Asian American community together along with our allies and brought some of a unified voice, which I think is what we needed. We still don’t have whoever is going to be our John Lewis. So we have to figure that out. But most importantly, we do have this collective voice of “This is enough. This has to stop.” And I’m grateful for that. But it’s very hard to see all these stories and not feel disheartened.

 

Ai-jen Poo:
One thing that you just made me think of that I think is just the opportunity of this moment is how many Asian American women and their leadership in the community has been transformative. The fact that we have a new platform for organizing and building power out of the pain of this moment and the devastation of the violence that’s happening. The fact that we have a lot of people working at the community level and voices everywhere, including yours in comedy and in media, that this is actually about racism that is deeply embedded in our systems and in our culture. And that has made us both highly visible and exotic and invisible at the same time. How it’s a reflection of power… How it means that Asian-American communities actually have to build power if we’re to really address it. And all of that really coming from women. It’s incredible.

 

Margaret Cho:
It’s great. I mean, we have people like Grace Meng. We have, of course, Kamala Harris, who is amazing. Lisa Ling, Dion Lim in the Bay Area whose reporting is so essential for all that’s happening to the moment. You know, Olivia Munn is out there. We have so many great Asian American women out there really championing our truth, and it’s powerful.

 

Ai-jen Poo:
Yeah. And I think the more we come together and the more power we build, the more we can shift both the narrative and the culture and the power dynamics, right?

 

Margaret Cho:
Yes. Absolutely.

 

Ai-jen Poo:
It’s exciting. Really exciting time.

 

Alicia Garza:
We loved having you, Margaret. Please tell the folks who are listening how they can find you on the socials and where they can catch all of your new work.

 

Margaret Cho:
I’m at Margaret Cho on Twitter. At Margaret underscore Cho on Instagram. My podcast is The Margaret Cho: Mortal Minority. It’s out everywhere you get podcasts. You can find out about me and where I’m playing at margaretcho.com. And we’re out here. We’re doing this. We’re doing this.

 

Alicia Garza:
Consider it done. Thank you so much for joining us.

 

Ai-jen Poo:
Thank you, Margaret.

 

Margaret Cho:
Thank you.

 

Alicia Garza:
Sunstorm is a project of the National Domestic Workers Alliance in collaboration with Participant. Sunstorm is executive produced by Alicia Garza, Ai-jen Poo, and Kristina Mevs-Apgar. Sunstorm is produced by Amy S. Choi and Rebecca Lehrer of the Mash-up Americans. Producers are Shelby Sandlin, Mary Phillips-Sandy, and Mia Warren. Original music composed by Jen Kwok and Jody Shelton.

 

Margaret Cho:
It’s my favorite show.