I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight- Margaret Cho

(Note - this ended up in the "Drafts" section - from 2007. Some things have changed - others not so much. I'm putting this out there to get it out of the drafts file, though it's not really really finished yet. Oh, but I did finish the book.)

Margaret Cho is an interesting person. I've been watching her for years- her standup and even a couple of episodes of her show, All American Girl. Her standup is hilarious. Her show was not so much, for a variety of reasons, over most of which she had no control. She has provided a voice (a very loud voice) for Asian Americans of my generation (30's), and I have suspicions that we went to middle school together.

Her book, checked out from the library, because I am poor but have managed to pay off my outstanding library debt from having mislaid a children's book, is I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight. I am about half way through it and may or may not finish it.

So far there is a politically semi-panicked unfocusedness to this collection of essays. Rife with swearing (fuck, mostly), most of which serves to detract from the point, and in one notable case, the beauty, of the thoughts struggling to get through. That notable case is in an essay called "good-bye", in which Cho catalogues, passionately, and heartbreakingly, what you will never be able to do again if you lost someone to the war. It ends:

"They're never coming home. Never. They bring back bodies, hidden beneath flags, pictures of which the government doesn't want us to see, but it's not them, anyway. They are gone, far away from this world, to heaven, I suppose, and, for their sake, I hope there is one, because here on earth it's fucking hell."

The piece itself is powerfull, and Cho's outrage is palpable, her words drag the reader into her emotion. Cho can write.

It is, perhaps, unfair to ask that someone so subject (and subjected to so much) to issues of identity- being Korean-American in America not be obsessed with it. Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970's and 80's, she was surrounded by her Korean family, the Chinese and Japanese students in school, and all the stereo-types associated with what an Asian Girl Should Be- most of which she was not. She was not thin, she was not considered pretty (having a "fat face" was one of the "problems" her relatives let her know she had), and she did not excell academicaly. She was shy, scared, and lonely. A lot of this due to pressures from within her groups, and exclusion from the outside. She has every reason to be pissed off about it all, and she is.

She identifies herself in many ways- American, Asian-American, Feminist, etc. It seems she is having trouble just Being Cho at times, due, no doubt, to the afore-mentioned troubles coming up. The troubles relating to race and racial stereotypes did not end when she hit 18- even at the supposed top of the game, having her own show, she was forced to diet by the show's producers, was attacked by Asian groups for employing the "wrong kind" of Asians as characters on the show, and on and on.

Throughout the (first half of) the book, Cho expresses what can be commonly seen in the letters to the editors' pages across the country now- an impatience and confusion about the War in Iraq, a distrust of politicians. Also commonly expressed is a wish for change without any clear direction of what shape that change would take. She advises us that it is time to "Warrior Up", but is not really clear about what that means. Cho's exhortations to get "militant" seem to go nowhere, as what that means is likewise left unexplained. Militant how, exactly? Write letters? Voting is suggested, but this falls into the tired Anybody But Bush camp of rhetoric.