{"product_id":"im-the-one-that-i-want-isbn-9780345440143","title":"I'm the One That I Want","description":"Comedian. Icon. TV star. Role model. Trash talker. Fag hag. Gypsy. Tramp. Thief. Margaret Cho displays her numerous sides in this funny, fierce, and honest memoir. As one of the country’s most visible Asian Americans, she has a unique perspective on identity and acceptance. As one of the country’s funniest and most quoted personalities, she takes no prisoners. And as a warm and wise woman who has seen the highs and lows of life, she has words of encouragement for anyone who has ever felt like an outsider. With \u003ci\u003eI’m the One That I Want\u003c\/i\u003e, Margaret Cho has written a book every bit as hilarious, shocking, and insightful as she is.“[A] beautiful book . . . It is innately empowering, honest, and raw.”\u003cbr\u003e–ROSIE O’DONNELL\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“REAL AND REVEALING . . . What makes Cho’s book resonate is the razor-sharp honesty she deploys and the straight-ahead style she uses to chronicle her messed-up life. Her humor is in no short supply.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e–Los Angeles Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A COMPELLING, QUICK READ THAT WILL SATISFY CHO’S FANS AND INSTANTLY MAKE NEW ONES.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e–The New Orleans Times-Picayune\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eMargaret Cho\u003c\/b\u003e was born in 1968 and raised in San Francisco. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her dog, Ralph (pronounced Rafe, as in Fiennes).1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e ALONE, STEALING AND WAVING\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I was born on December 5, 1968, at Children’s Hospital  in San Francisco.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e My mother says, “You were so small. Just like this!” and she makes  a fist and shakes it. “You grow so much! Can you imagine?! Just tiny baby!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I can’ t imagine being that small. It must have been the one time I didn’t worry about my  weight. At 5 pounds, 6 ounces, I was the Calista Flockhart of the newborn set.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e My  earliest memories are mostly unpleasant. The first thing I can truly remember is  standing in front of a sink in my footie pajamas being berated by a bunch of old  people. They must have been my grandparents. I couldn’t wash my face, and they were  making fun of me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Dirty face! Dirty face!” They all laughed and then started coughing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e My mother was about to leave me with them and, presumably, was hiding her guilt  behind my inability to wash my face. I was so small I had to stand on a stool to  reach the sink. I had a tremendous fear that if I immersed my face in the water I  would not return, I would drown, or water would go up my nose, or I would somehow  be hijacked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I also feared that if I took my eyes off my mother, she would leave.  And she did. My parents had a talent for leaving me places when I was very young.  This had to do with immigration difficulties, living in San Francisco in 1968 and  not being hippies, LBJ, men on the moon, and having their first child while being  totally unprepared for reality. My father didn’t know how to break it to my mother  that he was to be deported three days after I was born, so he conveniently avoided  the subject. He didn’t lie; he simply withheld the truth and at the last minute,  he left her holding the bag. Or me, as it were.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In my parents’ colorfully woven  mythology, that was the one corner of the tapestry they carefully concealed. Knowing  I probably wouldn’t remember, they kept it to themselves. But I did remember, perhaps  not actual events but colors and shapes and feelings. The insides of planes, the  smell of fuel, unfamiliar arms, crying and crying. Wanting my mom but not having  the words, not even knowing what I wanted.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e When questioned about it now, my mother  spills forth resentment and regret. “Can you imagine mommy?! Oh! It was so terrible.  I have to take care of you by myself and Daddy go back to Korea and then I have to  send you to Korea and all this you only three days! Can you imagine?! Oh! I hate  Daddy!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e My father says cryptically that he was testing the waters, scoping out the  situation, whatever that means.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It was all an unfortunate turn of events, but in  the spirit of my birthplace, I learned that if I couldn’t be with the one I loved,  I would love the one I was with. I was one, and already somewhat of a slut.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I loved  lots of stewardesses, and lots of old people. When I was reunited with my parents,  my mother showed me pictures of an ancient, bony woman in a white Korean ham-bok.  “She was your auntie and she take care of you when you baby. She love you soooo much!  She just die. She is in heaven. But she take so good care of you. She love you soo  much!!!!!” I believed she was dead because in the picture she looked like a skeleton,  even though her wide smile made her kind and human. Some infantile, suckling part  of me remembered her face and I wanted to weep with baby grief.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e My mother’s father  also died around this time in 1970. For some reason, her family did not let her know  of his passing until long after the funeral. She sat on her bed holding one of those  blue air-mail letters that is also its own envelope. Par avion. She was crying, letting  her tears fall on the blue paper and smear the ink, odd Korean letters looking like  a bunch of sticks that had fallen on the page. I was alarmed by her sadness–I hadn’ t witnessed it before. I jumped on the bed and wrapped my small arms around her and  said, “Don’t cry Mommy. I will be your mommy now.” I was fully aware of how cute  I was being. I was destined for a career in show business.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Even then, I loved television,  and my favorite thing to watch was the coverage of the Watergate scandal. I’d put  my fist in my mouth and then smear my hand across the TV screen, watching the saliva  make rainbow tracks all over Richard Nixon’s face.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e We lived in a little apartment  with my aunt and uncle on Washington Street. It was nice going from having no parents,  to suddenly having four. My mother would make me special outfits–red wooly jackets  with pillbox\u003cbr\u003e hats, just like Jackie O–and we’d all go to the park, where I would  cry whenever I saw a dog.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e My aunt and uncle ran a convenience store on Nob Hill,  and sometimes after nursery school, my mother would drop me there so she could run  errands. I became enamored of a product they sold called Binaca Blast, which tasted  like candy but also like medicine. Drop by drop, I wanted to consume the entire bottle  of icy freshness, feeling it explode on my tongue. One time I had slugged down the  contents of my aunt’s bottle laying next to the cash register, then I reached up  to the display and pulled a new one right off the metal rod. I threw its cardboard  package into the garbage  can and indulged my minty jones until my mother came and  picked me up.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The next day, when I was dropped off at the store, the tension was  so thick you could cut it with a knife. My aunt called me up to the back room for  a “talk.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In the room there was a bare lightbulb swinging above my head. I was only  three, but I knew an interrogation when I saw one.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “I know that you took that breath  freshener. I want you to know that is ‘stealing.’ If you ask me, I will give you  anything you want. But ask me first. Don’t steal. Stealing is bad. Okay?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “But I  wasn’t stealing.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e She looked at me hard.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Oh really? Now, it’s okay. I’m not mad.  But just don’t do it again.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e She gave me a hug and sent me back downstairs. I looked  on the table, and there it was–the crumpled up cardboard packaging of Binaca Blast  confirming my guilt.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The lesson I learned that day was to destroy all the evidence.  As I lay in my crib, which was much too small for me,barely accommodating my head  as I angled my feet up to the top of the bars, I played the incident over and over  in my mind. I saw myself getting the Binaca Blast, tearing it out of the package,  carefully gathering up the cardboard and the plastic, carrying it outside, looking  around to make sure I had no witnesses, then dumping it in the trash can down the  street, and running back into the store to enjoy the adrenaline of getting away with  the goods. The spooky thing is I would always wake up in the morning with minty fresh  breath.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I was enrolled in Notre Dame Nursery School, which was run by nuns. Being  a known hustler did not win me much favor with the sisters. Most days, I found myself  in Mother Superior’s office for my involvement in daycare crimes such as fingerpainting  my neighbor and crawling around on the floor with an older man, a boy of five, during  nap time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Mother Superior’s chambers were dark and cool, and even though the nuns  would threaten me all day long with being sent there, nothing ever happened when  I arrived. Mother Superior would just nod her wimpled head and smile up at me through  her glasses like Ben Franklin.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e We had a Christmas pageant, and all the kids in the  school were involved in a grand-finale number, singing a song for the Virgin Mary.  The nuns kept saying during rehearsal, “When you see your parents out in the audience,  don’t wave. Do you hear me? Don’t wave. If you wave, Jesus will be mad you messed  up His song. Don’t wave. If you wave, you will go to Hell. Don’t wave. Don’t wave.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e When I went out on the stage, I saw my mom and my aunt in the crowd and they started  to wave wildly! What could I do? I was having a moral dilemma. I kept seeing the  nun’s face in my mind’s eye (“Don’t wave . . . don’t wave . . .”), but here was my  mom and my aunt doing just that! I couldn’t leave them hanging! In slow motion, my  hand went up. It was like it wasn’t even attached to me. I couldn’t control it. It  just started to move back and forth, and before I knew it, I was waving. My partner-in-crime,  the boy of five, saw what I was doing and was not about to let me lead the revolution  all by myself. He started to wave at his parents in the front row, who of course  waved back, setting off another little kid and his parents and another and another.  Pretty soon, the entire audience and all the kids on stage were waving at each other  like we were on a float! Unfortunately, this was no parade. It was total Christmas-pageant  anarchy and no one was even sure what to sing anymore and the nuns rushed us off  the stage.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I thought I would be in trouble, but then when the pageant was over,  we were let off for winter break, and by the time we got back, nobody remembered  what happened or who waved first or anything. I was a bit disappointed that it was  forgotten so easily, but I learned something very important that day: When you are  on a stage and you wave, people wave back. This information would become very important  for me later on.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e My father was not around for a lot of my early childhood. He was  still in Korea trying to get a visa or something. When he’d come back into town,  I would welcome him by taking him into my arms and throwing up all over his back.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e We didn’t have a car back then, so my mom and I took the bus everywhere. She says  I was very friendly to people, always saying “hi” first, smiling, making amicable  conversation, all this glad-handing at only four years of age.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “The people in the  bus, sometimes don’t say ‘hi,’ or anything back. Sometimes they just look down! How  can be? That so mean, mean people. You always so nice, saying ‘Hello!’ and smile  and smile and so charming! Bad, bad people.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I don’t think I was put off by people  not responding to my gregariousness, as my behavior was not entirely without self-interest.  I’d learned early on that if you smiled at people, it increased your chances of candy,  as these were the days when you could still accept it from strangers. If they did  not smile back, they did not have candy, so I moved on.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e When I was five, my brother  was born, and everything changed. He was the cutest thing in the world, and we kissed  him so much he was smelly. We moved to a house in the Sunset District and our grandparents  came from Korea to take care of us. I started elementary school at Dudley Stone in  the Haight, and would come home on the bus in the afternoon and help my grandmother  take care of the baby.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e My parents started running a snack bar in the Japantown Bowling  Alley and my brother and I got big, eating hamburgers every day.National Bestseller","brand":"Ballantine Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303992611045,"sku":"NP9780345440143","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780345440143.jpg?v=1767729860","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/im-the-one-that-i-want-isbn-9780345440143","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}