Margaret Cho

**Margaret Moran Cho** (Korean: 조모란; born December 5, 1968) is an American stand-up comedian, actress, LGBT social activist, and musician. She is best known for her stand-up routines, through which she critiques social and political problems, especially regarding race and sexuality. She rose to prominence after starring in the ABC sitcom *All-American Girl* (1994–95), and became an established stand-up comic in the subsequent years.

She has also had endeavors in fashion and music, and has her own clothing line. Cho has also frequently supported LGBT rights and has won awards for her humanitarian efforts on behalf of women, Asian Americans, and the LGBT community.

As an actress, she has acted in such roles as Charlene Lee in *It's My Party* and John Travolta's FBI colleague in the action movie *Face/Off.* Cho was part of the cast of the TV series *Drop Dead Diva* on Lifetime Television, in which she appeared as Teri Lee, a paralegal assistant. For her portrayal of Dictator Kim Jong-il on *30 Rock*, she was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series in 2012. In 2022, Cho co-starred in *Fire Island*, a breakout platform portraying the LBGT Asian experience in the famous gay village off the South Shore of Long Island.

## Early life

Cho was born in 1968 into a Korean family in San Francisco, California. Her grandfather was a Christian minister who ran an orphanage in Seoul during the Korean War and, according to Cho, she "grew up in the church." She was raised in a racially diverse neighborhood near the Ocean Beach section of San Francisco, which she described as a community of "old hippies, ex-druggies, burn-outs from the 1960s, drag queens, Chinese people, and Koreans. To say it was a melting pot – that's the least of it. It was a really confusing, enlightening, wonderful time." Cho's parents, Young-Hie and Seung-Hoon Cho, ran Paperback Traffic, a bookstore on Polk Street at California Street in San Francisco. Her father writes joke books and a newspaper column in Seoul, South Korea.
At school, Cho was bullied, saying that "I was hurt because I was different, and so sharing my experience of being beaten and hated and called fat and queer and foreign and perverse and gluttonous and lazy and filthy and dishonest and yet all the while remaining invisible heals me, and heals others when they hear it – those who are suffering right now."
Between the ages of five and twelve, Cho was "sexually molested by a family friend". On the Loveline May 21, 1997, show with Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew Pinsky, she talks about being raped by her uncle, while during the same time period he was raping his three-year-old daughter. She often skipped class and got bad grades in ninth and tenth grades, resulting in her expulsion from Lowell High School. Cho said she was "raped continuously through my youngest years" (by another acquaintance), and that when she told someone else about it and her classmates found out, she received hostile remarks justifying it, including accusations of being "so fat" that only a crazy person would have sex with her.
After Cho expressed an interest in performance, she auditioned and was accepted into the San Francisco School of the Arts, a San Francisco public high school for the arts. While at the school, she became involved with the school's improvisational comedy group alongside actors Sam Rockwell and Aisha Tyler.
At age 15, she worked as a phone sex operator, and she later worked as a dominatrix. After graduating from high school, Cho attended San Francisco State University, studying drama; she did not graduate.