Margaret Cho

Cho was born in San Francisco, on December 5, 1968, to a family of Korean descent. Her paternal grandfather Myung-sook Cho, a Christian minister, worked for the Japanese as a station master during their occupation of Korea. When Japan withdrew from Korea at the end of World War II, he was denounced as a traitor by North Korea's Communist regime, and forced to move with his family, including his son, Cho's father Seung-hoon Cho, to South Korea. During the Korean War, Myung-sook ran an orphanage in Seoul. According to Margaret herself, 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 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.