I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight

by Margaret Cho

Riverhead Books (240 pages, $23.95)

Cheech, Chong, Che and Cho. Revolution with humor and attitude, and that ameliorating element: unabashed and endless love. Social change never tasted so good. “Get your war on!” is the Margaret Cho Declaration of Independence for the new millennium. Fixation without representation. America fixated on its phobias, and its disdain for uppity minorities, who, as Cho emphatically protests in I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight, are not represented fairly and are not uppity enough. “The amount of racism, sexism, homophobia and hatred in general that lies just beneath the surface of the American dream is astounding and serious,” she writes. The battle line is drawn, and then Cho, who holds office or at least pays dues in a half-dozen minorities, writes what may be the one false statement in her entire dissertation: “The names don’t hurt me; I have built up a tolerance to that.” Too much of the writing of this self-professed tuffy reveals a sensitive and vulnerable woman whose bravado may not always be enough to deflect the slings and arrows of outrageous bigotry.

She is an absolute wuss of a school girl, all a-twitter going backstage to meet her idol, David Bowie. She is a bespectacled librarian in the archives of pain, both of our nation and of her family. She is the most feminine of feminists.

Cho recalls an incident in which her mother, thinking she was going to die, hastily drew a treasure map X-ing the secret hiding places of all the family jewels because she didn’t “want to keep it anymore hidden away, like our history, our stories left untold.” For Cho “these jewels and their stories are my inheritance… It isn’t bling. It’s love, this long, long love that sisters had for each other, with hands reaching across the sea, even though separated by continents and hardship – war, immigration and isolation, war, racism and hatred in a new land… I am the keeper of the ring. And the brooch, and the bangles. Don’t fuck with me.”

As a survivor of pandemic racism and assorted Ameri-phobias, Cho has united an entourage of huddled masses yearning to breath free. “The underrepresented, unvoiced, ignored part of our population, the great many people who make up the Cho Army, are something you are unaware of,” she warns her would-be oppressors, “and they’re pretty much not the gang to fuck with.”

Reading I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight (the title co-opted from the Patty Hearst quote after she joined the Symbionese Liberation Army), you get the sense that Cho would morph membership into any discernible minority just to claim the right to defend them. She is the one to stand up to the schoolyard bully even if it isn’t her little brother being picked on. But the arsenal of the microphone-wielding social critic includes not only this kind of chutzpah, but love, logic and eloquence of the written word.

To those who send their worst regards, her response is a soft bullet to the heart. “… I want to hear what you have to say, but before you have your say, look me in the eye and tell me your name, what your mother called you when you were little, what you do for a living, if you are married, who your children are, if you are truly happy in this life and what your family is like, then, word for word, repeat the e-mails that you have written to this figurehead in cyberspace that you don’t consider a human being. I also want you to hold my hands when you do it. You can say all the things that you have already told me I am – shall I remind you? Chink, dyke, hole, whore, pig-fucker; telling me to go back where I came from, even though I am an American and was born here; fat, ugly, et al.

“… In return, we will love you for your courage in standing up for free speech. We come in love. We come to love. We do love you.”

The innate paradox of the woman and her writing is that although she is received and perceived as an obnoxious radical, much like Jerry Rubin, the agenda that Margaret Cho outlines in I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight couldn’t be more traditional 1776 American, much like Jerry Rubin. Her premise, though not at all profound, is clear: None of us are free unless all of us are free. “We have allowed alarmist and racist attitudes to take us hostage, and if these impulses are not kept in check they will behead us all,” she writes.

When the fight for truth, justice, and the American way comes to the ring, I want Margaret Cho in my corner, not spritzing me with water and wiping blood off my brow, but sitting on that three-legged stool waiting for the bell to ring so she can get back out there swinging, getting her war on.

Margaret Cho deserves rave for her rant. Good thing for true patriots across the board that she has chosen to stay and fight.