I'm the One That I Want (15 page)

The cast of the show was not only my fictional family, they immediately felt like my real family, too. B. D. Wong, Amy Hill, Clyde Kusatsu, Jodi Long, Judy Gold, Maddie Corman, the guest stars for the pilot—my old friends Kennedy Kabasares and Garret Wang— and I are bonded together because we made history. Garret and I are probably especially close because he endured some of my medical drama as well.

Through diet and exercise and sheer terror, I lost thirty pounds in two weeks. I got sick, big sick. My kidneys collapsed.

I was in my trailer with Garret. He played the first in my long string of on-screen romances. I had a crush on him, so kissing him on camera was especially pleasant.

I went into the little plastic bathroom and started urinating blood. I was screaming: “I am peeing blood! I am peeing blood!” and I sent Garret out to get someone. Then I got embarrassed, so I called him back in and said, “Forget it. I’ll be okay.”

Lost and confused and in pain, I called up Greer. I told his assistant Nancy, who pulled some strings and got me to the hospital without anyone knowing.

At the hospital, an old woman in a pink smock came in and introduced herself. “Hi. My name is Gwen. I am here to wash your vagina.”

This later became one of my most popular routines, and it was all true. This woman’s job struck me as so odd, and not only was she damn good at it—not like I know, really, I don’t have anything to compare it to—but she wanted to personalize it by introducing herself, putting a name to the hose. Like she had read the “Techniques of Highly Effective People” and was applying them to me.

She cleaned me out and the doctor catheterized me. He then filled my bladder with water and inserted a tiny camera. We watched the
Fantastic Voyage
on the video monitor up in the corner of the room and I wondered if I could get a copy of the tape. Talk about an
Entertainment
Tonight
exclusive.

Blood started to fill the screen and it was a surreal—and
painful
— moment, as I saw myself bleed internally on TV.

I didn’t tell anybody about being hospitalized except for the people who were directly involved: Greer, Vine, and Nancy. I was ashamed and also afraid that they would somehow make me stop dieting. I didn’t want to put that weight on again. I was terrified of losing the show and everything I had worked for. I didn’t want to go back out on auditions and I really didn’t want to go back out on the road. There was no other way.

I thought my life depended on my willingness to lose weight. Too many people were focusing on the size of my body for me to be able to feel comfortable
eating
. I now see how sick that was, but it seemed strangely normal then.

Deep inside, I knew that the show wasn’t good, that I had gotten myself into a big mess. The jokes weren’t so much stereotypical as stale. It had all turned out like
Saved By the Gong
. It was immature and unfunny, and playing an overgrown, oversize teenager was not my forte. I looked stupid, and even worse, I
knew
I looked stupid. Instead of focusing on that pain, I fell back on the old familiar pain of being unhappy with my weight. It is a pain I have had all my life and I know all the words to it. Ever since my first and last ballet recital when I was eight years old, when my father told me that I was the fattest ballerina, I have hated my body, and I have had to completely change my way of thinking to stop feeling it.

My kidneys bother me to this day, and I am sure the drinking and the drug abuse that came later didn’t help. It was all because I did not take the warning signals my body was giving off then, because I wanted to be thin like the other Hollywood actresses, because the
Friends
were hot, because skeletal was in. Because I grew up never seeing Asian faces on TV, so inside I viewed myself as the recipient of some kind of special Hollywood gift that I needed to somehow repay with starvation. Because my mother went on crash diets. Because Gail had told me the network had a problem with my face. Because I got a letter from some prisoner who said he loved women with fat arms and that I had the fattest arms he had ever seen. Because, because, because . . .

It’s funny, but the feeling I remember most about having to be hospitalized was relief that I wouldn’t have to work out—at least on that day. Nancy called Vine and told him what happened. His reaction: “My God, I’ve killed her.”

He knew how hard he was working me. He might have even known that it was unsafe, because I had been eating so little and was under so much pressure from the press and our shooting schedule.

Those weeks of working out and dieting and finally of illness made me weak and lifeless. I remember going to one Oscar party and all the queens were making fun of the gowns and the winner’s hair (“Oooohh, that’s right honey! Accessorize that nose with a part!”) and I couldn’t even laugh because I was so hungry and tired and staring at the taquitos the entire time.

Because of the bleeding and the catheter, it hurt like hell to pee. Every time I went to the bathroom, I was painfully reminded that I was fat, I was meant to be fat, would always be fat, and when I tried to starve myself thin, my body would rebel, fighting for its right to be fat.

I couldn’t let up on myself. I thought beating myself up would burn more calories, so I did it until I reached my target heart rate.

The costume designer saw how hard this was for me and watched my changing sizes with sympathy. She said that she had a doctor who prescribed diet pills that worked like magic. His office was conveniently located just blocks from the studio.

After my initial visit, which included a blood test and a brief visit with the doctor, I never had to come in again, sending PAs from the show to pick up my meds. The pills were nasty smelling and I took them mostly on an empty stomach, feeling them grind against each other in the most horrifying way.

They gave me migraines and panic attacks. After the pilot was picked up, we would do network run-throughs, where all the executives would come down to the studio and watch us rehearse our unfunny show, and I would sweat so much I am sure they must have thought I was on drugs.

In a sense, I was living out a kind of
Valley of the Dolls
fantasy, taking uppers in the day to control my weight and make early call times, and getting stoned at night to come down from the amphetamines. The show was on the air, and I was flying alongside it. The pills were as addictive as the fame.

I worked out on the speedy high they gave me, in order to run faster, sweat more, die quicker. It is a miracle that I didn’t give myself a heart attack. I stayed on the pills for years afterward, even after the FDA had them recalled, saying that people were experiencing lung and heart failure due to excessive use. I rationalized that my use was not excessive, that I could do it, that it was worth the risk, that being a few pounds lighter was worth
anything
. I wanted to be thin more than I wanted to be alive.

My appetite scared me so much that I spent years never even feeling it. I was so afraid that my own hunger was so great that I would consume everything in my path, and that if I let myself feel it, I would eat away my career, my livelihood, my attractiveness, everything I thought was important. I thought that if I could be thin, then I could be happy, but it wasn’t true. I was thinner than I had ever been and totally miserable.

I smoked pot at night to calm my screaming head, but I did it as close to bedtime as possible so that I wouldn’t eat when I got the munchies. I would fall into bed high and hungry, my head spinning with relief that I had not gone off my diet for one more day. When the place where I was going stopped supplying the pills, I changed doctors. I found a sleazier operation that dispensed outlawed prescriptions to the truly desperate. When you called them, the outgoing message was “If you are experiencing difficulty with the medication, hang up the phone and dial 911.” For real, that was the outgoing message!

To make the contraband scripts last longer, I would ration them and take some mid-afternoon, then jog around Lake Hollywood in the hot sun, sometimes with a weird blue Jack La Lanne–style rubber belt on to encourage weight loss around the abdomen.

I took laxatives every day, experimenting with many kinds: drinks, powders, tablets, herbal remedies, good old chocolate squares of Ex-Lax. There are so many different ways to make yourself shit. Almost as many as there are ways to say “I love you.”

My roommate at the time was bulimic, so our garbage can was always filled with chewed-but-not-swallowed peanut butter cookies.

One very famous actress, a yo-yo dieter from the old school, told me that she had maintained a thirty-pound weight loss by not eating after 5 P.M. and downing two shots of expensive tequila when she got hungry at night. She reported that it killed her hunger, and she had the tiny ass to prove it. She gave me a pair of her old shorts that no longer fit her; they were so small I couldn’t get them past my ankles. Surely this was the answer.

Unfortunately for me, those two shots turned into an entire bottle of Patrón and then some. Soon, all my calories were going toward my alcohol consumption. Drinking killed my hunger as well as my already dwindling lust for life. On top of everything else, I smoked more than a pack of Marlboro Lights a day.

After the show had ended, and I was in the depths of my drinking and depression, I got a little walk-on part in a film. On the set, the makeup artist ran a brush through my hair and it all fell out. She trapped me in the chair and questioned me harshly about my diet. I told her about the pills, not wanting to but not sure I had a choice in the matter. She pleaded with me to stop taking them. She said she had done the same thing, and all her hair had fallen out and her tongue had turned black.

Seeing that I was unfazed, she kept dragging the brush over my scalp. My hair fell out in clumps, hitting the floor—
Plink! Plink!
She called over all the other actresses and makeup and hair people to watch my hair fall to the floor like rain. They all started up about the dangers of dieting and the pills, jumping around in the puddles of my hair, and yet it didn’t stop me—even when I went home with a bald spot, a graying tongue, and a massive headache.

I just took more vitamins. I massaged my scalp once a day.
I kept
taking the pills!
Why was being thin so important to me? Perhaps it had something to do with my upbringing. Koreans have weight issues.

My uncle lives in Tennessee, which is a problem in itself. Why a Korean immigrant would choose to live there is beyond me. He saw me on TV once and panicked. He called my mom with a new diet he had been on that really worked. She called me and I told her never to mention it again. She kept on, of course, and explained it to me again, as if my angry reaction was merely my way of saying: “Tell me one more time.”

The diet consisted of consuming only one small bag of rice a week and chewing every bite fifty times. He also sent it to me in a letter that I received by registered mail and
had to sign for
when it was delivered. Not believing that was enough, he copied the letter and faxed it to me. I did not respond, and a couple of weeks later he called me and left it on my machine.

“You eat one bag, did you get my fax? You chew it fifty—because I send you a letter. . . . I think you need to lose some weight—didn’t your mom tell you?!”

Then, when he was visiting out West with his family, he made a special trip to Los Angeles so he could come to my house and discuss the diet with me in person. I got him to leave by showing him pictures of myself at the Amsterdam Sex Museum riding a collection of penis sculptures much taller than myself. He departed, but not before grabbing my hand and begging me one last time to go on the bag-of-rice diet.

I have never been a heavy person, but for some reason, my physique drives some Korean people insane. They feel that I am too large for them to be comfortable, too large to be one of them, so they go out of their way to tell me what to do about it. It is either personal weight-loss secrets or cautionary tales about people who refused to lose weight (“And she never got married . . .” followed by a shudder). If it isn’t that, it is because I have lost weight and they must comment on how much better I look. Most commonly, it is to inform me that on television I look grossly overweight, but in person, I look great.

My relatives were probably the worst to me about my weight, since they had my entire life to pester me about it. My mother and father, when they’d call me on the phone, would say, “How is your weight?” instead of “Hello.” It got to be so unbearable that whenever they said it, I would immediately hang up on them and not let them speak to me unless they stopped saying it. How joyous being an adult and having no repercussions for hanging up on your parents! If you haven’t done this, you haven’t truly lived. Doing that was so instantly gratifying and wonderful, especially when they would call back and I would let the machine answer it and they would beg and plead to know how much I was tipping the scales at.

I have stopped attending family functions because my weight is commented on before, during, and after all events. My aunt’s house is akin to a truck stop weigh station, and my sanity has required me to stop going there and break away from their judgment.

Anytime I meet a Korean person, it is most likely that we will make one of the comments I have outlined here. It is not a joke. It is not a sweeping generalization. I am finally breaking away from the rage that I feel about it, and connecting all of the experience for an objective examination. Why is this a collective obsession for so many Korean people? What do we feel about ourselves from the media, and about our image in the world? What do we believe is accomplished by regulating our young women this way? Is it out of care, true concern for the body and well-being of the soul? Is it strictly out of a sort of national pride and love for ourselves as a people that we feel the need to control exactly how we are perceived?