Every year, my family and I would go visit my mom’s family in Texas. We would drive from Chicago to Texas, and once we started to get towards San Antonio, everyone looked like me! It was such a great feeling. Everyone had the same brown skin that I did.
For me, my body image struggle started very young. All that I heard from my mother, my aunts, and my mom’s friends was, ‘I gotta lose five pounds.’ At 5 years old, I learned a size 2 is not thin enough. It was, ‘Don’t eat carbs! Don’t eat sugar! Drink Diet Coke! You always diet!’ So that was engrained in my brain at a very early age.
One day I went up to my mom and I said, ‘Mom, can I have permission to build a 2.3-million electron-volt atom smasher – a betatron – in the garage?’ And my mom stared at me, and she said, ‘Sure. Why not? And don’t forget to take out the garbage.’
My mom taught me the power of love. I learned to focus on the long-term big picture from my father. His sense of humor and light-hearted approach always make me smile. My husband is a pivotal anchor in my life. His influence encourages me to be independent and take risks.
There was a ‘magic rock’ my mom would lift up, and under the rock was a bunch of bugs. Roly-poly bugs and worms. Somehow I thought that it was a magical world of insects, and I wanted to go there. It was the same impulse as ‘Pikmin’ – I wanted to go into that world.
Stand-up is a weird animal. There are people who really want to know what you think about things, your opinion on life. But then there are people who think you’re just that beautician in ‘Legally Blonde,’ who doesn’t have opinions on anything. Or that I’m Stifler’s mom and hot for it all the time.
My mornings start with mom coming into my bedroom and waking me up, or trying to wake me up, and then I go back to sleep. Then my mom wakes me up again and yells at me. Then she’ll get me to wake up, and I’ll get dressed and go to school. We go to school, and my teacher tells me that I didn’t do the homework well enough. And that’s that.
My mom is a painter and an artist. She would play music, and she always had very good taste in music, fashion, and art. She was also a young single mom, so I think she had really good style; she was really free… just really inspiring in her own way and allowed me to find the direction I wanted to take in my life.
My mom was a folk singer and Celtic harpist. My dad was in a barbershop quartet and my great grandma was an opera singer. As I grew up, I discovered pop music and Top 40 radio, but it was in the ‘90s, so music was very different then – it was really lyrical.
I have to say that sports is what kept me out of trouble. No matter the circumstances, my mom kept us playing sports. She worked hard to provide for us and even harder to make sure we always stayed active. Whether it was football or basketball, we were playing one sport or another year-round.
My mom and grandmother were actresses, and I knew I was going to do this since I was super young. I would put on shows at my grandparents’ house and sing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ in the living room. I was in drama club and chorus, and I knew every word to ‘Grease.’
There was this hip-hop collective called People Crew. And at the time in Korea, there was no real place to access rap music. So People Crew used to host this summer school program, which taught rapping and dancing. I begged my mom to attend that school to learn how to rap.
I love to hang out with my friends and go to the movies. My mom and I are involved in the Mother/Daughter Organization – national charity work. Whenever I get free time, we volunteer. It’s an organization so mothers and daughters can spend time together while volunteering.
Violence and chaos were an ever-present part of the world that I grew up in. And unfortunately, it wasn’t just in my family. Sometimes, you’d see, you know, Mom fighting with one of her boyfriends. But a lot of times, you’d see people exploding on each other in a local restaurant or on the street.
I was a blue-eyed, chubby-cheeked five-year-old when I joined my family on the picket line for the first time. My mom made me leave my dolls in the minivan. I’d stand on a street corner in the heavy Kansas humidity, surrounded by a few dozen relatives, with my tiny fists clutching a sign that I couldn’t read yet: ‘Gays are worthy of death.’
A lot of people say I am using all the procedures for my face. I didn’t do anything. I live a healthy life; I take care of my skin and my body. I’m against Botox. I’m against injections; I think it’s damaging your face, damaging your nerves. It’s all me. I will age gracefully, as my mom does.
I don’t think I would have been able to stick with it and been proud of who I am and be feminine out on the court. I think I would have folded to the peer pressure if I didn’t have my mom to encourage me to be me and be proud of how tall I am.
I lead by example. My kids know what sweat is. They’ve seen me come home from so many runs and asked, ‘What’s on your skin? How did you get it?’ And I tell them, ‘It’s from exercise!’ So now my son will come home from a bike ride, take off his helmet and say, ‘Look, Mom. I’m sweating! I just worked out!’
Most days, I’ll wear lipstick. It’s always been a thing for me – my mom has a lot of them, and I’d always use hers. Eventually, I started buying my own because my mom has lighter hair and lighter skin, so we don’t always look good in the same colors.
When I was young and it was someone’s birthday, I didn’t have the money to buy nice presents so I would take my mom’s camera and make a movie parody for whoever’s birthday it was. When I’d show it them, they’d die laughing. That reaction was a high for me, and I loved that feeling.
Bob Dole. He’s like the neighbors’ Labrador retriever your dad used to curse for all that barking, all that darn digging in your mom’s tulip bed, and now look, you live next door to a godforsaken pack of teeth-baring rabid Pomeranians, and, good golly, Bob Dole!
My mom has given me my sense of style. She has taught me how individual style is so beautiful, what you appreciate on someone else might not be good for you. For her, style is all about being comfortable, and she has an innate sense of sophisticated style.
My mom told us never to reveal that we were Shia in school. You would find out that some other kid was Shiite, and you would whisper, ‘Hey,’ or you would see someone at the mosque, and you’d be like, ‘Hey, that kid’s Shiite!’ There was a lot of tension, a lot of violence in Karachi between Shiites and Sunnis.
My mom broke the mold. She put my brother and I first, always, and worked her fingers to the bone trying to provide for us. She taught us right from wrong and gave us very strong morals and values and belief in family, things that have stayed with me.
For months before he passed, my dad would have terrible night sweats, and soak through his sheets, often several times a night. Each time, mom would gently roll him over, replace the sheets, and roll him back – then spend the whole next day washing several sets of sheets, only to repeat the routine each night.
