“The stain was in the middle, so we couldn’t figure out which one of us had wet the bed,” she says. “As I was cleaning it up, I couldn’t believe how bad things had gotten. I felt like I was dying, and I didn’t want to.” 

Some of you will remember Cho for her short-lived 1994 ABC sitcom “All-American Girl.” The show, which centered around a twentysomething Korean-American butting heads with her traditional family, was based on Cho’s autobiographical national comedy act. 

This morning over breakfast at the Parker Meridian Hotel, the Korean-American comedian looks rested and healthy – quite a different person from the drunk of last year. 

But the painful mishaps of the past five years – brought on, she says, by the ABC experience – are so fresh in her mind that she has parlayed them into a one-woman, off-Broadway play called “I’m The One That I Want.” 

“The show is about my rise and my demise doing my television show, and my resulting four-year depression,” she says bluntly. 

Despite the show’s comedy, it’s a horrifying story. 

More than anything, “I’m The One That I Want” reveals the inner workings of an industry that can eat its young alive. From the sitcom’s inception in 1994, Cho says, her weight, race and her comedic abilities came under attack from the show’s producers and, later, the press. 

She says her troubles began after her first screen test for ABC in 1994. “The producers panicked because they didn’t realize how fat I was,” says Cho, who was average height and weight, and a novice to the physical demands of television. “They said, ‘Oh my God, we have to do something about the fullness of her face.’ I see now that it wasn’t really a weight issue, it was a racial issue, because Korean faces are round, and no matter how much weight I gain or lose, it will always be that way. I think it was their subtle way of saying, ‘She’s not white! She’s too Asian!’ ” 

Cho immediately enlisted a trainer, a nutritionist and a diet doctor, whose office was conveniently located across the street from the television studio. “I started taking diet pills which were probably deadly, and they made me crazy,” she says. “I’d send PAs [production assistants] to the doctor all the time. I’d say, ‘Get my car washed and get my diet pills!’ ” 

At one point, Cho dropped 30 pounds in two weeks, and checked into the hospital for kidney failure. 

Despite the weight loss and a steady stream of fen-phen, vitamins and nicotine, Cho still felt fat. “Now I look at old tapes of the show, and I was emaciated,” she says. “I was freakishly skinny.” 

“It’s so funny,” she muses. “Insanity is such an accepted trait among sitcom stars, it’s almost a job requirement. I would go crazy and call these emergency meetings with my writers and talk about things that made no sense, and they would all listen to me.” 

When told by TV producers she was too fat, Cho lost 30 pounds in two weeks – and was hospitalized.

Much of Cho’s angst, she continues, came from a feeling that the show’s producers were forcing not just a character but a totally different personality on her. They envisioned her alter-ego, Margaret Kim, as “young and cute – like a character on ‘Saved by the Gong,’” says Cho, who is tough and sarcastic. “And I had no idea what I wanted to be. I grew up on the road (Cho was touring with her stand-up act by the age of 18) and didn’t have time to formulate an identity.” 

ABC also hired a young Korean woman to act as a Korean consultant on the show, as if, says Cho incredulously, “We needed experts to help us figure it out.” (Cho, whose parents emigrated from Seoul to San Francisco in the mid-‘60s, spent much of her childhood traveling to Korea with one parent or another, and knew plenty about her family’s culture.) “She [the consultant] would come on set, and there would be forks, and she would say, ‘We need chopsticks.’ The fact that we needed people to make sure we were doing it right . . . that attitude was racist. In trying to break certain stereotypes, we ended up reinforcing them.” 

When The Post called ABC for comment, a spokesperson said that the only person who could speak about Cho was unavailable, and that most people involved in the show had since left the company. 

Cho’s own life defied all stereotypes from Day One. Of her parents, who are book dealers, she says, “They had a very unhappy marriage. I had a weird, isolated childhood, and an adolescence that bordered on delinquency. I was kicked out of my first high school for cutting class and low grades. I barely graduated, which is unspeakable to Asian parents. I coped with the pain by laughing at it.” 

Soon comedy became an obsession. “I was really focused. I’ve always been so connected to my career,” says Cho, who idolized Richard Pryor and started performing in San Francisco when she was only 16. At 18, she traveled from city to city in a rental car. In her extremely personal act, she riffed on everything from her mother’s Korean accent to being molested by an uncle as a kid and nearly being raped. “I had such a terrible adolescence that I would try to remember things in a funny way,” she explains. 

Her parents didn’t stop her. Says Cho, “I had already disappointed them so much that they just gave up.” (To date, they have never seen her perform, except to attend a taping of her TV show. “My mother has this Victorian idea that being a performer is like being a prostitute,” she says, laughing.) 

When Cho was only 23 and a rising star on the late-night TV circuit, ABC approached her to star in the sitcom. “The deal was a dream come true,” she says. “But I had a lot of trouble in that whole machine. I really trusted these people who [I feel] were not scrupulous or ethical. My manager [whom she does not identify] didn’t know what he was doing. He just looked in my eyes and saw dollar signs.” 

By the time the show was canceled in March 1995, due to poor ratings, Cho had made enough money to hole up in her Los Angeles home and support a serious drug and alcohol habit for four years. 

“I went into a deep depression and lived out this fantasy life of the Hollywood casualty,” she says. Somehow, while washing down prescription pills with vodka (at one point, she was tossing back a liter of booze a day) Cho also managed to return to the stage for the next few years. 

“I would be disorderly and retell scary drunken episodes,” she says. “It’s a miracle I could even perform.” 

On one level, though, it made sense. “Even when I was crazy and addicted, I was so good at creating this very strong person who lives this great life on stage,” says Cho, who has been sober since the bed-wetting incident, happily single for six months and even calls herself a vegan now (“a bad vegan, because sometimes I make a mistake and eat chicken”). 

Even though she describes herself as “supremely assured that the worst is over,” the comedian acknowledges that she still has a long way to go: ‘It’s off stage that I have a problem,” she says. “That’s why I am doing the show for six weeks this summer. I hope it will help me live my real life better.” 

Performances of “I’m That One That I Want” start at the Westbeth Theater in Greenwich Village on June 22•