Long before people laughed with her, people laughed at her. In this excerpt from her autobiography Margaret Cho talks about the summer from hell.

Camp Cruel.
 

It started with my name. I was born Moran Cho. Moran is a Korean name, meaning peony flower, a plant that bloom s even in the harshest winter. My father gave me this thoughtful, unusual name without the knowledge that someday the kids I grew up with would use it against me. It began when I was around 12, not at school, but at church. “Moran!! You are nothin’ but a moron!!!” They said my name every chance they got. “Jesus loves everyone, even Moron.” That summer I was going off to the church’s summer retreat, three days in the redwoods with all the kids from the Methodist Youth Foundation. I reasoned that the more I worried about something bad taking place, the less likely it was to happen. Since I’d been so tortured about this trip, by this law it was bound to turn out fine. We got to the campsite around the middle of the day. It was hot and teeming with kids. The beautiful Jolie, who was a few grades above me, perfect in her cutoff jeans and ribbed purple tank, looked over at us and smiled. Jolie had never been mean to me, but she’d never spoken to me either. She leaned over to Ronny”s brother and whispered something. He grabbed her face, and they fell into each other laughing. Oh, to laugh like that, to be held by a boy and get lost in your own wondrous being. To be able to throw your head back like a pony while the boys admired you. To be the object of desire and the one who is doing the desiring... I wished that for myself. As I was lost in this reverie, someone threw a pinecone in my face. “Oh s***, Moron’s here!!!” I tried not to cry as I looked for the perpetrator in the crowd of kids. Jolie stifled a chuckle, biting her tantalizingly glossed lip, and turned her head away. The shards of pinecone made my eyes blaze red. Half blind, I managed to make it to the girls’ cabin without further incident. The cabins were made of logs. Inside, there were about ten bunk beds, which were exotic and exciting to me, as I’d never slept in one. I looked around for an unclaimed top bunk, but there were none to be found. I unrolled my stained old sleeping bag that didn’t zip up all the way onto the bottom bunk near the back door. Lotte, the daughter of one of my parents’ best friends, came into the empty cabin and saw me. I was glad to see her and walked up. “Hi. I just got here. Where is your bunk? I want to be near you guys,” I said. She had a mean smile on her face, but she wouldn’t look me in the eye—kind of an “I can’t wait to tell my friends this” expression. She said, “We’re over there. It’s too crowded already. I’m going down to the canoes.” “Wait for me, I’m going to change and go too.” I ran over to my bunk to get my bathing suit, but she was already gone. I put on my orange one-piece and an oversize white T-shirt and walked down to the lake. A boy named Carl saw me first. “Oh s***. It’s Moron. Let’s drown her. Hey Moron. Why”d you come here? Nobody likes you. It’s going to be the worst three days of your life.” “Shut up!” I yelled. I got into a boat by myself. Not really knowing how to row, I pushed back from the dock a few feet and panicked. I must have been only about 5 feet away, but it might as well have been miles because I couldn’t move the boat back at all. I was slowly drifting out onto the lake. They all started yelling, “Moron! God! Can’t you do anything? Just paddle it back. We want to go too. Moron!!! Stupid. C’mon. Hurry!” I was trying to make the oars move in the water, but they were too heavy. The boat started to drift back toward the dock but not nearly as quickly as they would have liked, so they all screamed louder. I was not going to cry. I was too old for that. I was not going to give them the satisfaction. My face was red, and my eyes still burned from the pinecone. My arms were killing me from rowing. Finally, after a pull on the oars that took all my strength, the boat banged on the dock. Carl jumped in the boat and tried to push me in the water, but I was fast and ran back to the cabin. It was quiet there. I thought I would sleep for a while to make the time go faster. I just wanted to go home. Why had I come? What had I been thinking? That suddenly, when we were away from home, I would be friends with everyone? Was I losing my mind? Carl and Mike and Jaclyn and Eugene had always hated me, but how could they so quickly infect everyone else with that feeling? Hate was contagious, I guess. I was coming down with it too. I hated myself and sat down on my cowboy sleeping bag. It made a crunching sound. It was filled with dry leaves, pinecones, sticks and dirt—even dog s***! I heard laughter from outside the cabin. I couldn’t take it anymore, and I started to cry. I was a million miles from home, everybody wanted me to leave, and I had just gotten here. I shook out the bag as well as I could, but it still smelled of eucalyptus and s***. I took it in and sat on the floor, my head resting on the bottom bunk. Another girl and a boy came into the cabin. The waiflike girl named May Cha stood there with her brother Johnno, a fat kid with allergies. The area from the bottom of Johnno’s nose to the top of his lip was always red and flaking off. He also had dandruff, so when he moved, it was like he was snowing. May spoke first. “We don’t want you in our cabin. We took a vote, and everybody voted to have you out.” “Where should I go?” “I don’t know. Maybe you should go find a tree and sleep under it. I don’t care. You just can’t sleep here.” “Did you fill up my sleeping bag with leaves?” “No. I didn’t do that. I just organized the vote to have you kicked out of the cabin. I wouldn’t do something like that.” I tried to think of the worst thing I could ever say. I searched my preteen mind for possibilities. “Go climb a rock!” No, too Yosemite. “Sit on it.” No, too Happy Days. Um, um. Ah yes! I have it. “Your mother!!!” “My what?” “Your mother!!!” Johnno, who had been silent until then, exploded. “Take that back, you b****.” The force of his rage was terrifying. He got all flaky on me. It was like an avalanche. His thick glasses steamed up so fast I was sure he couldn’t see me at all. He lunged at me and grabbed my forearms. I grabbed his in return, and we pushed each other from one side of the cabin to the other. He pushed me backward into my still crunchy, cracklin’ leaves sleeping bag, and I dug my nails into his arms and pushed him up against the log wall. It must have looked like we were dancing. Johnno’s nose was running, and he was crying. The tears moistened the white patches on his upper lip so it looked like he was melting. He let go of my arms, and I let go of his. “You Moron!!! We don’t want you here infecting our cabin. Get out get out get out get out!!!” Then, inexplicably, they both left. I took my sleeping bag to the back of the cabin and shook it out again. Leaves and twigs and dry dog turds and acorns had to be picked out by hand. As I emptied the bag, I could hear the sounds of summer off in the distance. Girls screaming, water splashing, outbursts of the 2-4-6-8 variety—all of it reminding me of all the things I was not doing, was not allowed to do, would never be part of. Everywhere I went for the next three days, a great deal of space was made around me. It was as if I had an infectious disease. I stayed in the girls’ cabin, but all the campers around me had moved their things to avoid the five bunks that surrounded mine. I got a top bunk, which I was happy about, but I slept with one eye open for three days. My cootie quarantine was more painful than the battles. Everybody else was experiencing the exhilaration of being away from home and with other kids and swinging from ropes and forging friendships, while I sat alone in the shadowy cabin and made God’s Eyes out of yarn and chopsticks. There was no way I was going to face those horrible kids again. I’d had enough. I was hated, so I had to hate. I turned my Korean name, Moran, into one of my most memorable routines. I portray my mother screaming it through a set of French doors. “Moran!!!” Now, people call it out to me at shows— “Moran Moran Moran!!!”—and it feels like love. The cowboy sleeping bag sits in a closet at my parents’ house. After 20 years and a lifetime of use, it still smells faintly of sap.