Comedy Star Opens Up About Being Taken from Her Parents | Atsuko Okatsuka

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Before Atsuko Okatsuka became an internationally renowned comedian, sold-out performer, and one of the most unique voices in stand-up, she was a quiet eight-year-old girl living in a garage in Los Angeles, undocumented and confused, trying to make sense of why her grandmother had taken her from Japan and why her father never came to get her. In this deeply personal and unguarded conversation, the trailblazing comic sits down with David Begnaud to share the story of the woman who believed in her when no one else could, and how that belief came wrapped in complexity, sacrifice, and what Atsuko calls minor tiny criminal activities. Atsuko opens up about being born in Taiwan, delivered by an untrained OBGYN uncle because her “family loves a discount,” and growing up in Japan with a mother suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. She talks about the speed dating marriage her grandmother arranged in Japan, the moment her mother held a kitchen knife to her own arm at 10 p.m. while Atsuko watched through a sliding paper door, and the night her grandmother put her on a bicycle and rode around Chiba for hours until 2 in the morning to outrun the trauma. She shares what it felt like to be kidnapped the first time when her grandmother rented an apartment five minutes from her dad's house, enrolled her in a school across the street, and her father would stand at the gate watching her play on the playground before quietly going back to work. She reflects on coming to America at eight years old, living undocumented in Uncle Paul's garage, and meeting Uncle JT, a former gang member and Mexican-American outsider at a Taiwanese church who bought her a thrifted guitar she named “Happiness” and taught her to play before Sunday sermons. There's also a raw reflection on survival, identity, and what it means to love the person who took you. Atsuko talks about inventing a game called Ward Off the Demons to try to snap her mother out of psychosis, why she can make strangers laugh but has never made her mom laugh, and how she's moving her m