28/02/2026
"...the ongoing negotiation..."
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Resentment is about imbalance, and families are very good at pretending balance exists when it doesn’t. We say love evens everything out, and sometimes it does, but sometimes it doesn’t, and that’s what Margaret Cho is pointing towards. She’s talking about a slowly accumulated rupture, and the way no one wants to total it up.
Because once you start adding, you have to decide what counts. Does that comment about your body count? Does the comparison to a sibling count? Does the silence after you tried to explain yourself count? Families often operate on the rule that intent matters more than impact, so if someone meant well, the slate is considered clean. But that doesn’t stop the body from storing the slight. It doesn’t stop a child from learning that approval is conditional.
And when approval is conditional at home, it’s easier for the outside world to slot into that same pattern. Cho’s experience on All American Girl in the mid-1990s is a good example. She was the first Asian American woman to lead a network sitcom, which should have been a triumph, and yet executives reportedly criticised her weight and questioned how she presented her ethnicity. She later spoke about developing an eating disorder during that time. It’s hard not to see the echo. If you’ve grown up trying to meet shifting expectations, then an industry that tells you to be thinner and more authentic at the same time - it feels like a louder version of something familiar.
That’s where the language of debt becomes useful, because debt implies record. Someone is keeping track, even if only internally. Deborah Levy writes about the difficulty of telling the truth about family without being accused of disloyalty, and that tension sits under Cho’s humour. The joke about the white elephant that no one will feed suggests everyone can see the problem, but attending to it would require agreement that it exists. And agreement is often the first thing families refuse.
So you adapt. You laugh at what hurts and downgrade your own memory. You accept partial acknowledgement because full acknowledgement might not come. And if you grew up in an immigrant household, as Cho did, the pressure to be grateful complicates everything. Survival stories don’t leave much room for complaint. You’re reminded of sacrifice, and you start to wonder whether asking for repair is indulgent.
Roxane Gay has written about loving people who have also caused harm, and that doubleness feels central here. Love doesn’t cancel injury, but injury doesn’t automatically cancel love. So you stay and show up. You tell yourself that this is just how families work. But meanwhile the sense of deficit remains, and it shapes how much of yourself you offer. Maybe you edit what you share. Maybe you avoid certain topics. Maybe you achieve more than you need to, hoping it will finally clear the account.
And this is where the quote refuses to comfort, because being in the red suggests an ongoing condition. It’s a current state and the books are still open. That means someone, maybe everyone, would have to admit there’s a shortfall. And that admission threatens the story families like to tell about themselves, that they were loving enough, fair enough, good enough.
What I find most exposing is that the ledger isn’t neutral. If I’m honest, I keep one too. I remember what wasn’t said, what wasn’t defended, what wasn’t repaired. But I also know there are entries under my name. Times I stayed silent and chose peace over honesty. So the imbalance isn’t cleanly divided between villain and victim. It’s shared, even if not equally.
Which leaves the question open rather than resolved. If love doesn’t automatically settle the debt, and confrontation risks further loss, what do you do with the deficit? Cho says she chose to stay and fight, and that suggests the account is still active. Not closed, not forgiven in full, but not abandoned either. And maybe that’s the most honest place to leave it, in the ongoing negotiation rather than the tidy ending.
© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved
Image: CarCai, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
