Talk:Atsuko Okatsuka

Info on comedian
Born 1988. 98.163.249.45 (talk) 06:07, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

Info on atsuko-okatsuka from LA
For Atsuko Okatsuka, another comic who performed that night, the fear of deportation wasn’t totally unfamiliar. When she was 10 years old, her mother and grandmother packed their bags and moved the family from Japan to the United States. They told Okatsuka they were only going on a vacation, and she didn’t know they’d planned all along to overstay their two-month visas.

“We didn’t do it through the legal process because that would take too long,” Okatsuka says. Her mother’s mental health had been deteriorating, and she felt that living in Japan — which her mother associated with her divorce — was only making her schizophrenia worse. “She was threatening suicide and depressed, and so you know, like many other people, my grandma was like, ‘Well, let’s go to the States, I hear that’s where you’re supposed to go. That’s where dreams come true,’” Okatsuka told me after her set at iO West Theater in Hollywood.

The first couple of years weren’t easy. The family quietly stayed in Okatsuka’s uncle’s garage in West Los Angeles and tried to fake a sense of normalcy: Okatsuka enrolled in elementary school and taught herself to speak English. She mostly tried to stay out of trouble. “You can’t really be running around causing arguments and stuff if you’re undocumented,” she says. “So I went to public school and I would come back home to the garage — like, I would hang out with my friends, but I would never talk openly about how I got here [to the United States].”

She and her family entered the lottery for a green card every year, and after seven years of waiting — and hiding — their names were finally drawn. By that time, she was about to graduate from Venice High, and she’d started to take an interest in comedy. “I think moving here, it was like survival mode, and when I finally realized I was here for good, that’s when I really started appreciating the humor in things,” she says. TheGreatPrince 2023 Jan 18 98.163.249.45 (talk) 06:17, 18 January 2023 (UTC) Re:https://www.laweekly.com/how-being-an-undocumented-kid-helped-atsuko-okatsuka-find-the-humor-in-life/ Forget reference for above info. TGPrince — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.163.249.45 (talk) 06:23, 18 January 2023 (UTC)