She Grandmother Kidnapped Her And Moved Her Across The World.
She Raised Her In Her Uncle's Garage.
Atsuko Calls Her Best Friend.

The Atsuko Okatsuka Story

The Person Who Believed In Me  ·  Hosted by David Begnaud

"Atsuko Okatsuka grew up between Taiwan, Japan, and a garage in Los Angeles - where she arrived at age eight with no explanation and no English. Her mother has paranoid schizophrenia. Her grandfather was assassinated. Her grandmother - who is also her kidnapper - moved her across the world through minor criminal activities and tremendous love, and refused to let any of it define the child she was raising. Atsuko became one of the most beloved performers in live stand-up comedy today. Behind the bowl cut and the sold-out shows is a woman who used to wave a toy wand at her mother's demons and hope it would help. The person behind all of it is Grandma Ying Shi Li."

- David Begnaud

The Villain and the Superhero. Her Grandmother Was Both - and She Knew It.

Grandma Ying Shi Li was the oldest of eight siblings. When her husband was assassinated in Taiwan, she raised three children on her own. When her daughter - Atsuko's mother - developed paranoid schizophrenia and could no longer care for a child, Grandma stepped in again. She is, in Atsuko's words, "a caregiver, a hustler, a survivor, a fixer, and sometimes - you know - someone who does minor tiny criminal activities." She arranged her daughter's marriage through a speed-dating event in Japan. She crossed international borders to keep her granddaughter safe. And yes, she kidnapped her. Twice.

The complexity is the point. Atsuko chose her grandmother as the person who believed in her while also being completely clear-eyed about who she is - a woman who cannot sit with conflict, who avoids difficult conversations, who causes turbulence by refusing to name it. A woman who will make a decision on your behalf and then not quite admit she made it. She is a specific and interesting person: a woman who loved a child so fiercely that she was willing to become the villain of the story to protect her.

Atsuko's mother - diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia - was by any measure unable to raise a child safely. She threw irons at family members. She pulled her stepdaughter's hair at a birthday party and held on until the father came home hours later. Grandma watched this from afar, then closer, then she did what she always does: she showed up. She rearranged the board without asking anyone's permission. And the granddaughter she was trying to protect grew up to tour the world in alien print outfits while fans wore bowl-cut wigs in her honor. Grandma wasn't wrong.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Grandma's history and how Atsuko sees her - ~3:17

She Rented an Apartment Five Minutes Away, "Ran Into" Him at the 7-Eleven, and Took Atsuko on a Walk. They Never Went Back.

A Japanese court had given Atsuko's father full custody - rare in Japan, where mothers almost always win. But the judge saw what the family already knew: Atsuko's mother was violent and unstable, and the child needed protection. So her father had her. And then her grandmother decided to intervene. She flew from Taiwan to Japan, and as a non-Japanese citizen with no right to rent an apartment, she found a guy who worked at a ramen store and got him to sign for her. She secured a place five minutes from her son-in-law's apartment. Then she "accidentally" ran into him at the 7-Eleven she knew he frequented. "Hey, since I'm here, can we go to your apartment and have a talk?"

The visit happened. The talk happened. And then Grandma suggested a walk. "Can Atsuko come with us?" The three of them went outside - Grandma, Mom, and little Atsuko, maybe five years old. They walked. And they did not go back. She was taken to the apartment down the street, enrolled in the nearby school, and that was that. A new life, with no explanation. Atsuko's father - who had full custody, who could have called the police - didn't. He told her years later: he knew he was in over his head. He was already raising two other kids and working around the clock as an engineer. He wasn't able to be a good dad to a toddler. So he let her go.

But he didn't disappear. He would come to the elementary school near the new apartment and watch her play through the gate. He never went in. He just looked. And Atsuko, as an adult, says she already knew - as a child - that he was probably doing something like that. She was afraid to ask. She was afraid to find out he was sad. At five years old, she was already absorbing the emotional load of the adults around her and protecting them from having to feel it. Some childhoods don't let you be a child for very long.

▶ Watch on YouTube: The first kidnapping - the walk that never came back - ~17:13

She Slid Open the Paper Door at 10 PM and Saw Her Mom with a Kitchen Knife. Then They Got on the Bicycle.

In the apartment they shared in Chiba, Japan, the paper sliding doors were the only separation between the bedroom and the living space. One night - around 10 PM, when Atsuko was supposed to be sleeping for school - she heard her grandmother and mother arguing on the other side. She slid the door open to look. She saw her mother holding a kitchen knife up to her own arm. Grandma was trying to talk her out of it. Mom was saying there was nothing to live for.

Grandma is not a trained therapist. She is not a social worker. She is a Taiwanese woman who doesn't talk about her feelings, who avoids conflict even as she creates it, who was wholly unprepared for what she was witnessing. What she did next was get Atsuko out of the apartment and leave her daughter alone with the knife. She made a decision in real time, in the dark, with no manual. She chose the child. She got on her bicycle - the one with the little seat on the back for Atsuko - and she pedaled.

They rode around Chiba for hours. Until 2 in the morning. Atsuko doesn't remember coming back home. She must have fallen asleep on the bicycle. Her mother was alive. And shortly after that night, Grandma announced a two-month vacation to Los Angeles - to stay with Uncle Paul, her son, who had room in his garage. Atsuko was eight years old. She didn't know the vacation was actually forever. Nobody told her.

▶ Watch on YouTube: The night of the kitchen knife and the bicycle ride around Chiba - ~38:46

"This One's for You." Uncle JT Bought Her a Guitar Without Being Asked.

She arrived in Los Angeles at eight years old, speaking Japanese - not English, not Mandarin - and ended up living with her Taiwanese relatives, attending a Taiwanese church, surrounded by people who spoke a language she didn't know. It was disorienting in every direction. And it was at that church where she met Uncle JT: a Mexican-American former gang member who had married into her aunt's family, and who was - like Atsuko - conspicuously not Taiwanese in a very Taiwanese space.

He played guitar beautifully. Every Sunday before services, he'd play - and then fade to the back during the sermon, out of respect for a congregation that wasn't his. Atsuko watched him every week. She asked to hold the guitar. She asked him to show her chords. She never asked him to buy her one. One Sunday he came to her and said: "This one's for you. I bought it for you." It was thrifted. He had changed out the strings himself to make sure it was a good one. Then he started giving her free lessons every week before the sermon.

Atsuko named the guitar Happiness. She was still learning English. It was the best word she had. What she understood about what Uncle JT had done was this: everyone else in her life who showed up for her was family. They had a duty. A role. Something they were supposed to do. Uncle JT was a distant uncle by marriage who owed her nothing. He just paid attention. He saw what she wanted before she said it out loud, and then he went and got it. "It's someone seeing me," she said, "without having to."

▶ Watch on YouTube: Uncle JT buys her a guitar she never asked for - ~48:55

"Ward Off the Demons." The Game She Invented to Help Her Mother. The Career She Built From It.

When her mother was in the grip of a psychotic episode - hearing voices, spiraling with fear, unreachable by reason - a young Atsuko invented a game. She called it "Ward Off the Demons." She would find a toy wand and hand her mother something that could stand in for one - chopsticks, a cooking implement, anything. Then she would wave her arms dramatically, do voices, be theatrical, try to cleanse the room of whatever was happening. Like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, only the stakes were real. "I would like, you know, like waving my arms big, doing voices, being like, Go away - " she told me. "Trying to make her laugh. Yeah."

She cannot make her mother laugh. After all these years, all these shows, all these sold-out nights where strangers wear wigs of her bowl cut in the audience - she has never been able to make her mother laugh. Her mother wasn't at her graduation. She wasn't at her wedding. She has never come to a comedy show. When I asked Atsuko if there was a sadness in that - in being able to make strangers laugh but not the one person who mattered most - she paused. "Maybe," she said. "And maybe that's why I keep trying."

She still answers every call. Her mother calls forty times a day. Atsuko has her saved in her phone as "mother" - and she picks up because she doesn't want her mother to feel alone. She doesn't want her to feel forgotten. She is not naive about what her mother is. She knows the illness. She knows the difficulty. But she has not given up on the possibility of the real her - the true person who lives inside the illness, waiting. "I have not given up on my mom," she said simply. And I believed her completely.

▶ Watch on YouTube: The "ward off the demons" game and comedy as survival - ~1:00:32

"Thank You for All the Potentials You Saw in Me Before I Saw Them in Myself."

At the end of the interview, I asked Atsuko to hold up the photo - the recent one, the one of her and her grandmother taken just two weeks earlier. Grandma Ying Shi Li is 92 years old. She is currently in the hospital. I asked Atsuko to say directly to that photograph what she wanted her grandmother to know - because I wasn't sure, based on everything I'd learned about this family, that she would be able to say it face-to-face. She is her grandmother's granddaughter, after all. They are both people who stay busy so they don't have to stop and feel.

She thanked her. She thanked her for suppressing her own feelings and needs so Atsuko could become her full self. She thanked her for retiring early from teaching to raise a baby. She thanked her for moving to a country whose language she didn't speak - a country where her granddaughter would thrive in English while Grandma got left behind in it. She thanked her for the ballet lessons and the piano lessons and the bicycle rides and the signed studio apartments and the constant, relentless, imperfect love. "So that I could reach all the potentials you saw in me," she said, "before I saw them in myself."

Grandma Ying Shi Li may go back to Taiwan when she is well enough - back to where it all started, to spend whatever time remains surrounded by people who speak her language. She raised three children after her husband was killed. She raised a granddaughter in two more countries after that. She is 92 years old and still in the middle of the story. Atsuko said: I really try to return the happiness to her as much as I can. She said it the way people do when they mean it and know it isn't quite enough and are going to try anyway.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Atsuko says what she wants to say to her grandmother - ~1:10:17

"My name is Atsuko Okatsuka and the person who believed in me is Ying Shi Li, my grandmother."