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In ‘Tastes Like War’, Grace M. Cho tells about her mother’s schizophrenia: NPR

Grace M. Cho is an associate professor of sociology and anthropology at CUNY University on Staten Island.

Patrick Bower / Feminist Press at CUNY


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Patrick Bower / Feminist Press at CUNY

Grace M. Cho immigrated to the United States as a child, with a Korean mother and a white American father who served in the Merchant Marine Corps. They settled in a small, rural town in Washington state, where they were one of the only immigrants in the community.

“The kids often tease and bully me because I’m Asian,” Cho said. “I’m also starting to notice that things like this happen to my mother, too, sometimes in ways that are even more dramatic than what I’ve been through.”

During those early years, Cho’s mother, Koonja, went to the kitchen as a way to cope. She cooked elaborate meals for their white neighbors and for Cho’s teachers, and she began searching the nearby woods for wild mushrooms and blackberries.

But when Cho was a teenager, Koonja suddenly stopped feeding – which Cho was very surprised by, since it was one of her mother’s favorite activities. Cho also noticed that her mother started talking to herself.

“It looked like she was arguing with someone who wasn’t in the room. … She started saying things like, ‘Well, Ronald Reagan tapped our phones,'” Cho said. “She thinks people are watching her.”

As the years passed, Koonja stopped cooking and refused to leave the house. In the end, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

In the new memoir, Taste like war, Cho chronicles her efforts to reconnect with her mother as an adult. She details the hardships Koonja faced as a child both during the Korean War and later, in the broken South Korean economy. Cho said that after the war, her mother was likely a sex worker serving American personnel stationed in Korea. Cho believes her trauma may have contributed to her mental illness.

“I have more questions about it than answers because there’s so much I don’t know,” she says of her mother’s past. “Growing up, she never told me what she did in Korea. I often asked her, but she wouldn’t answer me. She would just stare at the wall and do like I might not talk to her.”

Highlights of the interview

Tastes Like War, by Grace M. Cho

Feminist Press at CUNY

Tastes Like War, by Grace M. Cho

Feminist Press at CUNY

Trying as a teenager to help my mother

I was really scared. I don’t know what to do or what will happen to her. But I snuck out during my high school lunch break to look at some books in the library about mental illness. And so I noticed that her symptoms, if we call them “symptoms,” matched what I found in the DSM on schizophrenia, specifically paranoid schizophrenia. thought. And so I gave this information to my father and brother first. I think my brother came home for the holidays because he didn’t live with us at the time so he didn’t witness anything himself. And my dad travels a lot, so he doesn’t spend as much time with my mom as I do. And so when I present information, both denying or accusing me of lying about it, it really breaks my heart that they think that of me. But more than anything, I wish it was true, that I lied about it, and I didn’t.

Learn a secret from her mother’s past

She once advised me not to take a job at the wait desk because she said that serving is a very difficult job and she really didn’t want me to, and I asked her, “Are you a waitress?” waitstaff in Korea??” And she just said, “Something like that.” So I know that she works in the service industry. I don’t know exactly what it is. And then there was a moment when my sister-in-law revealed to me that my mother used to work as a prostitute at the US naval base in Korea. And it was a pretty devastating moment for me to learn that. And then I spent the rest of my adult life trying to process it in various ways, one of which was through research and writing. And so it set me on this path to do the work that I do today.

Trying to understand her mother’s heartbreak

My father… said that she hates doing [sex work] and she does it as rarely as possible. So that also tells me that it was extremely difficult for her to even make the leap into the sex industry. And, of course, her experiences with war, the fact that she has said so little about it over the years, is, I think, a sign of trauma. I mean, she told me a story about being a displaced refugee at the age of 9. And after doing research for my first book, really focused on civilian experiences, I just think she must have witnessed a lot of terrible things, because I’ve seen it there in the archives and I see it in other survivors’ stories. . They often see dead bodies and really horrible, horrible things when they are running for safety.

How to cook for her mother helped her feel close to her mother and gain a sense of what she was like before her mental illness

The first few times I went there to cook for her, she didn’t want me to do it. She does not accept my cooking. We debated it. She refused to eat it. … In the end it was really amazing that she taught me how to cook dishes that my grandmother taught her, which I myself have never eaten in my life. And it was a wonderful experience to give me access to the family history I’ve been craving all my life, in the most intimate way through cooking and sharing food. …

There are definitely moments when I start cooking for her and I see my childhood mother come out and I see those eyes on her because she loves food. She loves to cook. She likes to eat. She likes to feed people. She likes to eat. And if I cook the right meal, that mother will show up. Those are some of the Korean meals, but that’s also whenever I cook a cheeseburger for her because it’s her favorite food.

When her brother criticized online that she didn’t interview family members for the book

First of all, I’d like to say that I think it’s best to interview family members for your memoir if you have relationships with family members that might allow such dialogue. In this case, I don’t. I think my family members tried to keep the family secret so that if they had a sister who wanted to go public about it, if I came they would say, “Do your memories match mine?” ?” they will try to turn off writing altogether.

It is not a sumptuous memoir. It’s really just something driven by my love for my mother and my desire to honor her, by trying to understand her history and actually denouncing the shame and stigma that has hurt her. psychological harm to her – and do the same for people who might be labeled with some labels like “schizophrenia” or “prostitute”. [I want] to let them know we can see them for who they are and that those marks don’t need to identify them. And that’s my intention behind it.

Sam Briger and Kayla Lattimore produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Natalie Escobar adapted it for the Web.

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