by Grace M. Cho
Jenny and I exchange a few more texts about the rural uprising and the horror that is upon us. “Hold your babies close,” she says. What else can we do but try to survive?
In the wake of the 2016 election, I began reading Our Most Troubling Madness: Case Studies in Schizophrenia across Cultures. In T. M. Luhrmann’s introduction, she makes a compelling argument that the set of experiences we refer to as “schizophrenia” is as much a social disease as it is biological. Luhrmann outlines several social risk factors that have been so widely evidenced by the research that they’re now indisputable, and my mother’s case ticks off five out of six boxes. Three of them had always been associated with poor mental health outcomes: social adversity during childhood, low socioeconomic status, and physical or sexual trauma. But the other two are less obvious from the outside: immigration and being a person of color in a white neighborhood.
My mother didn’t have to be schizophrenic.
I always knew it in my bones, but could never legitimately make a case for it without the science to prove it.
The risk increases with what is called “ethnic density”: the incidence of schizophrenia among nonwhite people rises as their presence in the neighborhood begins to fall.4
I thought about Chehalis, the seat of Lewis County, where 65 percent of voters cast their ballots for Donald Trump, where not much had changed since 1972 when my Korean family moved there.
The number of immigrants and people of color grew from three to several hundred, most of them coming from Mexico, but the town as a whole remains about 87 percent white and Christian.
In the 1990s, on my occasional visits home from college, I heard rumors of Asian and Mexican people being beaten or killed in hate crimes and former classmates becoming neo-Nazis. Despite the nineties rhetoric of multiculturalism, it seemed that racist sentiments were on the rise as more immigrants moved to Chehalis over the next three decades. The Uncle Sam billboard would reflect this renewed xenophobia: Is it immigration or an invasion?
In 2010 the City Council adopted a new official nickname out of fear of the “local media using the nickname The Friendly City in a contrary way if negative news about Chehalis were to come to light.”5 Now it is called “The Rose City.”
In 2016 Chehalis’s neighboring “twin city” of Centralia made it on a top-ten list of places with the most KKK members per capita, but the KKK had long been active in Lewis County. In 1924 Chehalis hosted a regional gathering of as many as seventy thousand Klansmen rallying at the fairgrounds. When the Daily Chronicle interviewed Grand Wizard David Duke in 1976 and asked about his plans to open a chapter in Chehalis, he responded that there were already members in the area.6
After Trump took office and amplified the voices of white supremacy, the billboard made another one of its highly controversial, news-breaking statements: Freedom Is Dangerous! Slavery Is Peaceful!
In Chehalis, we were never meant to survive.
PART II
The double function of the mouth—both in processing food into digestible matter and in producing sense—sutures that space to the domestic and civic production of language, to storytelling.
—KYLA WAZANA TOMPKINS, Racial Indigestion
4. UMMA
Chehalis, Washington, 1976
“WHAT DO YOU WANT to be when you grow up?” I was five years old the first time I can remember my mother asking me about my career aspirations. The high, clear pitch of her voice sounded like glasses clinking together, a sign that she wanted to coax something out of you. She knelt down, her long hair sweeping the linoleum, and looked at me with expectant brown eyes. “Huh, Grace-ya?” She held a smile for a few seconds before her dimples receded into the roundness of her cheeks.
“A cook.” As soon as the words flew out of my mouth, I knew I had made a colossal mistake.
“Aaawhaaaaat?!” She leaped to her feet and loomed over me. Her nostrils flared, her face turned red, and she huffed the correct answer in short staccatos. “You can be. A Doctor. Lawyer. Or professor.”
I doubt that I really wanted to be a cook then, or ever gave my future much thought, but as young children tend to do, I imagined myself doing the very things I saw adults do. My mother was always cooking, but for her, it was an obligation, not a profession.
If I had been a bit older, I might have realized that she had been recently obsessed with a song I made up whose refrain went, “I wish I were a pencil leader, pencil leader, pencil leader.” I sang it in a slow mournful tone, and sometimes exchanged the word “leader” for “eater.” No matter, my mother interpreted it to mean that I would someday become a great scholar and told everyone she knew that I had documented my intentions through song. When she talked on the phone with relatives, the quick clip of Gyeongsang saturi, my family’s regional Korean dialect, would be interrupted by the slowly enunciated English words “I wish I were a pencil leader.” She switched back to Korean and there was a lilt in her voice. It was the sound of my mother smiling. When visitors came to the house, she told them about my master oeuvre and asked me to sing it. The song was accompanied by artwork—pictures of pencils that I had drawn with pencils—and she proudly displayed the drawings too.
It was foretold that I would become an academic. On a child’s first birthday in Korea, objects are laid in front of her that predict her future. If she grabs the noodles, she will have a long life. If she grabs the coins, she will be rich. And if she grabs the pencils, she will become a scholar. In my adult life I would joke with my Korean friends that my mother had rigged the game by setting out three piles of pencils. You will be greaaat scholar one day, Grace-ya. She carefully injected this message into the substrate of my dreams. It was my destiny.
“A cook? What kind of answer is that?” she muttered to my father.
He urged her to calm down and said something that would later clue me in to their cultural difference. He was born of an Irish Canadian mother and an English American father, and twenty-two years older than my mother. He never missed an issue of Forbes or National Geographic, and was a devotee of PBS. “She’s not talking about becoming a fry cook,” he said. “She’s talking about becoming a Julia Child.”
“Ajuliawhat?”
“Julia Child. She’s the most respected cook in America. Her television program—”
“I don’t care! She is not going to be a cook!” Whenever my mother yelled, her whole body shook. Three and a half years of living in the United States had not converted her to the idea that cooking was an admirable profession, regardless of whether or not one did it on television. Cooking was the business of housewives and the working class—two categories that had largely determined my mother’s status in life. The funny thing is that she must have been cooking when this incident erupted because a knife suddenly appears in my memory.
She returned her gaze to me and gripped the knife handle until her knuckles turned white and shook it to the beat of her words. “Grace, you can be anything in the world. And you. Want. To be. A cook?” Tears threatened to break through her anger. “No. You will not be a cook. You will never. Be. A cook.” She stormed off to the other side of our six-room bungalow, having crushed my culinary dreams.
The parents of my childhood memory were about as different as two people could be—my mother was daring and vivacious, my father fearful and wizened—but they were drawn to each other by the economic and geopolitical events that charted their respective paths, and both of them suffered from a generalized dissatisfaction with the way their lives had turned out.
My father had once aspired to be a farmer, having raised pigs throughout his youth. He began to study agricultural science at Washington State University in 1937, but this was during the Great Depression, when he could neither afford to finish college nor make a living as a farmer. Life’s twists and turns led him down other avenues, first as a butcher, then as a mason. In the 1960s, he finally landed in the US Merchant Marines, which provided him with the best and steadiest income that a man of his education and abiliti
es could hope for. It also offered travel opportunities to exotic locales like Korea, where he met my mother. My paternal grandfather disappeared a year after my father’s birth, leaving my grandmother Grace to be a single mother for the next ten years until she remarried. My father’s attraction to my mother was as much about healing the wounds of his past as it was about her, and in fact, he once told me so when I asked him why he had married her. “She was all alone with your brother. I wanted to give that boy a proper home,” he said, nearly in tears.
My mother’s career trajectory was not so obvious, partly because she could never openly talk about her life circumstances and partly because women in the 1970s, and particularly Korean women, were not supposed to have careers. They might have had jobs, but not careers.
Both of my parents rose up from childhood destitution into the relative comfort of the middle class, and although it made life easier, it did not make them happy. Whereas my father grumbled openly, my mother only hinted that she wanted something more. When my father spoke of his unfulfilled longings, he knew that men in their late fifties rarely got second chances. My mother, on the other hand, was still young enough to wish that she could “be someone.”
One day, when I was five or six, something happened that made me understand that she had aspirations too. I was in the kitchen watching her chop a mound of garlic cloves into a fine paste in a matter of seconds. She packed it into a pint-size mason jar, stored it away in the fridge, and started on her next task. It seemed to me that she performed a magical feat each time she picked up a knife. She then took out a bag of apples and a paring knife and peeled the apples in one swift motion, keeping the entire peel intact—a whole bag in less time than it took to sing a song. She liked to sing when she cooked, usually songs she learned from the American movies she watched in Korea during the 1960s. I had never considered her singing as anything more than a habit, but this time I noticed that her voice emitted a deep, powerful resonance. She belted out the words “Que sera sera. Whatever will be, will be. The juture’s not ours to see. Que sera sera.” Her body swayed as if she were performing for some imagined audience and, in that moment, I could see her on stage.
“Wow, Mama. You’re a good singer.”
“Everyone used to tell me what pretty voice I have. I could be professional, you know.”
“Why aren’t you?”
“Why aren’t I? Hah! Because I have to take care of you, Mangshitori.”
“Mangshitori” was a Japanese-inflected, Koreanized version of the word monster, one of many linguistic oddities that were the products of my mother’s first language being Japanese, her second being Korean, and her third, English.
Though I sensed longing in my mother’s words about her unrealized singing career, it wasn’t quite regret. It would be more than a decade before I understood that her greatest wish was not to be a singer, but an educated person.
During the fall of my senior year of high school, as I was filling out my application for Brown University, my father inadvertently revealed one of my mother’s secrets. He found an error on the application.
“Your mother didn’t go to high school.”
“Yeah, she did.”
My father shook his head and sighed. “Dammit, why is she lying about that? She only finished junior high,” he said.
I still didn’t believe him, so I walked down the hall, from his study into the kitchen, where she was preparing dinner. “Mom, didn’t you graduate from high school?” I asked. “Dad’s saying that you didn’t.”
“Go on. Tell her,” said my father, who had followed me and was now standing in the doorway.
My mother whipped her head around and glared at him. “Why you have to say that?” she hissed.
“They’re asking for it on her application to Brown, for Christ’s sake! How was I supposed to know you were hiding it from her?”
“So it’s true?” I asked, bewildered that she had been lying to me about it my whole life.
My mother didn’t say a word. She just fixed her gaze on the wall, her eyes full of fury.
“Mom?” Her only response was to slink away to her bedroom and hide there for the rest of the night.
While the boys in my mother’s family had been granted the privilege of going to high school and college, my mother learned early on that the role of girls was to serve men and make sacrifices for their families. And she did serve and sacrifice, but she also wanted something more. And if this something more was not going to be hers, she wanted to make sure it would be mine. It would take me a lifetime to figure this out—that my success could be her vindication, that my education could be her second chance.
My mother’s seemingly mundane question—“What do you want to be when you grow up?”—arrived sometime during the summer of 1976, around the eve of my entry into kindergarten. She had been preparing for a scenario in which her daughter was destined for academic stardom. Otherwise, how could I have provoked such a strong reaction? Primed by my songwriting quips about leading pencils, the wheels of my mother’s fantasy must have been churning at full speed. Earlier that summer we had taken a road trip to California, and when we visited the San Diego Zoo, I remembered the names of several obscure animals.
“Look! There’s a dik-dik. It’s like a little tiny antelope.”
“Hwaaa!” my mother said, exhaling the sound that Koreans use to express wonder. “How do you know that?”
“I read about it in my wildlife cards.”
“You see,” my father said as he patted my head, “I knew you’d enjoy them, honey.”
Encouraged by my parents’ reaction, I searched for more opportunities to show off my newfound zoological knowledge. “There’s a capybara! It’s the largest rodent in the world.” My mother stopped in her tracks and studied my face, as if she were examining some curiosity. Her eyes widened and her tone became solemn and deliberate. “Hwaaaaa … The girl is a genius.” My brother probably rolled his eyes and groaned, something I distinctly remember him doing in response to my mother’s doting. I, on the other hand, was still small enough for her to mold without resistance.
We returned from summer vacation and I started school, carrying my mother’s expectations. She put me on the bus, and as I watched her figure fade into the distance, the neighborhood bully that would later chase me into a ditch sat next to me and said, “Your mommy is never coming back for you.” Before my first day of school even started, the blond bully had sniffed me out as her victim. Maybe it was my fear that the bully’s words would come true combined with my regret over having disappointed my mother, but something drove me to do well in school so that I could please her. Between my strangeness and my competence, I quickly developed a persona in this kindergarten microcosm of rural America. I became the model student. The alien. The Asian. I studied hard, and as a result, I restored my mother’s faith that I had a brilliant future in academia.
The story of my becoming a scholar—of my kindergarten tribulations and my mother’s Herculean efforts to create favorable conditions for my growth—is not an easy narrative. I can only make sense of it in fragments stitched together, and a few clear snapshots that hold the pieces together. At the age of five, I learned that telling your mother you wanted to be a cook was such devastating news that it could make the trees in the backyard tremble at the sound of her outrage. These trees—the flowering plums, the sugar maples, the dogwoods, the oaks—were close companions to which I had attributed mystical powers. Ten years later, when my mother’s mind became florid, they would become the source of her hallucinations.
Flash forward another twenty years or so, and you can glimpse the outcome of the first memorable conflict I ever had with my mother when I was five, layered with the emotional residues of watching her fall to pieces. By the age of thirty-three, I had spent eighteen years witnessing her struggles with schizophrenia, and managing my own psychic roller coaster of hope and despair. The entirety of my adult life had been shaped by my mother’s mental agony and my desire
to make her want to live. So at the age of thirty-three, I became the person she had once dreamed of becoming. I had acquired various letters after my name, most important of which were PhD. But to her dismay, I also held a certificate in pastry arts from a culinary institute.
I had been building up my own baking business until I got an offer for a tenure-track position as a sociology professor at the City University of New York. The tenure track consumed all my time. I stopped baking, barely had time to cook for myself, but in my mother’s view, that was all excellent news because there was no greater honor than to be called “Professor.” She once told me, “If I were you, I would be the happiest person in the world.” But she wasn’t me, and I wasn’t that happy. Yet I continued down that path because I was driven by a need to repay the debt owed to her.
There was my personal debt of knowing that her singular motivation had always been to give her children a life of opportunity, but there were also societal debts—American society’s debt to the immigrants who make their food, clean their toilets, raise their children; Korean society’s debt to the droves of young women who put their bodies and sexual labor on the front lines of national security, to whom no one would ever speak the words “thank you for your service.”1 In neither case were the debtees treated with gratitude. Instead, the debtors would make them into the cause of society’s ills, the very things that needed to be eradicated. I was driven by the inescapable feeling that the societal debt owed to my mother was crushing me, and the only way to lighten the burden would be to repay some of it myself. By becoming the “great scholar” she dreamed I would be, I might help her find some redemption. By studying her life and trying to make sense of it, I might find some too.
At thirty-seven, I became a tenured professor and published my first book about the ghosts of the Korean War—a book that was inspired by and dedicated to my mother. I had started researching and writing it as a way of trying to answer the questions that no one else was willing to answer for me.
