by Grace M. Cho
Increasingly, the rumors she believed people were spreading about us involved high-profile politicians. I learned this when I found her dressed in a powder-blue pantsuit, racing around the house looking for her car keys.
“Mom, what’s the matter?”
“I have to go for important meeting! I’m going to be late!”
“What meeting?”
She stopped for a minute and gave me a solemn look. “Grace, I have to tell you something.”
“What?” My heart started to pound.
“People are saying bad things about our family and I have to go clear it up.”
“What kinds of bad things?” I felt frozen, like I was being chased in a nightmare but my legs wouldn’t move.
“They are saying that your brother is child of Booth Gardner.”
“What? That doesn’t make any sense!” Although I knew that people speculated about our parentage, the idea of my mother having had an affair with the governor was a stretch of anyone’s imagination.
“I know. Who would spread such nasty rumor? You know, Grace, it is not true. I never do anything like that to your father.” Her explanation became even more incoherent because my brother wasn’t even my father’s biological child. He had been born five years before my parents met.
“Mom, that’s crazy. Who would say something like that?”
“These people want to ruin our family! I have to go meet with Booth now so he can clear my name. He’s waiting for me!” She scurried out of the house and disappeared for the next two hours.
Did she really make an appointment with the governor? Was it even possible to do that if you were just a regular person? What if she just showed up there, demanding to see him? Would they call security and lock her up? When she returned she said that the meeting had gone well and there was nothing more to worry about. I could no longer deny that there was something wrong with my mother.
At first I looked for “logical explanations”—the things people tell themselves to suppress their instincts. My father had been attributing her erratic behavior to menopause, but he probably held an antiquated view that “madness” associated with “the change of life” was not madness at all—not a serious affliction to be taken seriously—but a women’s malady.4
It was still decades before researchers had learned that the drop in estrogen that accompanies menopause might in fact be a trigger for schizophrenia, or that estrogen therapy could be an effective treatment.5 I knew as little about menopause at the age of fifteen as I did about schizophrenia, so at first I followed my father’s lead that it was “just menopause.”
Or maybe the culprit was grief. My grandmother had died several months earlier, after having lived in the United States for almost five years with my cousin Jinho, the grandson she had raised after he became orphaned during the war, and his wife Sun.
During those years, we spent most Saturday nights at Halmeoni’s place in Oregon, where we ate everything out of bowls: rice in one bowl, soup in another, little bowls of kimchi and seasoned greens, a shallow bowl for stewed fish or jang-jorim, the smallest bowls reserved for sauces. At the end of the meal, the leftovers were kept in their bowls and covered with stiff square cloths that Halmeoni had brought with her from Korea.
Even in 1980, when my grandmother first migrated, she already seemed ancient. She was born in 1900—before the Japanese invaded Korea, before industrialization, or any such a notion as two Koreas split along ideological lines. She wore her long white hair tied in a knot and fastened with a wooden stick, and she dressed in traditional hanbok and gomu-shin. Spine curved from a lifetime of carrying bundles on her head and children on her back, Halmeoni stood at four feet ten, a veritable little old lady.
She never caught up to the idea of a modernized Korea and was even less inclined to learn the ways of modern America, although she did love cornflakes doused in sugar-sweetened half-and-half and delighted in the spectacle of World Wide Wrestling. After dinner she would call me over to the TV—“Geu-re-ya! Reh-seuring bwa-ra!”—as she sat on the edge of her floor cushion with the corners of her mouth turned upward in a toothless smile. At the precise moment that the fake blood started to pour, she would clap her hands and shout, “Aigu, yalgu-jida!” How bizarre and thrilling!
On Sunday mornings, as my mother and I prepared to return to Chehalis, Halmeoni and I would watch our family’s food-exchange ritual unfold: my mother offering a trunkful of fresh produce she had picked along with her blackberry pies and jams, Jinho and Sun countering with a cooler full of fish, both parties refusing to accept before finally giving in. “Aigu, Jinho-ya! Deugara!” my mother would yell in our family’s regional dialect, to end the standoff. Go back inside!
It would take years for me to realize how much those weekend visits made me feel like I belonged to a family, and that they did even more so for my mother.
My grandmother’s jesa was held at a Korean church in Portland that she and my cousins used to attend. There was an altar with a larger-than-life headshot of Halmeoni, her tawny skin flecked with dark-brown sunspots, her lips and eyelids drooping under the weight of eighty-five hard years. In front of the picture was a mother-of-pearl table filled with piles of fruit, rice cakes, mandu, pajeon, and dozens of other foods that Sun and my mother had prepared. The smell of incense wafted through the air. I didn’t know the other people there, but they walked to the front one by one and bowed before the picture of my grandmother. My mother cried through the whole ceremony—a deep, guttural wail that filled the entire space of the church, loud and long enough to mourn legions of the dead.
Schizophrenia can occur when a life crisis or some great, tragic disappointment incites its emergence.… Initial breakdowns are typically insidious, appearing at first to be minimal, but leading to grave effect.6
One night, on the cusp of sleep, I felt a strange presence in my room. I opened my eyes to see a small shadowy figure standing at the foot of the bed. “There are demons in the house,” it said. I was scared, but as my eyes focused, I saw that it was Halmeoni. She was wearing white hanbok with a knitted sunshine-yellow vest over it. A bright energy radiated from her, and she spoke in a silent language. “Mah-mi is sick. Take care of her for me. Huh, Geu-re-ya?” When she called my name, Geu-re-ya, I could feel her wrinkled little hand pat my foot. I tried to answer, but by the time the words reached my tongue, she was already gone.
The next morning I told my mother. “I saw Halmae-ya in front of my bed last night. I’m not sure if it was real or a dream.”
“You did? Oh, I want to see her too.” She sighed, “Dap-dap-eu-rah. She loved you so much.”
In the days after my mother’s supposed meeting with the governor, I remembered the dream and her response to it, and took it to mean that she wanted me to carry out Halmeoni’s wishes. I was afraid to talk to anyone about it, so I took matters into my own hands. Anyway, Halmeoni had appointed me my mother’s caretaker. No one else was supposed to do it.
Each day during lunch recess, I escaped my friends to go to the school library and hid among the stacks to read the twelfth-grade psychology textbook and clinical diagnostic manuals. I can’t remember if I ever talked to Jenny about it, though I most certainly kept my research a secret from my family until I had armed myself with enough knowledge about mental illness to make a credible claim.
DIAGNOSTIC CRITERIA FOR A SCHIZOPHRENIC DISORDER
A. At least one of the following during a phase of illness:
—bizarre delusions (content is patently absurd and has no possible basis in fact) …
—delusions with persecutory or jealous content if accompanied by hallucinations …
—auditory hallucinations …
—markedly illogical thinking …
B. Deterioration from a previous level of functioning in such areas as work, social relations, and self-care.
C. Duration: Continuous signs of the illness for at least six months …7
Every book I read said more or less the same thing, and I
became convinced that my mother was schizophrenic. But the books that could help me understand why she had become schizophrenic weren’t in my high school library. Some of them hadn’t even been written yet.
In 1986 the dominant thinking in psychiatry was that schizophrenia was a random and strictly biological phenomenon, a malfunction of the brain caused by genetics and treated with medical intervention, the “bio-bio-bio” paradigm.8 Neither cause nor treatment could be found in the social.
The biomedical model of the 1980s was a complete reversal of the psychoanalytic model of the 1960s, which located the cause of schizophrenia in a person’s childhood and their reaction to the mother’s inadequate affection. “The schizophrenogenic mother.” While the bio-bio-bio paradigm stopped blaming mothers, it also sent the message that if you had the gene for it, schizophrenia would be a foregone conclusion. Society had zero responsibility.
It would take thirty years for the research to swing back in the other direction to say, “We now have direct evidence that people are more likely to fall ill with schizophrenia in some social settings than in others … that something about the social world gets under our skin.”9
When my brother came home for the holidays that year, I asked to speak privately with him and my father in the office. The atmosphere in the room grew tense as they waited for me to speak. “I think there’s something wrong with Mom,” I began, then broke down sobbing. I could no longer remember the words I had prepared about how I’d been reading the DSM and could match up every one of her odd behaviors with the symptoms of schizophrenia. I skipped the whole speech and blurted out, “She’s paranoid schizophrenic!”
The men in my family unleashed their denials in unison.
“What? That’s not true!” my brother barked.
“How could you say something like that about your mother? You’re a goddamn liar!” said my father.
My heart splintered when he hurled his accusation at me, not just because I wanted to defend my character but because I desperately wished that he was right. I was fifteen years old and had no idea what else to do.
I wonder how I would have reacted to the news had I not been the one to first witness her unraveling, if I had been the older child who had just graduated from college, to be told by a much younger sibling that your mother had lost her mind, and not just to any mental illness, but to the most stigmatized kind of crazy there was. I probably wouldn’t have believed it either.
But what was my father’s excuse? He had seen the changes in her behavior, and nine months earlier I had written him letting him know that things were getting worse. Maybe his denial was driven by the fear that my mother would vanish into her delusions leaving only the shell of a wife. Maybe he needed to believe that she would keep on taking care of him until his last breath.
Without the support of anyone in my family, I decided to seek professional help by going to the local mental health center to speak with a counselor. The man who called me into his office was young and white, probably in his midtwenties. At fifteen, I didn’t know to question his age or experience. People in their twenties seemed so wise to me. I felt incapacitated by my own confused feelings because I worried that I was somehow betraying my family by speaking with a stranger about private matters, but I told myself that this was the right thing—the only thing—to do. I was hopeful that the meeting would have a happy ending and that I would soon get my mother back.
“So, what brings you here today?” the counselor asked.
I was afraid that my nervousness would make me unintelligible, but it had the opposite effect. I was articulate and assertive. “I think my mother is paranoid schizophrenic. I checked out some books from my high school library and everything matches.”
“What are her symptoms?”
“She thinks that people are following her, and that Ronald Reagan has our phones tapped. She thinks that one of my friends is involved in a government conspiracy. She watches Wheel of Fortune and thinks that the puzzles are sending her secret messages.”
“You’re right. That does sound a lot like schizophrenia … How old is she?”
“Forty-five,” I said. The counselor fidgeted as I waited for him to say more. He was quiet, as if he didn’t know what to do next.
“So? How do I help her?” I asked.
“Unfortunately, unless she consents to treatment, there’s nothing you can do. The only way you can have her committed is if she hurts someone.”
“You mean the police could make her get help?”
“Yes, but … even then, I’m not sure that it would do much.”
“But why not?”
“Schizophrenia is a very serious illness.”
I was confused by the counselor’s response. “Well, isn’t that all the more reason to do something about it?”
“Your mother is forty-five. I’m afraid it’s too late now.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Maybe if you had caught it earlier we might have been able to treat it. I’m sorry.”
“How is that possible? Aren’t you here to help people? Why won’t you help me?”
Anger and disappointment roiled inside of me and formed a tight knot that throbbed in my chest. The man’s words sounded so complacent that I wanted to twist his arm until it snapped like a dry twig, make him scream until he showed some authentic remorse. I narrowed my eyes into slits as tears streaked black eyeliner down my face.
“So that’s it? Now I go home and just deal with it? I have to just live with it? Forever?”
“I’m sorry, but there’s nothing we can do for your mother.”
The expert had just told me that my mother’s life was in the dustbin and not worth trying to save. It was my first experience with the mental health system, and I had no frame of reference with which to evaluate the advice I had gotten or to understand that the counselor might have been operating on the assumption that my mother had developed schizophrenia in her twenties, which was typical among men. The belief in psychiatry was that the longer one waits to start treatment, the poorer the outcome, and maybe he thought that my mother’s symptoms had gone untreated for twenty years. The conventional wisdom on schizophrenia had been, has always been, based on men’s experience.
While the age of onset for men peaks in the late teens to early twenties, for women it is after twenty-five.10 Among women, there is also a second peak, starting at the age of forty-five and typically coinciding with menopause, but this would not be recognized by researchers until 1993 and would never make it into the mainstream.11
“Youth has been a diagnostic criterion for schizophrenia for a hundred years, including within the pages of the DSM, where schizophrenia has sometimes included an age limit: As recently as the 1980s, a person could not be tagged schizophrenic if he or she was older than 40.”12 As recently as 2020, popular websites such as WebMD claimed that “people rarely develop schizophrenia before they’re twelve or after they’re forty.”13 Beliefs about schizophrenia contradicted the reality that a forty-five-year-old woman could experience its onset.
Decades later I would look back at this moment as the origin of my han—the untranslatable Korean word that refers to “unresolved resentment against injustice,” “a blockage … that’s tangled up and cannot be untied,” or “knotted grief.”14 Han not only refers to a consciousness of ongoing trauma and a lack of resolution, but also the means to its own resolution.15 In the days following my visit to the mental health center, a chorus of voices invaded my head, all shouting at once and competing for my attention:
She’s paranoid schizophrenic.
How could you say something like that about your mother?
Don’t you know, Grace? All people from that town want to hurt us.
Mah-mi is sick. Take care of her for me. Huh, Geu-re-ya?
The only way you can have her committed is if she hurts someone.
She’s paranoid schizophrenic.
You’re a goddamn liar.
She’s paranoid sch
izophrenic.
I’m afraid it’s too late now.
Huh, Geu-re-ya?
And then my mother and I got into a fight. It was probably sparked by one of our usual conflicts, that she thought I wasn’t studying enough or that one of my friends was a spy, and I seized it as an opportunity to help her. The voices were still screaming at me, this time telling me I needed to escalate the fight so that I could prove that my mother was a danger. I said something to provoke her into hitting me, something that she couldn’t possibly have seen coming. She slapped me hard enough to leave a red mark on my face, and I picked up the phone and called the police. The only way you can have her committed is if she hurts someone.
The police came to arrest her, but somehow I didn’t think it would come to that. I thought I could just explain to them that I wanted her to get psychiatric help, and they would tell her that she had to do it. The shame and anger that spread across her face when they cuffed her silenced every last thought in my head.
At the police station I told them what the counselor at the mental health center had said and begged them to send her to the hospital instead of keeping her in jail. “Sorry, honey. It doesn’t work that way. I wish we could help your mom, but there’s nothing we can do for her.” It was the second time I had heard those words from an authority figure: There’s nothing we can do.
My memory of the rest of that night is blacked out except for the things my mother and father said once she was released. “What kind of a girl puts her own mother in jail?” she said. “You’re persona non grata in this house,” he said.
My last-ditch effort had been a complete failure.
I spent the rest of high school learning to live with my mother’s schizophrenia. I lost myself in music and literature and boys, smoked pot, and sought daily refuge at Jenny’s house.
