Tastes Like War

by Grace M. Cho

  Despite her voices and the vast amount of energy she spent battling the Birchers and Ronald Reagan, my mother was still somewhat functional, so everyone in my household managed to pretend that we were a normal family. In time we learned to forget the terrible thing I did to her, and the way the voices compelled me to do it. Indeed, there were moments when she was her old self enough for me to believe that she had recovered. Sometimes she would pull herself away from the TV long enough to spend the day picking strawberries at the U-Pick and the next day making jam, or cook up a feast for no occasion. Sometimes she would say the kind of motherly things she used to say before the government put surveillance devices in her head. I never had chance to study, but you do. Grace-ya, keep studying hard and you can do anything. You have such bright future ahead of you.

  Perhaps that’s why I didn’t hesitate to go to college three thousand miles away, because my father broke down crying on the day I got my acceptance from Brown University, his hands shaking as he read and reread the letter, because my mother drank a glass of champagne for the first time in her life and danced around the living room, because I knew what an earth-shattering event it was for both of my unpedigreed parents. I had known for as long as I was conscious of my mother’s desires that she dreamed of me joining the Ivy League.

  I felt overwhelming pride that I had been admitted, which was only amplified by my parents’ joy. Most of all, I felt the ache of my own desires. I wanted to transcend the confinement of my miserable little town and my mother’s delusions. The world was huge again, and I would emerge from the dark days of my adolescence into another spring, and life would start anew.

  Yet the distance that going away to college gave me, and being in the world of ideas and critical thinking would eventually lead me to search for the causes of my mother’s schizophrenia. With each new revelation, my han became more tangled up in hers, collected more emotional residue, and gave more force to my life’s decisions. As I worked to untangle our han, the loosened threads led me back to 1986, when at age fifteen I first saw my mother through the lens of disposability, when I first got the notion that she had been cheated out of her own life and left to wander the earth as a ghost.

  Thirty-two years later I would still be trying to untie the knot.

  New York City, 2018

  I AM TEACHING an undergraduate class on the sociology of mental illness, giving a lecture on the demise of community mental health, which was conceived of as the more humane and effective alternative to institutionalizing the mentally ill. John F. Kennedy, my mother’s first American hero, signed the Community Mental Health Act in 1963, but the investment in community-based mental health was never enough to serve all the people who needed it. When Reagan took office in 1981, he began to cut federal spending on mental health services until only 11 percent of the original budget remained.16

  In the middle of the lecture a thought hits me. She always said that Reagan was trying to take her down, and maybe she was right after all.

  Community mental health facilities became so woefully underfunded that they intentionally let people with the most severe mental illnesses fall through the cracks; the sickest people were the ones who used up the most resources.

  There’s nothing we can do for your mother.

  In the absence of real mental health care, people with mental illnesses were shuttled into prisons or left on the streets to fend for themselves. According to Allen Frances, it is for these reasons that the United States is the worst place in the world to have a serious mental illness.17

  Two weeks later, I’ll be leading a discussion with my students about the case of Nakesha Williams, a young, gifted, and Black woman whose mental health spiraled downward until she ended up homeless on the streets of New York City and eventually died while sitting on a bench at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-Sixth Street.18 One of my students will say that the story gripped her because it began when Nakesha was a college student, that the same thing could happen to any one of them in the class. “In all the stories we’ve read the person is fine until something triggers their crazy. Maybe it was the sexual abuse that triggered her crazy.”

  After that class, I will think again about my mother. Was there anything else that happened in 1986, some stone I left unturned? Have I become so attached to the narrative I’ve constructed that I can’t see what’s right in front of me? I will close my eyes and let all the pieces of the story fall away, and Green Hill will be left standing.

  Memories will flash up.

  I am ten or eleven, asking if I can see where she works. My curiosity sends her into a panic. “No, no, no!” she shouts. “You don’t know what kind of bad things going on in there! You can never go to that place! You hear me?” At the time I thought it was because she didn’t want me to go near the juveniles.

  I am fifteen and she has just come home from work, visibly upset, talking with my father in their bedroom. The door closed. Her voice shrill. My father urging her to keep it down. My mother’s complaints about Green Hill have begun to change from “what they are saying about us” to “what they are doing to me.”

  I will dive deeper into my memory for some clue of what might have happened there. What egregious thing did they do to her? Unable to come up with anything tangible, I will search the internet for pictures of the place to jog my memory. The first click will reveal the image of the sprawling compound that is located off of I-5, just before Exit 76. Between the edge of the lawn and the razor-wire fence is a line of poplar trees standing at attention. Even when I was little, I thought they looked like soldiers or a firing squad. With the next click, I will find the “bad things going on in there.”

  Rampant Sexual Abuse at the Green Hill School in Chehalis.19

  In 2018 plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against Green Hill, alleging that they had been repeatedly raped when they were incarcerated there, as minors. “For years, a culture of sexual misconduct existed at Green Hill School…. Retaliation and suppression of complaints were common…. [S]upervisory staff actively condoned the abuse and protected the abusers.”20 “At least six or more children at the school [were] being abused by staff, [and that was] the tip of the iceberg.”21 “One victim state[d] that he tried to call the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) hotline but was prevented from using the phone.”22 The investigation also revealed that the boys witnessed sexual misconduct of staff toward each other.23

  There was a paper trail of abuse that went back to 2009, when the cook, Deanna Witters, pleaded guilty to assaulting the children and received a thirty-day jail sentence in exchange for the names of five other abusive staff members, none of whom was charged or asked to resign. “It’s the culture out there,” she said. “It happens all the time.”24 In another case, a male employee, Everett Fairchild, was accused of sexually assaulting a female coworker in 2007.25 When asked to respond to the scandals in 2007 and 2009, Green Hill’s superintendent brushed it off: “When a facility has 250 employees, bad things are bound to happen.”26

  How long had these bad things been happening? The period of time in which victims had the courage to take their abusers to court dated back to 2007, but it must have been going on for much longer. Each witness, whether employee or detainee, described sexual assault as pervasive and deeply rooted in the culture of the institution.

  Witters was thirty and Fairchild twenty-six in 1986 when my mother was coming home from work every morning distraught about the “bad people at Green Hill.” Could they have been there, abusing the boys, assaulting the other staff, while my mother was told to keep her mouth shut? If not them, then someone else? I try to imagine her in this kind of environment and wonder what horrors she witnessed, what might have been done to her, what vile acts she might have been invited to do. I imagine the interaction of this trauma with her past in the camptown and our ambiguous family history with Japanese colonization and militarized sexual slavery.

  Maybe it was the sexual abuse that triggered her crazy.

  Another strand of the k
not will come loose. Eleven years spent working in the dead of night at a place that systematically violated minors and kept this abuse an organized secret.

  Something about the social world gets under the skin, but that something cannot be reduced to any one thing. It is the horror of Green Hill, but it is also the strident anti-immigrant rhetoric that says This is an invasion, and it is NOT a “human right,” the damaging Cold War that my mother faced on both sides of the Pacific. It is my father believing that she deserved it. It is the loss of my halmeoni, my mother’s first home.

  Thirty-two years after my mother went mad, I will have disentangled the threads enough to see where each one leads, to see that the thing that triggered her crazy was the knot itself.

  8. BROWN

  October 23, 1989

  Hi, Mommy and Daddy!

  Does this look like me on the front? I don’t know what possessed me to get a Halloween card. I guess I just thought it was cute. And it’s only fair to let you know that I charged this card the same time I got some notebooks! I hope you don’t mind.

  I want you to know that I feel very fortunate to have parents like you. I think of one of my friends here, Elena, who can’t afford to buy a coat, or Chris, whose parents won’t pay for him to go to school at all, and I don’t know what I did to deserve to be here. Well, thank you.

  Oh, if you didn’t already hear, Brown finally won a football game, against Cornell, 28–7 or something like that!

  HAPPY HALLOWEEN FROM YOUR LITTLE GHOUL.

  See you in less than two months!

  Love, Grace

  During my first semester at Brown I felt a sense of lightness in which my spirit could soar beyond the physical boundaries of my body into a world without limits. While college gave me a taste of adulthood, more important was that being there allowed me to be a child, to look at the world with wonder. And the distance from my parents allowed me some moments of forgetting; it made me see only the good in them.

  Although I had been nervous about the transition from my rural public high school to an Ivy League university, my curiosity proved stronger than my fear, and so I held my own in the classroom. I wasn’t a stellar student in that context, but I was competent, and that was good enough.

  I was surprised to find that I thrived socially in college in a way I’d never thought possible. Growing up in Chehalis, I had always been shy and somewhat of a loner, with Jenny as my one true friend. Upon my arrival at Brown, I became enamored with my new classmates because their lives were so interesting and radically different from mine: they were from cities or suburbs, had gone to high schools that were bigger than my entire hometown, or had been educated in small international schools in France and Switzerland. They were of ethnic and racial backgrounds I had never encountered growing up; I had never met a Jewish, Italian, or South Asian person, or a Latinx person who didn’t have Mexican roots, and I had never known anyone to be openly gay. In my hometown, if you were even perceived as gay, you’d better be prepared to get the shit kicked out of you, as Jenny’s boyfriend had learned the previous summer, when the two of them were walking down the street holding hands, and he was beaten to a pulp by a group of guys in cowboy boots. There was a reason why kids in Chehalis called cowboy boots and the people who wore them “shitkickers.” It didn’t matter that Jenny and her boyfriend were a straight couple. To them, he was still a fag.

  I was swimming in oxytocin those first months at Brown, making fast friendships with just about anyone who would let me in, though the friends that lasted were similar to me in that they were immigrants or students of color or kids from families that had to sacrifice something for them to be in the Ivy League. Jaquetta was my best friend from my freshman dorm. She was a drop-dead gorgeous Black girl and a classically trained pianist from Connecticut with an elegant, Afrocentric style. Her idol was Nina Simone, and we would dance around her room to “My Baby Just Cares for Me” or sit and brood to “Four Women” while smoking clove cigarettes. Sandra was another one of my best friends, whom I had met in an environmental studies class and later traveled with in Brazil. She was the youngest of four kids in a close-knit Brazilian family from Newark and she was also stunning, with her sea-green eyes and beach-brown skin. Unlike many of the other students, we were not “legacies.” We were in the first generation of our families to attend college, and kids like us made up a small minority of the student population. Being around them made me feel like I was part of a special group—we were powerful, beautiful underdogs, and together we would rise up.

  Among our classmates were the sons and daughters of the rich and famous—the children of Diana Ross, Ted Turner, and Marlon Brando were all in my graduating class, as was the grandson of Haile Selassie, and the heir to the Getty oil fortune. I met students whose parents were high-powered politicians, well-known members of the literati, foreign dignitaries, and Fortune 500 CEOs. They owned yachts and various country homes, grew up with gardeners and drivers, and casually used the words “summer” and “winter” as verbs.

  There were social classes at Brown that I had never heard of, such as “old money” and “new money.” For members of both classes, the cost of a plane ticket would have been a negligible sum, but for my parents it was an extravagance. I was the only student I met during my time there who had enrolled without ever having seen the campus. It could have been that my parents just lacked the cultural capital to know that you were supposed to visit a college before deciding to go there. Brown had been my top choice because of the way they touted pluralism and diversity in their recruitment literature. It was the only school I had applied to, so I certainly wasn’t going to study elsewhere. What would have been the point of visiting? I had even received a formal invitation to attend “Third World Weekend” for admitted students of color to visit the campus, but my father had been offended by the term “third world.” “Don’t they know that Korea’s not a third world country anymore?” He was as baffled as he was miffed.

  I had applied for early admission to Brown in October 1988, and when my acceptance letter arrived in December, my father bought himself a gift from the Brown bookstore catalog. It was a vintage poster of the first annual Tournament of the Roses, a 1916 football game between Brown University and Washington State University, where he had studied agricultural science for three semesters before he ran out of money and had to hitch a ride home in the back of a flatbed truck.

  The poster represented the completion of his unfinished college legacy, and somehow my going to Brown had been written in the stars at the meeting of our two colleges in 1916—three years before my father was born. I imagine that he would have told me something like that if he could have gotten the words out, but instead he just pointed at the poster and nodded his head. His lip quivered for a moment before he said in his gravelly voice, “It’s a damn good Christmas present.”

  His other present was the defibrillator he got implanted in his chest after his heart stopped on Christmas Day.

  In October 1989 the university planned three days of activities for visiting parents of first-year students, which they called “Parents’ Weekend.” I pressured my parents to come because I didn’t want to be known as the only kid whose parents weren’t there. They gave in but decided to make a six-thousand-mile round-trip drive from Washington State to Rhode Island instead of flying. Twelve hours after they hit the road, I got a call from my mother.

  “Grace-ya. I m sorry.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Your father’s heart is acting up again.”

  “Oh no! Is he okay?”

  “I think so, but he’s not going to make it for all that long trip. We are already in Idaho but he says we need to go to the hospital.”

  I felt guilty that I had been the reason for their epic road trip, but there was hardly time to process the information before my mother hung up the phone. As Parents’ Weekend rolled around, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for myself, like I was an orphan in the midst of children whose parents were b
y their side, while mine were in a hospital somewhere in Coeur d’Alene.

  I didn’t realize then how much things were about to change. My mother was still, in her own way, taking care of my father, still acting like a mother. Still calling me on the phone. Still saying “I’m sorry.” I took for granted these tiny maternal gestures that she was still capable of.

  My parents didn’t get divorced as soon as I left for college as they had threatened, but their lives did become increasingly disparate. My mother spent most of her days sitting on the beige sectional watching TV, and she slept there at night too. My father stayed in his office, slept in the bedroom, and went out to visit his shopkeeper friends or his cousin Buck’s pig ranch. During my visits home freshman year, I alternated between their two separate spheres of inside and outside, bringing them together only at dinnertime.

  My mother was still going out once in a while; she did yard work and grocery shopping, and once or twice a week she’d volunteer for the United Way or the Special Olympics, something she began to do after quitting Green Hill. Generally speaking, she could make her way out of the house whenever the situation demanded it, as it did when my father got fed up and left her.

  November 20, 1990

  Hi Dad,

  Sorry it’s taken me so long to write. I’ve been extremely busy lately … I’m so happy to be able to spend a few days without classes and without having to go to bed at 2:00 and get up at 7:00.

  I think I know what I want for Christmas. I got this catalog in the mail with things I like in it. I’m enclosing the order form and pictures of two pairs of earrings but don’t get both pairs. You can sort of surprise me this way. What do you want or need?

  You don’t have to worry about not seeing me when I’m home. If Mom doesn’t mind, I’d like to spend Christmas Eve at home and Christmas Day (or part of it, at least) with you in Raymond. I’m sure I’ll visit you a couple more times. Even though I’m only going to be home for two and a half weeks, it’s more time than I know what to do with in Chehalis. See you soon.