by Grace M. Cho
This new edition, published on the two-year anniversary of Alexander’s passing in 2018, will feature a commemorative afterword celebrating her legacy.
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NOTES
PROLOGUE
1. Throughout this text, I use the terms “mad” and “madness” to reference the work of people who have challenged the psychiatric dogma that hearing voices is always and only an “illness,” “disorder,” or “dysfunction,” but I also use the terms “schizophrenic” and “schizophrenia.”
2. Esme Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2019), 50.
3. Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2015), 114.
1. TASTES LIKE WAR
1. Charles J. Hanley, Choe Sang-Hun, and Martha Mendoza, The Bridge at No Gun Ri:A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2001), 127.
2. Chong Suk Dickman, “Thank You,” in I Remember Korea: Veterans Tell Their Stories of the Korean War, 1950–53, ed. Linda Granfield (New York: Clarion Books, 2003), 75–76.
3. Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (New York: NYU Press, 2012), 4.
2. AMERICAN DREAMS
1. BBC News, “Korea Reunion: Mother and Son Reunite after 67 Years” (video), August 20, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-45249821/korea-reunion-mother-and-son-reunite-after-67-years.
2. Arissa H. Oh, To Save the Children of Korea:The Cold War Origins of International Adoption (Stanford, CA: University of Stanford Press, 2015), 27.
3. Oh, To Save the Children, 121.
4. This quote derives from an oral history with a birth mother who had been a camptown sex worker in the 1960s, conducted by the Sunlit Sisters Center in Seoul, translated by Hosu Kim.
3. THE FRIENDLY CITY
1. These are the two postings I remember most from my adolescence in the 1980s.
2. Sarah Kershaw, “Highway’s Message Board Now without a Messenger,” New York Times, November 28, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/28/us/highways-message-board-now-without-a-messenger.html?_r=0.
3. Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on the Nomination of Brett M. Kavanaugh to Be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Day 5, Focusing on the Allegations of Sexual Assault, September 27, 2018 (statement of Christine Blasey Ford).
4. T. M. Luhrmann and Jocelyn Morrow, eds., Our Most Troubling Madness: Case Studies in Schizophrenia across Cultures (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 21.
5. Adam Pearson, “Forget Friendly—Chehalis Happy Being the Rose City,” Daily Chronicle, May 11, 2010, http://www.chronline.com/news/forget-friendly-chehalis-happy-being-the-rose-city/article_9874fcc4-5d20-11df-a354-001cc4c03286.html.
6. “The Ku Klux Klan Was Strong in Lewis County,” Daily Chronicle, August 13, 2008, http://www.chronline.com/editorial/the-ku-klux-klan-was-strong-in-lewis-county/article_9a3f2a84-a35a-557e-b23f-6e3641e2e722. html; Brittany Voie, “Voice of Voie: Lewis County No Stranger to Far Right, Supremacist Groups,” Daily Chronicle, August 18, 2017, https://www.chronline.com/opinion/voice-of-voie-lewis-county-no-stranger-to-extreme-right/article_5bda9aa4-8490-11e7-81da-97c03aeb6b52.html.
4. UMMA
1. In the words of a former prostitute, “The more I think about my life, the more I think women like me were the biggest sacrifice for my country’s alliance with the Americans.” Choe Sang-Hun, “Ex-Prostitutes Say South Korea and U.S. Enabled Sex Trade Near Bases,” New York Times, January 7, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/world/asia/08korea.html.
2. James L. Watson and Melissa L. Caldwell, eds., The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating:A Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 1.
3. Anne Allison, Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996).
5. KIMCHI BLUES
1. Ji-Yeon Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America (New York: NYU Press, 2004), 127.
2. Yuh, Beyond the Shadow, 128.
3. Yuh, Beyond the Shadow, 130.
4. Yuh, Beyond the Shadow, 127.
5. Yuh, Beyond the Shadow, 128–29.
6. Yuh, Beyond the Shadow, 129.
7. This quote derives from archival film footage of Korean War orphans eating American treats such as chocolate and chewing gum with the text from an International Social Services pamphlet that was provided to American adoptive parents in the 1960s. Deann Borshay Liem, “Practical Hints about Your Foreign Child” (video), 2005, http://www. stillpresentpasts.org/practical-hints-about-your-foreign-child.html.
7. SCHIZOPHRENOGENESIS
1. T. M. Luhrmann and Jocelyn Morrow, eds., Our Most Troubling Madness: Case Studies in Schizophrenia across Cultures (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 197.
2. “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” Bob Dylan, recorded October 26, 1963.
3. “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” Bob Dylan, recorded October 26, 1963.
4. Lisa Miller, “Listening to Estrogen,” The Cut, December 21, 2018. https://www.thecut.com/2018/12/is-estrogen-the-key-to-understanding-womens-mental-health.html.
5. A study in Ghana found that one-third of women with schizophrenia first developed it after menopause, while others seem to have been triggered by the stress of marriage. Luhrmann and Morrow, Our Most Troubling Madness, 8.
6. Ann Olson, Illuminating Schizophrenia:Insights into the Uncommon Mind (Newark, NJ: Newark Educational & Psychological Publications, 2013), 15.
7. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-III (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1980), 188–89.
8. Luhrmann and Morrow, Our Most Troubling Madness, 2.
9. Luhrmann and Morrow, Our Most Troubling Madness, 3.
10. Olson, Illuminating Schizophrenia, 20.
11. Miller, “Listening to Estrogen.”
12. Miller, “Listening to Estrogen.”
13. “Schizophrenia Onset: When Do Symptoms Usually Start?” WebMD, accessed January 22, 2020, https://www.webmd.com/schizophrenia/schizophrenia-onset-symptoms#1. The National Alliance on Mental Illness website also states that it is “uncommon for schizophrenia to be diagnosed in a person … older than forty.” The data shows, however, that almost 20 percent of first-time diagnoses are among people over forty. “Schizophrenia,” National Alliance on Mental Illness, accessed August 31, 2019, https://www.nami.org/learn-more/mental-health-conditions/schizophrenia.
14. John M. Glionna, “A Complex Feeling Tugs at Koreans,” Los Angeles Times, January 5, 2011, http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/05/world/la-fg-south-korea-han-20110105.
15. Sandra So Hee Chi Kim, “Korean Han and the Postcolonial Afterlives of ‘The Beauty of Sorrow,’” Korean Studies, 41 (2017): 256.
16. Deanna Pan, “Timeline: Deinstitutionalization and Its Consequences,” Mother Jones, April 29, 2013, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/04/timeline-mental-health-america/.
17. Allen Frances, “World’s Best—and Worst—Places to Be Mentally Ill,” Psychiatric Times, December 29, 2015, https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/worlds-best-and-worst-places-be-mentally-ill.
18. Benjamin Weiser, “A ‘Bright Light,’ Dimmed in the Shadow of Homelessness,” New York Times, March 3, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/03/nyregion/nyc-homeless-nakesha-mental-illness.html.
19. “Rampant Sexual Abuse at the Green Hill School in Chehalis,” Pfau Cochran Vertetis Amala Attorneys at Law (website), accessed September 6, 2018, https://pcva.law/case_investigation/rampant-sexual-abuse-at-the-green-hill-school-in-chehalis/.
20. Natalie Johnson, “Lawsuit Alleges ‘Culture’ of Sexual Abuse by Female Sta
ff at Green Hill School,” Daily Chronicle, March 8, 2018, http://www.chronline.com/crime/lawsuit-alleges-culture-of-sexual-abuse-by-female-staff-at/article_f56fe2d4-226d-11e8-9157-3f71631484e5.html.
21. Olivia Messer, “Staffers Raped Teen Boys at Juvenile Detention Center, Lawsuit Claims,” Daily Beast, March 8, 2018, https://www.thedailybeast.com/staffers-raped-teens-at-juvenile-detention-center-lawsuit-claims.
22. “Rampant Sexual Abuse,” Pfau Cochran Vertetis Amala Attorneys at Law.
23. Johnson, “Lawsuit Alleges ‘Culture’ of Sexual Abuse.”
24. Rebecca Pilar Buckwalter-Poza, “Teen Who Says He Was Raped by Juvenile Detention Center Staff Fights Back through the Civil System,” Daily Kos, March 12, 2018, https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/3/12/1748449/-Teen-who-says-he-was-raped-by-juvenile-detention-center-staff-fights-back-through-the-civil-system.
25. Andy Campbell, “Culture of Sexual Misconduct Alleged at Green Hill School,” Daily Chronicle, July 16, 2009, http://www.chronline.com/news/culture-of-sexual-misconduct-alleged-at-green-hill-school/article_42b8b61d-1acc-5e6d-b369-c15a7f40a03c.html.
26. Campbell, “Culture of Sexual Misconduct.”
8. BROWN
1. Peter Applebome, “Duke’s Followers Lean to Buchanan,” New York Times, March 8, 1992, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/08/us/the-1992-campaign-far-right-duke-s-followers-lean-to-buchanan.html
2. Michael Ross, “Duke Ends Presidential Bid, Blames Hostile GOP,” Los Angeles Times, April 23, 1992, http://articles.latimes.com/1992-04-23/news/mn-1312_1_duke-s-campaign.
3. Trevor Griffey, “KKK Super Rallies in Washington State: 1923–24,” Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project (website), http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/kkk_rallies.htm.
9. JANUARYSEVENTH
1. Ralph Ellison, The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 148.
2. Michael Rembis, “The New Asylums: Madness and Mass Incarceration in the Neoliberal Era,” Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada, eds. Liat Ben-Moshe, Chris Chapman, and Allison C. Carey (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014), 139.
3. Jonathan M. Metzl, The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), xiv.
4. Metzl, Protest Psychosis, xiv.
5. David A. Karp and Lara B. Birk, “Listening to Voices: Patient Experience and the Meanings of Mental Illness,” Handbook of the Sociology of Mental Health, eds. Carol Aneshensel and Jo Phelan (New York: Springer), 28.
6. Choe Sang-Hun, “Ex-Prostitutes Say South Korea and U.S. Enabled Sex Trade Near Bases,” New York Times, January 7, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/world/asia/08korea.html.
7. Choe Sang-Hun, “South Korea Illegally Held Prostitutes Who Catered to GIs, Court Says,” New York Times, January 20, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/20/world/asia/south-korea-court-comfort-women.html.
8. Richard Warner, Recovery from Schizophrenia: Psychiatry and Political Economy, third edition (New York: Brunner-Routledge, 1997), 148.
9. Warner, Recovery from Schizophrenia, 169.
10. T. M. Luhrmann and Jocelyn Morrow, eds., Our Most Troubling Madness: Case Studies in Schizophrenia across Cultures (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 25.
10. CRUST GIRL
1. Saundra Pollock Sturdevant and Brenda Stoltzfus, Let the Good Times Roll: Prostitution and the U.S. Military in Asia (New York: The New Press, 1992), 300.
2. Sturdevant and Stoltzfus, Let the Good Times Roll, 302.
3. Franny Choi, “Choi Jeong Min,” Poetry Foundation (website), accessed December 17, 2018, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/58784/choi-jeong-min.
11. ONE TIME, NO LOVE
1. Ann Olson, Illuminating Schizophrenia: Insights into the Uncommon Mind (Newark, NJ: Newark Educational & Psychological Publications, 2013), 27.
12. OAKIE
1. Ivan Leudar and Philip Thomas, Voices of Reason, Voices of Insanity: Studies of Verbal Hallucations (London: Routledge, 2000), 3.
2. Leudar and Thomas, Voices of Reason, 3.
3. T. M. Luhrmann, “The Violence in Our Heads,” New York Times, September 19, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/20/opinion/luhrmann-the-violence-in-our-heads.html.
4. Lisa Blackman, Hearing Voices: Embodiment and Experience (London: Free Association Books, 2001), 189.
13. QUEENS
1. T. M. Luhrmann, “The Violence in Our Heads,” New York Times, September 19, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/20/opinion/luhrmann-the-violence-in-our-heads.html.
14. COUNTING GHOSTS
1. Colonel Turner C. Rogers, “Memo: Policy on Strafing Civilian Refugees,” July 25, 1950, declassified June 6, 2000, US National Archives, College Park, MD.
2. Nora Okja Keller, Fox Girl (New York: Penguin, 2002), 131.
3. Keller, Fox Girl, 81.
4. Keller, Fox Girl, 81.
5. Yi Okpun, “Taken at Twelve,” True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women, ed. Keith Howard (London: Cassell, 1996), 100–101.
CREDITS
American Dreams (p. 23) and The Friendly City (p. 42). Portions of these chapters originally appeared as “Disappearing Acts: An Immigrant History” in Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 18, no. 5 (2018): 307–13.
Kimchi Blues (p. 88). A version of this chapter originally appeared in Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 12, no. 2 (2012): 53–58.
Madame Mushroom (p. 105). A version of this chapter originally appeared in Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies 15, no. 1 (2015): 77–84.
Crust Girl (p. 197). A version of this chapter originally appeared in PMS poemmemoirstory, no. 15 (2016): 87–96.
Oakie (p. 228). A portion of this chapter was originally published as “American Movies” in WSQ 47, nos. 1–2 (2019): 83–88.
Cheeseburger Season (p. 268). A portion of this chapter was originally published in East Asian Mothering: Politics and Practices, eds. Patti Duncan and Gina Wong (Bradford, Ontario: Demeter Press, 2014), 53–58.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I began writing this book in fits and starts back in 2008, as I was mourning my mother’s sudden and untimely death. Writing was equal parts therapy and eulogy, and at some point, it started to take the shape of a book. The transformation from grief-driven unconscious thought to memoir was possible only because of the many people and institutions that supported me along the way.
I am grateful to the teachers and writers at Gotham Writers’ Workshop, Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, and Asian American Writers’ Workshop, especially Marie Carter, Starina Catchatoorian, Bill Cheng, Courtney Mace, Luke Malone, Pritha RaySircar, Bushra Rehman, Cullen Thomas, Michael Tirrell, and Alisson Wood. My friends and colleagues Jean Halley, Rose Kim, Jessie Kindig, and Christine Rague were exceptionally generous with their time and care in giving feedback on multiple chapters. Thank you all for reading my words and helping me to craft them into a bigger story.
To the people who have been by my side through the journey documented in these pages—Sandra Baptista, April Burns, Jaquetta Bustion, Patricia Clough, Rafael de la Dehesa, Jenny Hammer, and Hosu Kim—thank you for being my family. To my partner, Patrick Bower, who has been by my side through the twelve-year-long journey of writing this book, thank you for reading every word and for believing in me. You have made me a better writer and a stronger person. To my children, Felix and Isabella, thank you for your love and patience.
I am indebted to the Feminist Press for making a space for marginalized voices and publishing the multiplicity of viewpoints that is feminism. It is an honor to be in such good company. A special thanks goes to my editor, Lauren Rosemary Hook, whose thoughtful work on my manuscript infused it with energy, clarity, and compassion. Jisu Kim, Nick Whitney, and the rest of the team at FP have shown unqualified enthusiasm about my work, banishing every doubt I ever had about telling this story.
My gratitude also goes to the College of State
n Island, CUNY, and the Professional Staff Congress of CUNY for providing me with the most precious resource of time.
Above all, I am thankful to my mother for teaching me the value of an unconventional mind.
