More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
And I did in fact lose her to a kind of death—one where she withdrew from the social, a death in which society rendered her worthless and disposable.
My socially dead mother sat on the couch for years on end with the curtains closed, completely cut off from the outside world.
The town to which we migrated was not a refuge but another place of imperial violence, where the rescued must continuously pay a psychic price for their purported salvation.
“It took the writing of not only that book, but also an unintended sequel [The Red Parts], for me to undo this knot, and hand its strands to the wind.”
Paradoxically it was my mother’s very absence that gave her a new presence in my life.
And when the sun rises we are afraid it might not remain when the sun sets we are afraid it might not rise in the morning
So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.
She always seemed to put a great deal of thought into her choices to eat or not eat something. In time, I recognized these choices as an expression of agency, tiny acts of rebellion against enormous structures of power.
The only women Koreans despised more than single mothers were the women who “mixed flesh with foreigners,” because they were whores, and traitors too.
“I’m half American,” I say. “My father is American.” With enough time I learn to make my mother disappear.
Even after the immigrant haters came face-to-face with her, they still couldn’t see her, and so she became their flesh-and-bones straw woman.
Years later, I will understand that innocence was another thing that she wished so dearly for me to have precisely because it had been denied to her. My guilt and shame will turn to rage.
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.
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.
After the call, I picked up Yoyo, my little gray tabby, and pressed my face into his fur. I became all too aware that I lived alone, that so much of my life had revolved around my mother, and now she was gone.
I could imagine that this Asian woman who was kneading the pain out of my body was my mother, who used to rub my back as I fell asleep at night and squeeze my legs as I awoke in the morning. I’d close my eyes and slip deeper into the dream that she was there with me. Umma. In the flesh. And not only was she still alive, she was the young mother of my childhood, her mind still intact, her spirit full of wonder. The mother I had lost so long ago.
Silence had become the norm between my brother and me over the years, neither of us making much of an attempt at either small talk or meaningful conversation, but this was different. With Mom gone, when will I ever see him again? I thought to myself. What if this is the last time?
Even as I opened my mouth, I wasn’t sure what I was going to say. I only knew that we were both hurting, and that maybe I should say to him what I myself would have wanted to hear. “I want you to know …” My voice was quaking. “I appreciate everything you did for Mom.”
I imagined her in every scenario that I wrote about, and wondered if that might have been the thing that pushed her over the edge.
The sight of the robe suddenly angered me. I had seen her in it on so many recent occasions, but there it was, empty and lifeless. I screamed as I dumped the contents of the other bags onto the floor and grabbed her bra and a few random pieces to stuff inside the robe. I formed the robe into the shape of a woman, breasts and all, and lay down next to it, and buried my head into its shoulder. I smelled my mother’s scent still on the robe, and another wave of grief pummeled me. I cried out uncontrollably, “Umma! Umma! Umma!” and dug my fingers into the makeshift effigy. “Umma, come back! Umma!”
The party was such a success that it became an annual event. Though my mother had made it clear that cooking was not an acceptable profession for me, she unwittingly showed me how powerful it was. None of the adults would ever forget me.
In her death, she was the sweetest of ghosts.
The biggest shock was the food. Suddenly, every meal became a painful reminder of having left home.
And so communities developed around resurrecting the lives of women forced to assimilate so violently that they felt homeless.
Schizophrenia is the story of how poverty, violence and being on the wrong side of power drive us mad. —T. M. LUHRMANN, Our Most Troubling Madness
People who are humiliated and abused and bullied are more likely to fall ill. People who are born poor or live poor are more likely to fall ill. People with dark skins are more likely to fall ill in white-skinned neighborhoods … when life beats people up, they are at more risk for developing psychosis.
SCHIZOPHRENOGENESIS = schizophrenic + genesis: the production of schizophrenia. Sometimes refers to the onset of schizophrenia, sometimes to the causes. The story of the mind’s cleaving. The story of being on the wrong side of power.
I felt embarrassed that I was embarrassed, as if I was a bad daughter for not putting my grief on display.
Household bickering became a constant, and one of them was always threatening to divorce the other. I spent a lot of time in my room, trying to shut out my parents and their problems.
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.
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.
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.
Despite two years of witnessing her gradually waste away on the couch, my father still believed that she was doing it to spite him. “Your mother could go back to work if she wanted to. Hell, she can be like her old self if she really wanted to—take care of the house, cook dinner, keep me company. You know, like she used to. But she just doesn’t want to, dammit.”
Once I knew what it felt like to not live with my parents, being around them again began to make my spirit hurt. My mother’s was not the same kind of hurt. Mine motivated me to leave, while hers kept her chained to the couch.
More and more, my college experience was broadening my worldview in such a way that it became incompatible with my father’s.
My studies and social experience at Brown allowed me to feel, for the first time, that I was good enough. I didn’t have to be white or try to be white to have a voice.
The longer I was at Brown and the more distance I had from my childhood, the more I put my parents under a microscope.
Yes, my mother had problems. It was a euphemism spoken by someone whose place in my family was secure enough to speak what had always been unspeakable.
The voices of the mentally ill are equivalent to the miner’s canary. Their stories are alerting us to the fact that something is wrong with psychiatry’s overreliance on a biological model of suffering.
Baking, for my mother, was a way to become American. Baking was a way to forget.
When my brother’s wife told me the big family secret, it was to explain my mother’s mental illness, as if her past were an answer and not, in itself, a question.
As much as I liked school, my decision to spend seven years in graduate school was largely motivated by that fleeting moment, perhaps less than two seconds, during which I heard the words Your mother used to be a prostitute.
Even sex work for sheer survival is a way of defying a power structure that might otherwise leave you for dead. Survival is an act of resistance, but performing an act of resistance within an imperialistic order is not the same thing as “being a prostitute by choice.” Forced or free is a false dichotomy.
She escaped Korea only to find that American society devalued her, too—this gray country, this violent foster home … land where they stuff our throats with soil &accuse us of gluttony when we learn to swallow it.3
the vast majority of schizophrenics are not violent, that the vast majority of violent crimes are committed by people without schizophrenia. People who hear voices are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it.
