Tastes Like War: A Memoir

by Grace M. Cho

Feeding others was a way of making a living and learning to live among people who saw her as always and only a foreigner. It was at once a gesture of nurturance and an act of resistance. And in the repetition of these acts, she created her own worth.

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. The town in which she became American was the same place in which she became schizophrenic.

when we are loved we are afraid love will vanish

“I can’t stand the taste of it,” she said. “Tastes like war.”

But the United States would continue to kill Koreans in order to save them from themselves.

Although South Korea profited greatly from US military presence, to the point that the government aggressively promoted the sex industry around the bases as a form of “foreign diplomacy,” the women workers were gradually stripped of their rights.

The only women Koreans despised more than single mothers were the women who “mixed flesh with foreigners,” because they were whores, and traitors too.

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.

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.

We were joined by our common legacy as militarized subjects, having been borne out of the same murderous conditions of US intervention and war, the same sexist and imperialist social policies that fractured families in Korea. We were all bound by the discourse that said that the American family/nation rescued us.

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.1