Tastes Like War

by Grace M. Cho

  At first, I didn’t feel compelled to visit her more than once a month. The nearly three-hour commute took a lot out of me considering the demands of my first year in the doctoral program. I was also working full-time as a Head Start director at a community center in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn. Cesar was touring with an off-Broadway show that year, and the occasional weekend he came home I spent with him.

  Door-to-door, the trip from my apartment in Brooklyn to her house in Princeton took forty minutes on the subway, one and a half hours on New Jersey Transit, and forty minutes walking from the train station—all while carrying a backpack full of schoolwork and a bag of groceries in each hand. She would always comment on how many books I brought with me, how thick they were, how small the print. “Hwaaa, that is a lot of reading. I could never in my life read that much.”

  It was between the first and second visit to my mother’s new house that my father died.

  On Friday, October 2, 1998, I went to work and had just started an in-service training for the teachers at my Head Start program. I had gotten a call earlier that morning that two sisters who were teachers in my program had just lost their father to a heart attack. “I have sad news,” I told the other teachers. “Constance and Adriene won’t be joining us today because their father died.” I choked on the words because the voice in my head said my instead of their. I had just heard the sound of my own voice speaking two things at the same time. Their (my) father died.

  Two nights earlier I had a dream that he was lying in a hospital bed, glowing. The body wasn’t his though; it belonged to an old college girlfriend who had died of Hodgkin’s that summer. I was sitting by his side in a translucent metal chair that looked like silver jelly. There were no lights in the room, but the white bedsheets and the aura around him were so brilliant that they illuminated everything, and I could see that the room had no walls or floor or ceiling. Just beyond us was pitch black. We were floating in space, holding hands. The light emanating from my ex-girlfriend’s body was a radio, sending me my father’s thoughts: Forgive me for being cruel to you. The words came to me as the sound of a meditation bell.

  The feelings from the dream stayed with me that day and the next, and were still on my mind when I choked up on the words, “Their (my) father died.”

  About two hours into my workshop, I was interrupted by an urgent phone call. I ran downstairs to my basement office and picked up the phone to hear my sister-in-law’s voice. “I’m sorry, Grace. Your dad died. He went peacefully in his sleep … Wednesday night—” but just then, the J train rumbled by on the elevated tracks above my office building, drowning out the rest of her words.

  “Okay. Thank you for telling me,” I said, and hung up the phone. I stood there, unable to cry, unable to feel much of anything, let alone grief. I just felt mildly stunned.

  I returned to the room of teachers and said, “The rest of the workshop is canceled. My father died.” Gasps and murmurs rippled through the room. You too? How uncanny that two of our fathers could die on the same day. But in fact, my father had not died that day, but on September 30, in the middle of the night when I was dreaming about him.

  Outside, Fulton Street was a cacophony of merengue blaring from car stereos, Spanish chatter of passersby, and the J train rolling over the tracks above, but the sounds were muffled, as if I were hearing them from under water.

  Back in my dim two-room apartment on Eastern Parkway, I sat on the futon and stared out my second-story window at the building superintendent throwing trash into the dumpster, and wondered what to do next. I had grown so accustomed to my father’s absences from my life that the finality of this one wouldn’t fully register for months to come. Because his death had been drawn out over decades of heart disease and hospitals and constant low-grade misery, decades of him talking about and planning for his own demise. “This is for when I expire,” he used to say. Because his mortality had loomed over me my whole life. I had grown numb to the idea of him dying, and perhaps the numbness was also borne out of our years of conflict and estrangement, his neglect of my mother, and my growing consciousness about social injustice and the way he symbolized the power that my mother didn’t have. With all of that, what was my grieving supposed to look like?

  I think it was the following weekend that I went to visit my mother again, my first time speaking to her since my father’s death. In a rare display of maternal warmth that I hadn’t felt for years, she greeted me by reaching her arms out to hold me, to soothe me for having lost my father. “Sesang-eh, sesang-eh.” What in the world? I wish I could have accepted her affection, but instead, I pushed her arms away because I still wasn’t ready to mourn him.

  It would be two years before I learned what horrible misunderstanding had transpired in that split second, that the voices had told my mother that I thought she was “dirty.”

  Although I had known about the voices since I was in high school, I first heard that my mother had named them Oakie from my sister-in-law. They were ethereal beings spawned by the trees on our property in Chehalis, whose lineage began with the ivy-covered oak in the front yard. I wondered if this was the reason my mother had cut the trees down. I don’t know if she was trying to free herself from the voices or free the voices from the trees. Regardless, chopping them down didn’t make the voices go away. Over time, I would learn that they talked to her during every waking minute, guiding all of her decisions. Some of them took the form of beeping electronic sounds and others barked like dogs. Although my sister-in-law always referred to the voices as “the Oakies,” my mother called them “Oakie” singular—preferred pronoun, “they.” They were a multiplicity, the many parts that made up a whole, the source of both torment and comfort.

  Each time I spent the weekend with her in New Jersey, I cooked a big dinner, enough for a generous portion of leftovers, but she began to complain bitterly about it. Cooking is a waste of time. I get by just fine on what I have. But what she had was a paltry selection of five items: a bag of rice, two cases of Top Ramen, a can of Planters mixed nuts, a jar of kimchi, and a pitcher of apple juice that she mixed from frozen concentrate. The more I tried to talk her into eating other things, the more stubborn she became, and I wondered if she sometimes threw away the food I left for her.

  Toward the end of my first year of grad school at CUNY, my sister-in-law would call to say that ramen was the only thing my mother had eaten for weeks, and that I needed to visit more often. I was initially frustrated. Did she understand that cooking for my mother was already so fraught? That it was challenging for me to travel there and shop for groceries without a car? If they had expected me to do this regularly, why couldn’t my mother live closer to me? And yet, I relented out of guilt. I gradually increased the frequency of my visits and quit my full-time job at the community center, until I was going to New Jersey every weekend.

  Something must have happened behind the scenes, my brother telling my mother that she had to accept my cooking, his voice overpowering the others. Or maybe it was Oakie that talked some sense into her: You can’t let that food go to waste.

  It was on the night I cooked chicken paprikash that I first asked her about Oakie. I had been working my way through the recipes in a Bon Appétit international cookbook, each meal a new culinary experience for her, and often for me too.

  “Pah-pree-kash. Pah-pree-kash. What a funny name,” she said, taking delight in both the sound and the taste of it.

  “It’s a Hungarian dish,” I said.

  “What is this? You gonna open up a restaurant named after me? Koonja’s Kitchen.” She laughed, and the smile remained for the next few bites. It pleased me immensely that she seemed to be enjoying our culinary excursions around the globe, and that despite my being the cook, she still thought of the kitchen as hers.

  After dinner, I put on an Ozomatli CD. It was a Latin band from Los Angeles that Cesar and I had just discovered and had been listening to incessantly. “Let’s dance!” I said, on a whim. “I’ll teach you how to salsa!�
� I expected her to protest, but she got up and grabbed my hands as I showed her the steps. We moved exuberantly to conga beats and brass, doing spins on the linoleum floor.

  “One more time, Ma?” I asked when the song was over.

  “No, I better not.” Suddenly, she looked tense, and I wondered if she regretted dancing, if I had disrupted the rhythms of her “work,” as she called the act of listening to her voices. She had once told me that Oakie forbade her from moving too much. If I even lift my finger the wrong way, bad things will happen, she once told me.

  We sat back down at the kitchen table and listened to the rest of the album, a mixture of hip hop, pop, and Latin folk. There was a brief pause after the end of the last song, then a child’s voice said, “Ozomatli is in the house.” My mother jumped at the sound of it. “Omo! That voice scared me! I thought it was real.” There was fear in her eyes, and she had a hard time shaking it. I was frightened, too, by whatever disturbance the music and dancing might have unleashed, but I was also curious. She was so clear in distinguishing the voice on the record from the ones in her head. What did it mean for her to hear a voice that was “real”? Could a voice be real without belonging to an embodied person? Was Oakie real?

  “Mom, do you still hear Oakie?” I knew that she did, but it was the most innocuous question I could think to ask.

  “Yeah. Sometimes.”

  “Are they talking to you right now?”

  “Well, actually, they are always talking to me.”

  “I want them to go away,” I said, not knowing if saying so would offend her or Oakie.

  “Me too. I wish they would just leave our family alone!” Her face flushed, and her eyes welled with tears.

  I wondered what exactly she meant, how the rest of the family was involved, but she was already so agitated that I didn’t ask. As much as I wanted to know every detail about my mother’s experience, I was always careful to tread lightly.

  After I finished my doctoral coursework, I began reading books on hearing voices, sometimes as part of my dissertation research. According to Leudar and Thomas’s work on the cultural meanings ascribed to verbal hallucinations, contemporary psychiatry views these voices as “errors in perception”: in some versions of this episteme, the experiences reflect no more than a confusion about what is real and what is imaginary, and therefore are a dangerous source of psychotic delusions.1 But in fact, voice hearers do not mistake hallucinatory voices for other people speaking; they use the same methods of realitytesting that nonvoice hearers do.2 Contrary to popular belief, the voices in Leudar and Thomas’s study did not typically “make” their hearers do things against their will, but rather influenced decisions in the same way that the ordinary inner dialogue of a “normal” person does.

  My sister-in-law recommended that I read a memoir about a man who heard voices coming out of the objects in his day-to-day environment. The lion statues in front of the New York Public Library would hurl expletives and insults at him each time he walked by, pulling him down into his deepest traumas. What I remember most about that book was that he also talked about living with the stereotype that schizophrenics are violent, when the truth of the matter is that 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.

  While it is a common experience of voice hearers to be harassed with violent imagery by their voices, it is not universal. Cross-cultural research on schizophrenia has shown that voices in the United States are more likely to talk about violence. Americans spoke of “war,” as in, “They want to take me to war with them,” or their “suicide voice” asking, “Why don’t you end your life?” By contrast, those in India instructed their hearers to do domestic chores—cook, clean, eat, bathe, to “go to the kitchen, prepare food.”3

  The Hearing Voices Network, a self-advocacy group, has also shown that engaging with voices can make them more peaceful. Voice-hearers are invited to focus on the voices, recount what they are saying, to record them, document them and integrate them into their lives. In short, the style of living changes from one of denial to acceptance, through which individuals begin to transform their relation to the experience.4

  The process of becoming my mother’s cook allowed me to let go of my fear long enough to ask about her voices, and it was as if acknowledging Oakie’s place at the table changed something between us. I was preparing one of the last recipes in the Bon Appétit cookbook when she said, “How ’bout next time you make me some sogogi soup?”

  Sogogi is a spicy beef and radish soup in a clear, aromatic broth, which she taught me to make by barking out the directions from five feet away. “Use more sesame oil. Don’t be ashamed to use it. Now put garlic in. More. More. Okay, that’s enough!” Like other Korean dishes she would teach me to cook, it was simple and flavorful and tasted of my childhood. It became part of my regular rotation of dishes and was the entrée for other requests. “You make me some kong-nameul each week. I always gotta have that, you know.”

  It was always after she had begun to eat, as her hunger was being sated and she was swimming in nostalgia, that I would periodically check in about her voices.

  “Mom, do you still hear Oakie?”

  “Yeah, but they are not really bothering me anymore.”

  My mother lived by herself in that house for two years before my brother and his wife decided that it was both too isolating and too burdensome for her. So they sold the house and moved her to his Tribeca studio, where she slept on his couch for several months. It was a small, spare apartment in a luxury high-rise that served as his crash pad for the nights he worked too late to make the commute back to New Jersey.

  Now that she didn’t live three hours away from me, I sometimes made impromptu visits during the week when my brother was there. I could just hop on the downtown R train from Thirty-Fourth Street after school and arrive at her door fifteen minutes later. She ate well during those months: takeout that my brother brought home after work and the meals I cooked for her on the weekends. It seemed as if her days of rejecting food were over.

  She also developed a new interest in baseball. My brother usually had sports on in the background, and the Mets and the Yankees were facing off in a Subway Series.

  “How often do two New York teams play each other in the World Series?” my mother mused. “That is really something!” I was delighted by her sudden engagement in the outside world, and it gave me hope that one day she’d be able to go out again.

  There was one time when it almost happened. Upon arriving at my brother’s apartment and unpacking a bag of Korean groceries from Han Ah Reum, she eyed the packages of bean sprouts and said, “Grace! I have an idea. Let’s go shopping!”

  “Shopping?You mean you want to go out?”

  “Yeah! You take me to that Korean grocery store.”

  I was shocked and elated by the request. For the first time in months, she changed out of her pajamas and bathrobe, put on makeup, and curled her hair. The whole time she talked about everything she was going to buy. “Misu-garu. Oh, I can’t wait to taste misu-garu,” she said, practically salivating at the memory of the sweet toasted-grain drink of her childhood.

  The anticipation in the room was palpable. She was one beat away from opening the front door and taking a step outside before she suddenly changed her mind.

  “Oh, never mind. It’s a bad idea,” she said, her eyes beginning to go blank.

  “C’mon, Mom. Let’s go. It’ll be fun.”

  “I’d better not.”

  “Please, Mom. Let me take you out. I promise everything will be all right.”

  “No, it’s okay.” Her smile evaporated and she returned to her usual place on the couch. I silently cursed Oakie. Though I was crushed by disappointment, I also recognized that something inside her was waking up. The rumblings of her desire to eat Korean food were getting louder.

&n
bsp; It was in my brother’s Tribeca apartment, over a bowl of sogogi soup, that my mother would make a confession.

  I ladled the soup over bowls of rice and set them down on the coffee table in front of the couch. She moved onto the floor, and we sat across from each other eating the soup. After dinner we made small talk for a while before our conversation trailed off into a familiar silence.

  “Grace?” she said, her voice higher than normal, with a kind of tenderness and vulnerability I hadn’t heard since I was a young child. It was the same tone she used when she was trying to comfort me.

  “What is it?” I felt nervous, like she was about to break bad news.

  “I realize now that you love me.”

  “Why are you saying this? You thought I didn’t?” I was hurt and touched at the same time.

  “I used to think that you hate me.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Because you put me in jail.”

  “Mom,” I gasped. “I only did that because I thought I could help you.” I started to cry. No one in my family had ever spoken about what had happened that night or my motivations for taking such drastic measures. Over time, the gravity of the police incident faded away, and it became just another segment in a string of dramatic events that made up the course of my mother’s mental illness.

  “And when your father died and I try to hug you, you pushed me away, like I was dirty.” She grimaced when she spat out the word, as if it were a piece of rotten fruit.

  “What? No, I … I … Did Oakie tell you that? It was because I couldn’t admit that I was sad.”

  She grabbed my hand and looked into my eyes. “Now I realize they are wrong. You really do love me.”

  I didn’t know of a single person outside my family that had a schizophrenic relative, not until I began writing and speaking about it publicly, and then they started coming out in droves—approaching me after talks, looking up my school email, to say “me too.” Yet, despite not having had firsthand experience with schizophrenia, my friends in grad school were a huge source of support, especially Hosu. Although she had never met my mother in person, she did once speak to her on the phone. “Let me talk to Umma,” she said when I was talking to her from New Jersey.