![]() ![]() Cho’s mother comes to live with her and her boyfriend in Queens, but then moves to Princeton to live near her brother and his family. The third stage represent something of a rapprochement. The subject of her dissertation is her mother, as she “wants to write her back into existence” (p. She leaves the west coast to go to Brown for college and then moves to New York for graduate school at CUNY in sociology. Cho is forced to negotiate assimilation on her own, too, and becomes a model student. Cho is largely on her own in trying to find a way for her mother to get help and is terrified of losing her. Cho and her mother have screaming fights, one of which led Cho’s mother to slap her, so Cho calls the police, who take her mother, not to a psychiatric ER, but to jail. She withdraws from social life (“socially dead”), as she becomes floridly psychotic. Her mother is not willing to talk about her past.ĭuring the second, disturbing stage, Cho’s mother begins to be grandiose and paranoid. Cho describes her mother’s evolution to being a vivacious host, and finding a direction with work, selling blackberries, blackberry pies, and later mushrooms. We do not hear much about Cho’s early years, besides the immense and rocky transition from living in Korea to moving to small town America as a child. The notion of having different experiences with the same mother is worth noting, as it rings so true, and corresponds to a clinical sensibility that discerns how parenting is not a unitary function and can vary at different stages of life. There is a final twist in what she learns about her mother’s history that I will not reveal in case readers are inspired to read this memoir, which I heartily recommend. She suggests that she had three mothers, the first from birth up to her teenage years, the second as an adolescent to young adulthood when her mother became psychotic and was diagnosed as schizophrenic, and the third during her adult years when she learns more about her mother’s history and comes to understand her mother’s schizophrenia as produced from her war trauma (from the Japanese occupation of Korea and the Korean war). ![]() She has a contentious relationship with her father, exacerbated at one point by finding a letter from David Duke, the white supremacist politician, thanking him for his donation.Īt the center of the memoir is the complex relationship Cho has with her mother. Cho’s parents had a tumultuous (and occasionally violent) relationship, and end up getting divorced, re-married and then divorced. Cho grew up in Chehalis, Washington, her father’s hometown, that was white and conservative-a place where the John Birch society thrived. Grace Cho defines herself in relation to her family in her memoir, her white American father, a merchant marine and former farmer, and her Korean born mother who survived the occupation of Korea by Japan and the Korean war, and her brother. Cho (2021) and The Absent Moon (2023) by Luiz Schwarz. To help us make sense of the construct, I would like to discuss two remarkable but quite different memoirs: Tastes Like War by Grace M. On the face of it, there is something radically strange and disturbing about how a person can be so profoundly affected by the experiences from the life of another person, without any conscious intentionality to pass the experiences on by the second person. ![]() Much remains unresolved about understanding precisely how the neurobiology of transmission works (Jovanovic et al., 2023 Yehuda & Lehrner, 2018). Originally, evidence for its existence came from Holocaust studies, although diversified studies now continue to add support. The intergenerational transmission of trauma is an intriguing but enigmatic construct.
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