Tastes Like War: A Memoir

Koonja’s reclusive tendencies began in 1986 when Cho was 15. Koonja quit her job at Green Hill juvenile detention center and swapped foraging for television-watching. Koonja’s reclusiveness coincided with Cho’s father’s retirement and brought into an unprecedented level of proximity, the formerly distanced couple argued. Cho reflects that her parents’ relationship had always been violent and has a memory of her clinging to her father’s leg while he repeatedly beat her mother.

Still, in 1986, Cho found it easier to sympathize with her father over her mother who was growing paranoid that the neighbors were spreading rumors about the family, that her coworkers at Green Hill were plotting against her, and that a radical right-wing organization called the John Birch Society was spying on her for being a suspected communist. As she became increasingly paranoid, Koonja began suspecting that the rumors spread about the family included high-profile politicians.

Cho looked for explanations for her mother’s change in mental state. Her father blamed menopause. While researchers have identified the drop in estrogen associated with menopause as a factor in psychosis, her father’s use of this excuse in the 1980s was a means of dismissing her mother’s troubles as female ones.