When You Cannot Speak About the Thing That Most Pains You

I visited my grandfather's grave recently for the first time since his death in 2001. One of the reasons I (and my siblings) had a such a hard time visiting him was because of the pain I feel when I recall how he had to live the last 10-15 years of his life and when I recall the way my family dealt with his mental illness. They didn't deal with it; they rarely talked or acknowledged the fact that my step grandfather was "crazy" and had fixed delusions about the CIA spying on him. The blanket of denial and shame enveloped our family and was palpable and omnipresent. It is also in remembering that I was not there to help and support him in his illness. After my grandmother divorced him, she left him with a little money, but without a caretaker. With the severity of his psychosis, he was not unable to take care of himself. Because neither my grandmother or mother did not care to educate themselves about mental illness, they knew little about his condition in medical terms and basically abandoned him. I found their actions to be unconscionable, but they did not feel any guilt just leaving him to fend for himself. No wonder just a few years after my grandmother and he split (after 22 years of cohabitation and marriage), my grandfather ended up in a public home for the mentally ill in Richmond, VA.
As I work relentlessly on this film without pay, I sometimes find myself wondering why I am willing to endure the many sleepless nights and long 14-hour days. I realize that a part of my tolerance of this lifestyle is because I am determined to process all the emotions I withheld as well as produce this film. The research, pre-production, meeting all these mental health professionals from all over the country, speaking to Asian Americans with mental illnesses and hearing their stories and speaking about my personal experiences as a family member of a consumer have been paving my healing path. Finally after 30 some years of not acknowledging that I had a family member with a mental illness, I have permission to talk about it. These opportunities to speak to Asian Americans with mental illnesses and their family members are unprecedented for me. I wanted to know how their families dealt with this pain. Empathy is a healer and I had longed for those emotional connections to other Asian Americans who had experienced the silent suffering and the kind of spiritual paralysis that comes from denying portions of your daily reality. I needed the validation from other souls who lived in the same culture that I did; Euro-Americans could not understand the underbelly of mental illness as it is exists in Korean culture. I realize that though on the surface, it seems that I am doing this film for humanitarian reasons, which is true, but I am also doing this film for my own process. I went through most of my life, not being able to talk about the issue that most pained me in my early childhood and most of my adulthood.

While my friends and colleagues might talk about cancer and heart disease among their family members, I was not allowed to speak about a close relative's chronic and serious ordeal with chronic paranoid schizophrenia. How do you go about distilling grief into something that might benefit society? Art.