한: Han

Abstract

Han is an epistolary memoir that explores schizophrenia not solely as a medical diagnosis but as a way to understand cross-cultural relationships, intergenerational trauma, and challenge the narrative of the history of the Korean War by looking at it through the lens of mental illness. Told in the second-person “you,” the narrator writes to her grandmother, or Halmoni, who has dementia and is slowly losing her memories. She retells her grandmother’s stories through the epistolary to give them back to her. Nakyong, a Korean American who has schizophrenia attempts to understand herself and her diagnosis through her grandmother’s stories about her own experiences developing schizophrenia at age eight, in the midst of the Korean War. This memoir also attempts to give insight into Korean history and the narrator’s family history from 1942 to the present through the experience of mental illness. Han, an epistolary memoir with lyric and graphic memoir elements, is a genealogical cartography that traces the lineage of sexual trauma and mental illness in one family; specifically, between a grandmother and a granddaughter.