Tastes Like War

by Grace M. Cho

  BY THE TIME MY MOTHER reached the age of twenty, half of her family had already died. My grandmother gave birth to at least four children between the years 1922 and 1941: one boy and three girls. My mother was the youngest. If my grandmother had given birth to more than four children, no one ever spoke of them.

  They were all born when Korea was a colony of Japan, and Gyeongsang Province, where my mother’s family lived, endured the greatest violence by virtue of its proximity to Japan. Under Japanese colonial rule, Koreans were dispossessed of their land and homes and forced into various forms of labor. Young women and girls were taken to Japan to work as sex slaves for the imperial army. Most were teenagers, and some were as young as ten.

  Korean subjects were ordered to speak only Japanese or risk having their tongues cut out, so my grandparents raised their children to speak their oppressors’ language.

  My mother and her siblings lived through their colonized childhoods, but two of them, along with my grandfather, would be lost in the Korean War and its aftermath. My mother and her eldest sister were the survivors.

  The end of Japanese colonial rule in 1945 did not mean the end of occupied Korea, but rather, a change in occupier.

  In August 1945 the United States became the only country in history to use nuclear weapons, bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an event later commemorated by an American holiday called “VJ Day.” Victory over Japan.

  The atomic bombs killed not only the two hundred thousand Japanese that the United States saw as an enemy people but also some twenty thousand Koreans, a people that the United States claimed to have liberated and saved. My mother’s family was in Osaka during World War II, and so they were spared annihilation. But the United States would continue to kill Koreans in order to save them from themselves.

  At the end of World War II, when my mother was four years old, the US drew a line at the 38th parallel, dividing the country in two and ceding the North to the Soviets. As soon as Japanese occupation of Korea ended, American and Soviet occupation began, and Korea became the United States’ first “laboratory of communist containment,” the first “theater of the Cold War,” in which an experiment in mass destruction would play out. The dead, the wounded, the motherless or fatherless, the homeless, the families permanently torn apart when the border was closed—each of these categories numbering in the millions.

  Buried beneath the ashes of the cities and towns that burned to the ground during the Korean War, beneath the sobering statistic of three million identifiable bodies, were the others that could not be easily calculated among the casualties. Bodies that could never be found and counted as dead. Bodies too decomposed to be identified. Entire families wiped out in a single blow with no one left to claim them. People who died of seemingly natural causes in a country too devastated to sustain the life of the remaining population. Dire circumstances that led to the exodus of its survivors.

  My mother’s words about the past, scattered across two decades:

  My brother disappeared during the war, when I was nine.

  My father died during the war, when I was ten.

  My sister Chunja—oh, she was my favorite! She was closest to me in age, you see.

  My sister died when I was twenty, in 1961.

  It would take me twenty-five years to locate my family beneath the rubble.

  Chehalis, Washington, 1980

  THE FIRST TIME I get an inkling of my family history is when my third-grade teacher assigns our class a family-tree project.

  With my father in some faraway port—Manila or Guam or Singapore—I plan to interview only my mother. She hates to talk about the past, but for the benefit of my education, she’s willing to do just about anything.

  I know my grandmother and aunt, my halmeoni and imo, and the two cousins I met during our summer trips to Busan, so I think I know what my mother’s side of the tree will look like.

  I sit down at the high counter in the living room that looks out onto the kitchen. The white wooden shutters that divide the two rooms are open, allowing me to face my mother as she works. This is my favorite spot in the house because I feel tall in the swiveling yellow vinyl barstool, and it’s within arm’s reach of the ceramic cookie jar in the shape of Goofy’s head. I plan to eat a cookie once I finish my family tree, but for now, I open my Garfield notebook and focus on the task at hand.

  “What’s Halmae-ya’s name?” I ask, picturing my grandmother’s hands swish rice under running water. My mother has just fed our two cats and has begun to chop scallions at the pull-out cutting board next to the sink.

  “Cho Sung-woon. C-H-O. First name you spell S-U-N-G-W-O-O-N.”

  “What’s your father’s name?” I don’t call him Halbae because I’ve never even seen a picture of him, and therefore haven’t made the emotional connection that he’s my grandfather.

  “Ha Jum-eul.” Again she spells out the name.

  “What were your grandparents’ names?”

  “Huh. I don’t know,” she says, shaking her head. “Koreans don’t call old people by their first names.”

  “Okay, then … what are the names of the children?” I draw two lines for my mother and her sister, my imo.

  My mother spells out Imo’s name, as well as her own. Then she wipes some bits of scallion off the cutting board and leans against it. She focuses her eyes on the wall two feet in front of her and says, “I had a brother and another sister too.”

  I nearly drop my pencil as I look up, mouth agape.

  “My brother disappeared during the war. I don’t know what happened. I just never saw him again.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Oh, about your age,” she says, still staring at the wall.

  I try to imagine what it would be like to suddenly never see my brother again, and even though I don’t see him much anymore because he’s a big kid, already planning for college, the word “never” still crushes me. An urge comes over me to tear my homework assignment into little pieces, but then I worry that I’ll disappoint my parents and teacher, the people who believe in me and have invested in my education.

  My mother seems lost in a dream.

  “What about your sister?” I ask.

  “My sister Chunja … she was by far the best looking out of all three of us girls. She was my favorite …”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She died before you were born.” Her gaze finally connects with mine, and the two of us stare in silence, amplified by the humming of the long fluorescent bulb mounted on the wall. She closes her eyes and sighs the words, “Aigu! Dap-dap-eu-rah.”

  “Dap-dap-eu-rah”—I’m suffocating—an expression of stifling sadness.

  My mother’s brother, my grandmother’s first child and only son, disappeared at the start of the war in 1950. His body was never found, and the family could not officially claim him as dead, nor did they want to believe that he was gone forever. Historical records would later file his disappearance under the ambiguous category of “missing or wounded” along with some two million others.

  When the armistice agreement was signed in 1953, it spelled out a contract between the United States and North Korea that the war would be resolved with a peace treaty and the divided country would be put back together within six months. Over a third of the surviving population had been separated from their loved ones because they ended up on opposite sides of the border, and the armistice gave them a promise that they would soon be reunited.

  This meant that my missing uncle might resurface once the border reopened. But none of these promises was fulfilled, the signatories of the armistice have remained locked in a stalemate ever since, and my mother’s family never found out whether he died, defected, or simply had the misfortune of being in the wrong place on July 27, 1953.

  Other families—the ones who were lucky enough, and lived long enough—would wait forty, fifty, sixty years to spend a few hours with their lost brothers and sisters during state-supervised visits. The family reunificat
ions would begin during the fourth decade of the armistice and take place every few years, as gestures of goodwill between the two Koreas, each time granting visits to a handful of applicants.

  For example, in August 2018, only eighty-nine out of 57,000 applicants would meet their missing family members after more than sixty-five years apart. One woman, ninety-two-year-old Lee Keum-seom, would see her son again for the first time since 1950, when they lost each other in the chaos of the war. I didn’t know what to do but cry for a whole year, calling out his name…. He was only four years old.1

  But when my mother lived in Korea in the 1950s and 1960s, South Korean families had to act as if their missing kin were dead. If the government suspected that they had any ties to the North, even if such ties were accidental, they could have been persecuted as enemies of the state. So my family was to never again speak my uncle’s name, and my grandmother took in his five-year-old boy, Jinho, one of millions of children who lost parents to the war, and raised him as her fifth child.

  Natural cause: an illness or internal malfunction of the body not directly caused by external forces.

  For years, the only thing my mother could say about my grandfather was that “he died during the Korean War.” I would eventually learn that he wasn’t killed by bombs or bullets, but by stomach cancer.

  What complicated my grandfather’s illness was that all the hospitals had burned to the ground during the first six months of the war, as part of an American policy that destroyed civilian institutions, calling them “military targets” in the official record. By the time he knew of his cancer, there was no place left for the sick to go.

  The lack of infrastructure, the food insecurity, the postwar suffering of survivors would continue throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s.

  My mother’s sister Chunja would also die of stomach cancer, in 1961, at the age of twenty-six.

  I would come to question not only the state of health care when Chunja was sick but also what could have caused such a young woman to develop stomach cancer. I would remember the stories from my research of Koreans who survived by scavenging half-eaten hot dogs and hamburgers from the dumpsters at American military bases and wonder how much of her illness had been linked to her impoverished diet. I’d remember what my mother told me about the kinds of things her family ate during the (post)war era: We used to catch spiders and grasshoppers, sometimes little birds, and roast ’em over a fire. The spiders tasted pretty darn good, but those little birds hardly have any meat on ’em. Hardly worth all the trouble of plucking and cleaning, ’cause we practically eat it in one bite, bone and all!

  There are no pictures of my dead aunt or anyone else from my Korean family prior to the 1963 glamour shot of my twenty-two-year-old mother in a beehive hairdo, an off-the-shoulder faux-fur stole, and black kohl eyeliner, flashing her wide smile and dimples for the camera. I had internalized this image as the epitome of feminine beauty, so it was hard for me to imagine a sister who was more stunning than my mother. My surviving aunt would later confirm that my dead aunt was a vision of such otherworldly proportions that she could make any woman look ordinary by contrast.

  She would corroborate other parts of the story, too, answering my broken Korean with a single word: “Geu-reh.” Correct.

  “Chunja Imo died of stomach cancer?”

  “Geu-reh.”

  “Your oppa was lost in the war?”

  “Geu-reh.” And then she would add questions of her own: “Do you suppose he’s still alive? He would be almost ninety now. Could he be still alive in North Korea?”

  Princeton, New Jersey, 2006

  MY MOTHER AND I are sitting in her apartment eating a meal of ssam, grilled meat and rice wrapped in lettuce leaves. In between bites of food, she lets loose a secret about her beautiful dead sister.

  “My sister had two children, you know. Boys.”

  “No, I didn’t know! Where are they now?”

  “No one knows. They just disappeared.” She puts the ssam in her mouth and begins chewing.

  “What do you mean ‘they just disappeared’?” I wait as she chews and swallows, pushes more of the ssam into her mouth, chews and swallows again, until she has eaten the entire wrap in one continuous bite.

  “You see, in Korea, children belong to their father,” she says, as she assembles the next piece of ssam. “No one knows what he did with them after she died.”

  The thought enters my mind that they were given up for adoption and are living somewhere in America, with names like Andrew and Christopher, or maybe in France. André and Christophe.

  I think about some of the adopted kids I knew growing up who were renamed Cathy, Cody, and Robert. Their Korean names forgotten, replaced. Their birthdays rewritten as the date of their adoption. Their Korean families rendered dead through official documents, the children told to never again speak their names.

  At the time that I learned of my missing cousins, I had also recently researched the ways in which my own family history was implicated in the history of transnational adoption. Although it began as a rescue mission in 1954 to find American homes for Korean war orphans, it quickly turned into a substitute for social welfare and a government policy to rid the country of an unwanted population.

  South Korea’s first president, Syngman Rhee, whose motto was “one race, one nation,” publicly denounced the presence of “Yankee wives and mixed race children” as a “social crisis.” He signed a presidential order for the placement of these children in transnational adoption as a solution to the “GI baby problem.” American propaganda depicted the poor, socially rejected biracial child as the most vulnerable of all creatures to the clutches of communism, and therefore, Americans would be exercising their patriotic duty by rescuing them.

  At the same time, Korean social workers launched aggressive campaigns to convince mothers working in the camptowns that Korea could offer nothing of value to their children and the only rightful place for them was in their father’s country. And indeed, the law was structured to make it so. Children born to Korean mothers and foreign fathers would not be allowed to attend public schools or register as South Korean citizens. Long before I was born, Rhee’s policies had already determined the conditions of our exile.

  South Korea’s adoption program and American campaigns to save Korean children from communism and the “Asian disregard for human life” had become so successful that, by the 1960s, Korean social workers had to expand their recruitment efforts to other marginalized populations.2 Single mothers and poor families of “pure” Korean descent became the new targets. Instead of finding homes for needy children, adoption agencies began looking for children to place in homes, thus continuing the steady supply of Korean adoptees westward. One former Korean social worker spoke openly about this practice: I misunderstood my job and thought I was supposed to make the birth mothers relinquish their children.3

  In the minds of many Koreans, America became a mythical place where there was no poverty or racism, and anyone could make it big. In the words of one woman who gave her two Amerasian children up for adoption: One time my older one came home with his trousers soaked and frozen with his own pee. Children bullied him by saying, “You must have a big penis. Let me see.”… I talked to them for about a month and said, “We have been waiting a long time for your father who has never come. If you stay here, you will face constant discrimination. However, in the US there is no such thing.”4

  Chehalis, Washington, 1977

  IT IS A MILD fall day in first grade, and I have just gotten off at the bus stop near my house. The neighborhood blond bully calls after me.

  “Wait! Wait! I want to show you something.”

  I turn around and watch her crouch down and peer into the shady grass beneath a small grove of oak trees. Tentatively, I stop and move in her direction. When I’m close enough to almost see over her shoulder, she springs to her feet with a rusty hammer in her hand and waves it at me. I begin to run and think I’ve lost her before I realize that
she has stopped to dip the hammer into a mound of fresh dog poo. She begins chasing me again, aiming her shit-smeared weapon at my head. Another child from the bus stop joins in and tackles me. He pins me down as the blond bully holds the hammer above my face, but somehow I wriggle away and run.

  Panic pulses through my body as I feel myself slipping on mud and falling into a ditch. I land on my back and look up through the tops of the gold and green sun-dappled trees at a rare blue sky. A trickle of cold water runs down my neck and soaks through the back of the red corduroy jacket that my mother had just washed that morning. I picture how upset she’ll be that it’s already dirty, and the tears start. I squeeze my eyes shut so that the blond bully cannot see me crying, but I hear her cackling at the top of the ditch.

  “Dog eater!” she calls out as she drops the hammer into the water next to me, splashing mud and feces onto my jacket.

  Sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one, my mother journeyed from her family’s ancestral town of Changnyeong to the port city of Busan in search of work. This I know by putting together two pieces of evidence: according to my cousin in Korea, she went to high school for one or two years in Changnyeong; she was pregnant with my brother in Busan by age twenty-one. Only the second one can be proven.

  Not once did my mother ever narrate a clear story about her coming of age, but she did drop a few crumbs of information during our dinner conversations over the last ten years of her life. Once in a while, she would flesh out a character or scene from postwar Korea that had stayed in her memory, and in so doing, she gave me the outline of a story.

  Though my mother had lost half her family, it seemed as if her heart remained open. She spoke with compassion about the other survivors among whom she lived. Around her were people of all ages trying to make a living in a country still reeling from the devastation of the war: the grandmothers who carried heavy bundles of cabbages into the city to take to market, the girls who quit school to toil long days in the factory, the men who stole and butchered dogs to sell for meat. She couldn’t admit that she pitied the dog traders, because they were regarded as the dregs of society, and no respectable person could excuse the filthiness and dishonesty of their work. One of her own dogs even fell victim to them and was turned into meat. As much as she hated them for snatching her pet, and as much as she internalized public opinion that they were unworthy of her concern, she could not help but wonder what circumstances led them to that fate. In some small way, she felt for them too.