Tastes Like War

by Grace M. Cho

  When we first arrived to Chehalis, however, the sign off Exit 76 was promising: Welcome to the Friendly City.

  Chehalis was a neighborly kind of place where you could show up on someone’s doorstep unannounced, and if they knew you, they’d invite you inside for a cup of coffee or a soft drink and some cookies.

  My father was the only one in my family who most people in town actually knew. Everywhere we went they seemed to like and respect him. Sometimes they’d pull me aside and say, “Your dad’s a great guy, ya know.”

  My mother’s acquaintances were fleeting, as she tended to associate with other outsiders and immigrants who arrived after her, but most of them didn’t last long in Chehalis. There was a Black man named Ollie and a Filipina whose name I don’t remember. She did develop one close friendship with a longtime local woman, a white woman, who was old enough to be her grandmother. Her name was Ethel and she lived in the St. Helen’s Apartments, upstairs from the Book and Brush, the town’s bookstore and art-supply store. She visited Ethel regularly until she died in the mid-1980s, which was around the same time that my mother began to show signs of schizophrenia.

  I’m not sure what it was like for my brother. Because of our age difference, we lived in different worlds. When I was in my early twenties, he told me that he didn’t think Chehalis was as bad as I made it out to be. “That’s because you were a boy,” I said. “The racism was worse in Korea,” he shot back. Both statements are probably true. Regardless, he seemed to have had something of a social life when he was in high school. As for me, I had one true and lasting friend.

  1978

  IT’S RECESS AND I’m playing by myself on the log toys, holding on to a slide pole with one hand and walking around it in circles. A blond girl from my class grabs the pole next to me and begins to copy me. I glance at her, nervous about what she’ll say. The tension builds as we continue to quietly rotate around the poles. Finally, she breaks the silence.

  “Are you Korean?”

  I’m amazed by her question. “How did you know?” Instantly I like her, the first child to not call me Chinese or Japanese.

  “My parents hosted a family from Korea, and they also went to Seoul,” she says.

  Decades later I will marvel at the rarity of a small-town white American couple vacationing in 1970s South Korea.

  We exchange names—hers is Jenny—and then go back to walking in parallel circles. We play together the next day at recess, and again the next, and soon we begin seeing each other every day after school too. At her house we eat homemade Finnish cardamom pastries and Wasa bread with cubes of cream cheese. At mine, my mother wakes up early from her daytime nap to set the big dining table with orange linen napkins that she sewed by hand, crystal plates, and tiny silver forks for our afternoon snack, which is usually fresh fruit: strawberries and chunks of honeydew melon dipped in powdered sugar. Jenny becomes my dearest friend, my psychic armor for the onslaught ahead.

  The people in my family’s immediate midst—schoolteachers, next-door neighbors, and my father’s friends and relatives—were generally kind and well-meaning toward us. At the outer limits of Chehalis’s six square miles were the hicks, the rednecks, the shitkickers, as the kids in my high school called them, and as they sometimes called themselves too. They had a reputation for holding the same views as Uncle Sam on the Hamilton Farms billboard. But the divide between town and country was an open border, and so we lived among both people who tolerated immigrants and those who wanted us to “go home.”

  To survive my father’s hometown, we sometimes had to make ourselves invisible. My mother tried to wring the foreignness out of her tongue by speaking only English, except for the names of Korean foods and things for which there was no translation, even at home with us, her Korean children. And so I became an outsider, not only to the place where I grew up but also to the language of my birth country. I would always be excluded from the we of “woori mal”—our language, as Koreans call Korean. Decades later, after summers of studying Korean in windowless classrooms in Seoul and conforming the sound of my speech to the standard dialect, I still could not utter the words “woori mal” to Koreans without an interrogation. Where are you from? Why don’t you speak Korean well? Are both your mother and father Korean? No, they would conclude,you are not Korean.

  1980

  FOURTH GRADE. I’ve just arrived at Jenny’s house for one of our marathon playdates. Instead of her usual chatter and excitement at my arrival, she’s quiet and avoids eye contact.

  “What’s the matter?” I ask, and then her words spill out.

  “My neighbors asked my mom who your real dad is!” Her face turns red, and she begins to cry. “They don’t believe that your dad is really your dad. My mom got so mad and told them it’s not true, but they wouldn’t believe her!”

  I’m awash in emotion, feeling vulnerable but protected by Jenny’s family—her mother’s anger a reflection of her sense of justice, possibly of her own identity as a Finnish immigrant’s daughter. More than anything, I feel shocked. It’s the first time I realize that my family is a scandal, the first time I’m able to see myself through the adult locals’ eyes.

  How can they not see how much I look like my father? We have the same angular jawline, the same full cheeks, the same cupid’s-bow dimple; my mother marvels at the similarities almost every time she looks at me. Yet the white people can’t see it. All they see is the Korean in me. The Korean they call “Chink” and “Jap.”

  Who am I without my father to claim as my own? Now that my relationship to him has been called into question, I’m even more of a foreigner in this town. Illegitimate to the core.

  The racism in Chehalis was not of the colorblind variety. All colors but white were highly visible. You could count the nonwhite people on two hands, a few fingers each of Black, Brown, and Yellow. While the numbers slowly increased over the years that I lived there, it wasn’t a linear progression. Sometimes there’d be a sharp decline in the people of color census because of some tragedy. A Black boy named Chris in my brother’s high school class who died by suicide, I can’t remember if by hanging or gunshot. A Korean adoptee who survived slitting her wrists, her scars the object of other people’s ridicule or pity. She was in my high school for a year or so before she disappeared. A Mexican girl named Kari in my junior high class who went away after she became pregnant, at the age of twelve.

  Then there was Sheena, a Cambodian girl who arrived in 1987. We were in the same gym class, and she always talked to me in the locker room: “You are the only one here who is nice to me.”

  Jenny came to me one day, upset about something that had been going on with Sheena in her typing class. Sheena sat next to her each day, her keys clicking out Everyone hates me. They call me ugly and stupid. They call me bitch. Line after line of vitriol.

  “Isn’t Miss McPherson going to do something?” asked Jenny. “Or is she just going to keep giving her papers back with her words per minute written at the top?”

  By 1987 some of the immigrant haters had gotten used to my family, but they still saw the Asians that were settling along the Pacific Coast as a threat. At some moments, their fear of the Other rose up in waves, against newer immigrants like Sheena, and at others, it manifested as tiny ripples, the microaggressions that weren’t yet part of a public conversation.

  I hate the Chinks and Japs. They’re taking over everything. Oh, but I’m not talking about you! You’re okay. You’re different.

  These were words I heard from people I considered to be my friends.

  Part of me also saw myself as different, an Americanized half American, but the rest of me felt the full sting of the insult. My Amerasian double consciousness.

  The self-effacing part of me couldn’t process the unrelenting hostility. And as hostile as the environment was for me, it was more so for my mother, who for years had to navigate unfriendly waters by herself while my father was at sea. She had such high hopes for becoming American.

  When I wa
s eight or nine, I woke up one school day to find that, instead of changing into her nightgown after returning from her 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. graveyard shift, my mother had put on a blue polyester pantsuit and was blotting her lipstick in the mirror.

  “Mama, where are you going?”

  “Seattle,” she said as she smoothed the creases in her pants. I was surprised that no one had mentioned this earlier. Seattle was the place we went for cultural events and “important matters.”

  “Really? What for?”

  “I’m taking citizenship test.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s for Mama’s becoming American citizen today. I put cereal on the table for you. Go eat.”

  She got into her car to drive ninety miles to Seattle, spent the day at the Immigration and Naturalization Service center, drove ninety miles back in the afternoon, began cooking dinner when she got home, and left herself almost no time to sleep before her next shift.

  “What happened with the test?” I asked when I saw her that night.

  “Nothing happened.”

  “What do you mean ‘nothing happened’?”

  “What do you mean ‘what do I mean’? Nothing happened. I just took test and now I’m becoming American citizen.”

  Such a simple statement of fact, but what new privileges would that status grant her? In what tangible way would it make her life better? Maybe in another place I could have seen the difference.

  1983

  I AM TWELVE years old. My mother comes to pick me up from school, and as we start the drive home, she becomes suspicious that a car is following us. She turns suddenly to test the driver. “I lost that sonofabitch,” she mutters to herself, but a moment later, he reappears in the rearview mirror. Fear begins to grip me as I start to wonder if we’re his prey. Images from Friday the 13th and Halloween fill my head, of a masked killer knifing us to death after a long harrowing chase. Then I come back to reality. If he’s going to kill us, it’ll probably be with a shotgun. My mother speeds up and so does he. Each move she makes, he makes in turn. The cat-and-mouse continues all the way to our home, where she pulls over to the side of the road and parks in front of the ivy-covered oak tree at the edge of our front yard instead of pulling into the driveway. The other car parks right behind us. I think that she must have parked on the street so that the stalkers wouldn’t know that this is our house, especially since we are living there alone, with my brother gone away to college and my father somewhere in the Pacific.

  She gets out, rushes over to the stranger, and bangs her fist against the windshield. “Get out of the car,” she says sternly.

  I’m too scared to move from my seat, but I turn around to see who’s been following us. There are four young white men, and their windows are rolled down. The driver doesn’t move.

  My mother pounds the windshield again. “Get out!” She yells this time.

  He opens the door and emerges from behind the wheel. It’s a lanky boy of sixteen or seventeen with a mop of brown curls. He’s a head taller than her, but she stares him down as he shuffles his feet and kicks pebbles against the curb.

  “Why are you following me?”

  He turns around to look at his friends still inside the car.

  “I said, Why are you following me?” she enunciates, exaggerating each syllable.

  “Why are you following me?” he repeats, mocking her accent. His friends chuckle. He looks at them again and then at my mother. He begins making stupid sounds to mimic a fake Asian language. The boys in the car begin to laugh so hard they’re clutching their sides.

  I brace myself as I see my mother’s eyes bulging, her nostrils flaring. She’s in fight mode, not about to back down. She takes a step closer to the boy and cranes her neck up at him, her fists clenched on her hips. Her face is about six inches from his when she screams, “You leave me and my children alone! Do you hear me?” The volume of her voice startles them out of their laughter. “You get the hell out of here right now! If I ever see you again I swear I will kill you.”

  The stalker doesn’t attempt to talk back or make fun of her a second time. He just gets back in his car and drives away.

  Three years later, my mother will get fed up with being grateful and begin to call out all the shitty things that people do to her. She’ll name the experience of being followed, harassed, persecuted. Everyone in this town is out to get me. At first it will seem entirely rational, completely grounded in reality. Not crazy talk. Not schizophrenia.

  1986

  IT’S THE SUMMER before my sophomore year of high school and the boy I’ve had a crush on for a year invites me over to his house. I’d been hanging around him and his friends my entire freshman year, thinking that they were part of the cool alternative crowd. Finally, he noticed me! Practically every moment between the invitation and the date, I obsess over what to wear and fantasize about him falling in love with me.

  I arrive at his house swimming in anticipation and sporting a new magenta tube skirt. Ten minutes later he’s asking me to “get baked.” He pulls out a pipe and a bag of weed. My first time smoking. “Take another hit, Gracie,” he says again and again, putting the pipe in my mouth until I’m too stoned to move, barely able to speak. He kisses me. I’m too incapacitated to kiss back. The Beatles are playing in the background. Michelle, ma belle. My first kiss. He takes his pants off and tells me to suck his cock. I try to speak and manage the words, “Not yet.” I’m too incapacitated to fight back.

  Years later, I will learn that the pot was laced with embalming fluid.

  As soon as I get home, my mother calls out, “Grace-ya, come talk to me!” I’m still high and terrified that she’ll know what I’ve been doing. She looks at me affectionately, takes my hand, and calls me Soon-hee, her old-fashioned Korean name for me that means the “most innocent girl.” “Soon-hee-ya, you are my innocent girl, aren’t you?” I feel spooked that she’s saying this to me now, at this particular moment. More than anything I’m consumed with guilt and shame.

  Years later, I will understand that innocence was another thing that she wished so dearly for me to have precisely because it had been denied to her. My guilt and shame will turn to rage.

  My sophomore year begins a month later. I’m at tennis practice hitting balls against the wall while I wait my turn to drill serves on the far court. It’s a perfect late summer day—blue skies, 75 degrees, the kind of weather that reminds you that you’re connected to something larger, that heartache passes. I listen to the pop and swish of the balls’ movements and let the rhythm soothe me.

  Three of the boy’s friends appear out of nowhere and surround me, cornering me against the wall. They jeer, “I heard Dan fucked your mouth.” One of them grabs my racket and the other two pin me to the ground. The boy with the racket hits me between the legs with the handle, pumps it up and down, to simulate a rape. They seemed to be having a very good time. “It’s true what they say about Oriental girls,” he shouts. Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter—their uproarious laughter … their having fun at my expense.3 They disperse once the joke gets old.

  I look up, and no one—not the coach or any of the other girls—seems to have noticed the assault that happened in plain sight. I try to locate Jenny, and then spot her on the far court, too distant to have seen clearly. But the coach, the only adult present, is on the court closest to me with seven or eight girls. None of them so much as glances at me, even as I struggle to get up off the ground, brush the dirt off my uniform, and hobble to pick up my racket that the boys tossed against the fence. I wonder if they’re choosing not to see, because that’s the kind of thing that happens in Chehalis.

  Later that fall: a scene of my impulsive near suicide at age fifteen. A fight with my parents that started over something trivial. Me, traumatized by my first sexual experience, the sexual violence I can’t yet name. I release my anguish with a loud guttural cry and run across the kitchen toward the knife block. “I’m going to kill myself!” I yell as I grab th
e chef’s knife. My father wrests it out of my hand, my mother stands back and gasps. I collapse on the floor in tears.

  “I hate this town!” I scream at my father. “Why did you bring me here?”

  He looks shocked. “Would it have been better if I’d left you in Korea?”

  “Korea? What’s Korea got to do with any of this?” I shout. “Why couldn’t we have lived in Seattle?”

  I am so mired in my personal hell that I can’t see that my mother’s hell is burning hotter.

  In a few weeks, I’ll discover that she’s been hallucinating, and no one in my family will believe me. It’ll be another thing that almost makes me crack, but I’ll hang on long enough to get out of Chehalis. And she will encourage me to get out. One day as I’m studying for the PSATs, she will approach me at the kitchen table, set plates of fruit and jjin bbang in front of me, and comb my hair with her fingers. “Huh-huh. Chakhada! Study hard and go to best college, far away. There is nothing for you in a place like this.”

  Twenty, thirty years later, I’ll look back on 1986 as the year my mother began to die.

  New York City, 2016

  IT’S THE NIGHT of the presidential election, and as I ride the subway home from Manhattan to Brooklyn, Jenny texts me from Seattle: “What the fuck is happening?”

  “Unusually large turnout of rural white voters,” I text back.

  “Oh lord,” she replies.

  In the days ahead, friends and colleagues in my little blue bubble of New York City will ask, “Who are all these people that voted for him?”

  My simmering rage about the bullies and rapists and xenophobes from my childhood, all the injustices my mother faced, will boil over once again. One small thing I’ll be grateful for is that she’ll never have to see a Trump presidency. My mother, now eight years dead.