by Grace M. Cho
I became quiet and introspective as we crossed the Verrazano Bridge, the massive towers and long steel cables mesmerizing me. I remembered the day when I had driven my mother from New Jersey to my old apartment in Queens. I told her that it was my favorite bridge, but she was not impressed. “Hmph. This bridge needs a new coat of paint, pretty badly,” she had said. I wondered if she had seen it at night, lit up like strings of Christmas lights, might she have been able to see its beauty instead of its flaws?
Sani dropped me off at Eighty-Sixth Street. I shivered as I got out of the car, descended into the subway station, and took the R train back to my empty apartment.
The late winter freeze made my brother’s garage feel like a walk-in refrigerator on the day I went back to New Jersey to sort through her belongings. He had already moved her stuff from the apartment upstairs into the garage. “I figured it would be easier for you this way,” he said.
I began randomly unpacking the two dozen or so contractor bags and found things I hadn’t seen in decades—the lacy nightgowns and satin slippers I used to try on whenever I could sneak into her bedroom closet, the ornate garments she sewed in her attic workshop, the perfumed soaps she had been saving for some special occasion that never arrived, the silver faux-fur jacket she wore only once, to the wedding of the logging tycoon whose house she used to clean until she fell from a second-story window while washing it. Seeing the jacket sparked my memory of the day the accident happened. I was three or four and she had taken me to work with her.
“Stay right here near the window, so I can see you, Grace-ya?” she said, setting me up to play with some toys on the other side of the window. “Mama is going to be right here the whole time, okay? Make sure you can see me. Promise Mama that you don’t go any farther than that.”
I did as I was told and played quietly next to the window as she washed it from the outside. We made faces at each other through the glass, and in that instant the ladder tipped backward, and I watched as she disappeared from my sight. We were both temporarily paralyzed—she was injured, and I was keeping my promise to her that I wouldn’t move.
In the next bag I unpacked was the old taupe-colored purse, but it didn’t stir me in the same way because she carried it with her up until the end, on the rare occasions we took her out. But then I looked inside. There was a handkerchief and her wallet, neither of which seemed out of the ordinary at first. The handkerchief was stained with little puddles of mascara that belied my mother’s persona as a tough woman. I had given her the wallet for Christmas in 1993. It contained a long-expired driver’s license and a parking ticket from a mental health center dated May 1994, fourteen years before she died. It was the last time she had ever driven a car or gone outside on her own. I couldn’t help but wonder about the connection between the tear-stained handkerchief and the document of her last foray into the world as a semifunctional person. I could barely stand the weight of these things, the tokens of my mother’s shattered life.
But the last item I found inspired warmth as much as it did sadness. Inside the purse was nestled a small heavy bundle wrapped in several layers of fabric. I unraveled three long pieces of turquoise silk to uncover another bundle, wrapped in white tissue paper, inside which was yet another cloth cradling her most treasured jewelry. Among these pieces was a tiny gold bracelet that had once been mine. It was a delicate, narrow cuff with two little bells dangling from the center and clusters of flowers engraved on either side. Following the Korean custom of honoring a child’s first birthday with gifts of gold, my mother had given it to me when I turned one. That bracelet used to be one of my most beloved objects when I was a girl, but I had forgotten about it until that moment.
Over the next hour, I packed as many of her belongings as I could fit into the back of my friend Rose’s car and left the rest in the garage. “I’m leaving now!” I shouted as I knocked on my brother’s back door. He came outside holding a black plastic box containing my half of the ashes, handed them to me, and said goodbye.
I got into the passenger seat of the car and set the box down between my feet, hugging it with my calves. “I can’t believe this is all that’s left of her,” I said to Rose.
“I know. The feeling is surreal because you just want to”—she shook her head—“you just want to hug them, but they’re gone.”
When I got home, I placed my mother’s ashes on the windowsill next to my bed, hung the frilly nightgowns on the clothesline that stretched across the sleep alcove of my studio apartment, and laid her favorite robe on my mattress. The sight of the robe suddenly angered me. I had seen her in it on so many recent occasions, but there it was, empty and lifeless. I screamed as I dumped the contents of the other bags onto the floor and grabbed her bra and a few random pieces to stuff inside the robe. I formed the robe into the shape of a woman, breasts and all, and lay down next to it, and buried my head into its shoulder. I smelled my mother’s scent still on the robe, and another wave of grief pummeled me. I cried out uncontrollably, “Umma! Umma! Umma!” and dug my fingers into the makeshift effigy. “Umma, come back! Umma!”
As if she heard my call, a deluge of childhood memories washed over me. That’s how I started to remember kindergarten.
It was still dark in my bedroom. It must have been near dawn but the mornings were gray and cold in the Pacific Northwest and no sunlight filtered in through my window. I slowly emerged from the fog of sleep to my mother’s syrupy voice. I felt her hands grip my legs and gently squeeze to get the circulation going. Groggy but awake, I started to become aware of her massaging my legs and singing that it was time to get up. She quickly pulled back the covers and before there was a chance for me to feel the chill of morning air, she lifted me onto her back, wrapped me in a heated blanket, carried me into the kitchen, and gently placed me in a chair at the table. She kept the lights dimmed until my eyes adjusted and then gradually brightened the room. In front of me she placed a fragrant bowl of miyeok-guk with a scoop of rice in it. The seaweed soup was warm and briny, with little bits of beef and enough sesame oil to make it taste rich. It was one of my favorite foods and usually served on birthdays, so it felt like a special occasion. I was enjoying it so much that whatever anxiety I might have had about my first day of school dissipated.
This morning ritual continued my entire first year of school. Every day she’d carry me from my bed to the kitchen table to serve me my favorite foods, even chocolate layer cake with chocolate icing, which I used to call “birthday cake.” While I was eating, she’d heat my clothes in the dryer and bake my outerwear in the oven. Usually her timing was spot on, but when the shoelaces started getting crispy and others started noticing the burnt edges of my winter coat, I began to wonder if I seemed strange. Regardless, my mother’s efforts paid off. I went to school with little or no resistance and I performed well. And yet, this was not enough for her. She needed insurance.
So she hatched a plan to throw an end-of-the-year cocktail party for the staff of the town’s elementary, middle, and high schools. It was the first party she had ever hosted in the United States and she treated it as if it were the most important thing she would ever do. She spent days studying recipes in ladies’ magazines, shopping for ingredients, and picturing exactly how she wanted everything to look. One day we drove to the Bon Marché to look for fancy service ware and later to a fabric store where we picked out material to make dresses. My mother was learning to sew and this was the perfect opportunity to practice her new skills. She selected a sleek velvet fabric in mottled brown and gold and a metallic lace trim studded with amber jewels for the neckline. For me, she chose white satin with grosgrain ribbon and tiny pink rosettes. When we got home, she ran up to the attic, and after an intense few hours, emerged in a low-cut ankle-length gown with ruching at the shoulders. She was five feet five—statuesque for a Korean woman of her time. The dress elongated her frame and flattered her miniature hourglass shape. “Hwaaa,” she said as she admired herself in the mirror. “Don’t I look pretty?”
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On the day of the party, my mother was focused on the mass production of food. Every square inch of counter space was covered with thousands of hors d’oeuvres—water chestnuts wrapped in bacon, roasted mushroom caps stuffed with sweet Italian sausage and garlicky bread crumbs, bite-size bits of Korean barbecued beef, crudités carved into the shape of flowers and goldfish, fruit cut into fans, each one speared with a frilly toothpick and carefully arranged on small crystal platters. My parents, who never drank liquor, created a liquor cabinet just for the occasion. My father was there mostly in a supporting role, and as a man who sailed on a boat half the year, this was his usual role in our family. He cooed when my mother changed into her new dress and gold sandals. Her high heels and curled hair piled on top of her head added another five inches to her height, making her as tall as my father. She looked like some gilded goddess poised to walk down a red carpet. By contrast, my father looked quite plain. He wore something that didn’t stand out, probably a clean, ironed, button-down shirt and a pair of creased dress pants, probably in neutral colors. Maybe he used a little Brylcreem on his thinning salt-and-pepper hair or dabbed a few drops of Aqua Velva on his strong wide jaw, the one vestige of his handsomeness that remained untouched by age. I think my brother was there, too, but I have no clear memory of him.
The first guests to arrive were my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Jensson, looking the way she always did for school—mousy brown hair combed straight, cotton blouse and knee-length skirt. Her husband, Mr. Jensson, was dressed as plainly as my father. My velvet-and-lamé-clad mother greeted them and ushered them into a house that smelled like bacon and sesame oil. Other school staff arrived, and she practiced her most polite cocktail-party English. “Please come in.” “Won’t you take a seat?” “Do have some more.” She laughed and smiled and served up an endless array of delicacies, working the crowd with a platter in each hand. When her guests were sufficiently drunk, she broke out the bulgogi skewers and said, “Want to try some Korean food? You never tried anything delicious as this one.” By the end of the night, the crowd was thoroughly intoxicated. She had dazzled my current teachers and principals—as well as my future teachers and principals—with a generous supply of food and drink, served with a dash of flirtation.
This was perhaps the first time that she flipped the script; this was her territory, and she was now the host rather than the stranger, showing her guests how to properly welcome newcomers. My mother’s magnanimity, her delicious food, her seductive charm, were all self-devised political tools to get what she needed, and maybe these tools had always been part of her arsenal, going back to her days as a club hostess in Korea. In this case, what she needed was to give her children an advantage in school. I couldn’t yet see how shrewd she was, but my father would remind me every few years of her intellect. “You know where you got your smarts from, don’t ya? Not from me!”
The party was such a success that it became an annual event. Though my mother had made it clear that cooking was not an acceptable profession for me, she unwittingly showed me how powerful it was. None of the adults would ever forget me.
When she was alive the only memory that stood out about kindergarten was that of the blond bully conjuring the specter of my mother’s permanent absence, and once that absence became real, these other things surfaced. I sensed the phantom image of my young mother’s hands gently shaking me. My body remembered our routine: the singing, the leg massages, the getting wrapped in heated blankets and transported to a dimly lit kitchen where breakfasts felt like birthdays.
I looked out at the piles of old clothes I had dumped onto the floor of my studio apartment, and there was the bejeweled velvet gown.
Grace-ya, remember me?
In her death, she was the sweetest of ghosts.
5. KIMCHI BLUES
Unscientific studies conclude that if you were to ask ten Koreans, “What is the one thing you cannot live without?” at least seven of them would say kimchi.
—THE ECONOMIST, October 4, 2010
When my family was gone, I ate kimchi … I might not have survive without it.
—My mother’s war story
New York City, 2008
A WEEK AFTER MY MOTHER DIED, I stopped at a grocery store in Manhattan’s Koreatown and bought a jar of kimchi. I didn’t give it much thought at first. It was just an instinct. Stopping at that market on my way to Penn Station, where I’d catch the Northeast Corridor line to her house, had become a weekly habit during the ten years that she lived in New Jersey.
When I left the store that day, I meant to get on the downtown Q train that would take me home, but instead I walked right past it and had almost arrived at Penn Station before I remembered that my mother had died. I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk on Thirty-Second Street, blocking the flow of foot traffic as throngs of tourists and commuters pushed past me. I peered into my shopping bag at the jar of kimchi and watched dark spots spread across the brown paper where my tears hit the bag. Why did I buy this? She’s not here to eat this with me. I don’t even like kimchi that much.
The kimchi sat in my fridge for weeks, swimming in a sea of garlic and chili, its odors slowly permeating all my other foods as it fermented. Everything I ate vaguely tasted of it, reminding me that my mother was gone.
The first time I opened the tall glass jar, the smell hit me so hard that waves of grief rose up through my chest and into my throat until my body gave into its weight, and I was sobbing over the kitchen sink.
Every couple of days I forced myself to eat some kimchi with my rice or ramen, tasting its transformation from the garlicky crunch of fresh cabbage to the pungent tang of soft ripe kimchi—the whole life cycle on my palate. By the time I ate my way through the jar, something shifted in my consciousness, and I went back to Han Ah Reum to buy some more. I contemplated the orderly rows of kimchi in all their varieties—garlic chive, oyster, radish, cucumber, scallion, and the classic napa cabbage—before selecting a quart of the classic mat kimchi.
“Remember,” I said to myself. This time I knew full well she was dead.
It wasn’t until I was assigned the family tree project at the age of nine, the same age as my mother when she became a refugee, that I began to understand that she had survived a war. She didn’t utter another word about the war for at least ten years, and my curiosity about all the things left unsaid was a seed in my unconscious.
In the absence of her storytelling, I dedicated years of my adult life to researching civilian experiences. Some of the survivors who were children at the time came out a generation later to tell horrific tales of seeking refuge under piles of corpses during ground attacks, wading through rivers of the dead to search for their parents’ remains, and watching helplessly as the people around them got dismembered by bombs. My mother couldn’t bear to talk about the things she might have witnessed. The first time she ever volunteered a memory of the war, she told me a story about kimchi.
As the battle lines moved southward, families were forced to flee their homes. People were starving, but they got by on foraging and looting the homes and fields of other displaced families. Occasionally, they received gifts of food from American soldiers.
I was never really sure if I understood the facts of my mother’s experience or if she herself remembered them correctly, but once she told me that when they were on the run, moving with hordes of other refugees, she became separated from her family. Somehow, she made her way back to her family’s home, and then she remembered the big earthenware jars of kimchi that my grandmother had buried in the backyard. There was also some rice left in the pantry.
She dug up a jar, set aside a ration of kimchi and boiled a pot of rice, eating just enough to quell her hunger but not so much as to squander the kimchi. At the age of nine, my mother carried on like this week after week while she waited for her family to return. That kimchi kept me alive for almost three seasons. I might not have survive without it.
After the war, the places that offered the best hope for
survival were American military bases, because that’s where wealth was concentrated in Korea. And so my mother went there, her longing for America carefully cultivated by the social and historical context in which she came of age. She was captivated by the images of the United States that she saw in the movies and came to associate all things American with luxury. She did not anticipate that, in a country of such riches, she might one day starve.
The first part of the story is that of deprivation that began with the physical absence of Korean food1
Our first port of entry to the United States in 1972 was Seattle, which then hosted a modest Korean population, enough to warrant a grocery store that carried Asian products. We only lived there a couple of months before moving. The story I heard years later was that my mother spent most of her days in Seattle homesick and crying. Maybe that’s why my father thought it would be better for us to move to Chehalis. Maybe he imagined that the presence of his friends and relatives might ease my mother’s transition. Indeed, some of them did welcome her with a parade of creamy tuna casseroles, lime Jell-O mixed with canned fruit cocktail and cottage cheese, snickerdoodles and homemade lemonade. The gestures were kind, but these exotic foods were not exactly an antidote to her homesickness.
The biggest shock was the food. Suddenly, every meal became a painful reminder of having left home.2
Shortly after our arrival in Chehalis, my father shipped out again, his work schedule alternating three months at home, three months at sea. When he was sailing the Pacific he was reachable only on the few days when he was on land, and so my mother was left behind in a new country, to navigate the pitfalls of her immigrant life with two kids to take care of. But what if she needed care too? Not once do I remember one of my father’s relatives coming to visit us when he was away, although I don’t know how much the presence of his family ever could have made up for the absence of hers.
