Tastes Like War

by Grace M. Cho

  I wonder if my father ever considered what it would be like for her in Chehalis when he wasn’t there. He probably thought that at least it would be better than Korea. That anything would be better than Korea.

  Craving for Korean food was accompanied by homesickness and a loneliness that resulted from the absence of other Koreans in their lives.3

  For the first few years of our life in America, my mother tried to maintain a connection to Korea, taking us to Busan each summer, where my brother showed me all his old haunts. Though I remember other kids teasing us for being twigki ainoko, a Korean Japanese racial slur for “half white,” my early childhood memories of Korea were among my fondest. We were surrounded by family, Halmeoni and Imo lavishing us with treats and affection, my brother still young enough to want to play with me.

  At the end of our summers, my mother would pack suitcases full of food and fib her way through customs at Sea—Tac International Airport. If she packed a bagful of dried anchovies, little yellow melons, doenjang, and red peppers, it could still go undetected despite the scent of fish and fermented soy paste. Kimchi, on the other hand, was too sensitive to warm temperatures, too likely to leak its juice inside the bag, too noxious in its odor to safely carry on a nine-hour flight and sneak past customs agents. The most difficult food to smuggle from Korea was also the most important to the Korean palate. It’s not as if my mother didn’t want to try, and maybe at some point she did. But the improper transport of kimchi was a risky endeavor. Therefore, she settled on bringing back gallon bags of gochu-garu and several jars of preserved brine shrimp to make kimchi at home.

  My father vowed to supply her with the fresh ingredients and a whole refrigerator dedicated just to kimchi. The problem, however, was that there was not a single head of Korean cabbage to be found anywhere in the rural Pacific Northwest during the 1970s, and my father didn’t know the difference between American cabbage and baechu.

  The moment when she first received my father’s generous gift of American cabbages, indignation spread across her face.

  “What is this? This isn’t real cabbage.” Her voice grew panicky. “Oh no … oh no! What I’m going to do now?” In the next moment, she directed her rage toward my father. “What I’m supposed to do with this? Huh?” Then, more calmly, she turned the head over and over in her hands, inspecting it with incredulity. “Hwaaa … What American people can do with this, I have no idea.”

  The vegetable that Americans know as cabbage was an inferior specimen and wholly inadequate for making kimchi. Or so I inferred from my mother’s rant. Once she recovered from this bitter disappointment, she set out to source the “real” cabbage, which Americans call “napa cabbage.” She would drive to Seattle to look for it and did this on a semiregular basis. Sometimes she’d “het the jackpot” and come home with several cases of baechu, having bought out the store’s whole supply. On less fortuitous occasions, all she could find was bok choy. It was not the same, but it was still better than nothing. In other words, it was better than American cabbage.

  Women like my mother were the first link in the chain of Korean migration. These women, who were seldom acknowledged by other Koreans because of the stigma of having “mixed flesh with foreigners,” sponsored relatives who were fleeing poverty or the string of military dictatorships that ruled South Korea after the war or the dangers of having family ties to North Korea. Almost all of these immigrants came because they had a sister, cousin, aunt, daughter, or niece who married an American and thus enabled them to do so. By the 1980s a significant Korean population was living in the United States, but the women who led the way endured extraordinary hardships as outsiders in both their host country and their families.

  My father’s family, too, was wary of my mother. Little by little, she chipped away at their fear by learning to cook their familiar foods and hosting all-American Thanksgiving dinners in which green Jell-O concoctions made an appearance on the table. The next day, when the American guests were gone, she would serve the leftover turkey with doenjang and kimchi.

  My mother’s experience of being marginalized within the new American family was not as extreme as that of other intermarried Korean women. According to Ji-Yeon Yuh’s oral histories with Korean “military brides,” Korean women who married American soldiers were expected to cook American food and therefore, to reproduce their husbands’ cultures in the kitchen, often at the expense of their own. Husbands and in-laws typically found Korean food to be too foreign and smelly, so they discouraged—and sometimes forbade—the women from eating the strange food at home. Even the children of these marriages sometimes refused to identify with Korean food, and by extension, rejected their mothers’ cultures. In the absence of Korean food, the women found pale substitutes for kimchi in American pickles, made gochu-jang with heels of bread and Italian pepper flakes, rationed tiny morsels of real Korean banchan to last the duration of a whole bowl of rice.

  Many of the women couldn’t stomach the greasy starch-laden dishes that Americans favored. Korean military brides who immigrated to the United States in the post–World War II decades of the 1950s and 1960s, a time when the proverbial land of plenty was basking in unprecedented economic wealth, told me that “here, there was nothing to eat.”4 Not only did the absence of Korean food intensify their feelings of homesickness and loneliness, but it also caused physical problems: American food was so unpalatable that eating was difficult and hunger was a constant companion.5 They became malnourished and underweight, depressed and anxious. Both body and spirit withered away.

  To survive, some kept Korean food in their kitchens, if they could find it, but resorted to eating it on the sly—hiding secret stashes of Korean products and cooking it when no one was around to complain about the smell. The ones who had access to Korean food hosted underground meetings to feed the women who were not allowed to eat in their own homes. These women felt estranged from their American families and therefore did not think of their houses as their homes. At the same time, they could not return to Korea and became desperately homesick. And so communities developed around resurrecting the lives of women forced to assimilate so violently that they felt homeless.

  At the safe houses, they ate kimchi and miyeok-guk together and shared stories of Korea. One of them explained that Korean food was more than just food: the experience of finally tasting the spicy, garlicky, fermented flavors of Korea was akin to being stranded in the desert and then taking your first sip of water. It was a narrow escape from a slow death. For a moment, some of these women found their way back home.

  My mother once knew that experience of feeling lost for lack of Korean food, yet there was no one in Chehalis who could guide her to a familiar place. Instead, she became the very guide she wished she’d had.

  As new Koreans started trickling into Chehalis, my mother took each of them under her wing. The first was named Kyeong, and she was married to an American. They had a daughter, Ellie, who was a year younger than me. Ellie’s mom was also younger than mine, which made my mom her unni, or “older sister.” Upon their first meeting, my mother greeted her with a jar of homemade kimchi and they soon became cooking companions.

  The arrival of another Korean woman to my hometown meant that my mother expanded her Korean cooking repertoire. Many of the ingredients were hard to come by, so she led seaside foraging expeditions to look for them, and Ellie and I went along for the ride. We made bouquets out of driftwood and dug holes in the sand while our mothers filled ten-gallon buckets with clams and seaweed and the little oily fishes that Americans did not regard as food. They made chewy seaweed salads and fried smelts, and served them with rice and kimchi. These gatherings kept Ellie’s mom afloat for a little while, but ultimately she could not stand being isolated from a Korean community, so Ellie and her family moved to Tacoma, which hosted the second largest Korean population in the state.

  As a child, I never imagined that it was so hard on my mother to have limited access to Korean food, because there had always been
American foods she enjoyed. She loved hamburgers and hot dogs, and any kind of meat, foods that had colonized the collective taste buds of South Korea during the American occupation and war. Despite liking these foods, she needed something more. For a Korean person, rural America was a food desert.

  The gravity of what she must have felt only registered for me a few years before she died, when I told her that Hosu’s friend Jandi was visiting from Korea and I had invited them both over for dinner.

  “What are you cooking? Don’t cook American food,” she urged.

  “I was thinking of making a coq au vin. It’s a French dish. Chicken cooked in wine,” I said.

  “French, American. Same thing! Don’t cook any Western food!”

  “But she might like to try something new.”

  “I am telling you, she is not going to like it.”

  “You don’t even know her!”

  “Oh no, Grace. Koreans cannot eat that kind of food. It’s making her sick. Cook Korean food.”

  A couple hours later, when the topic of my upcoming dinner had long passed, my mother brought it up again. “Make Jandi some Korean food, okay?”

  Her concern for my guest triggered a memory of a day from my childhood, when I was eight or nine years old and my mother discovered an Asian supermarket only thirty miles from our house. She came back with two hundred pounds of rice, the trunk stuffed to the brim with dried soybeans, gochu-garu, fish sauce, oyster sauce, brine shrimp, and fresh bean sprouts, and enough baechu to fill the backseat of the car.

  “Thank the dickens I can eat rice and kimchi for a looooong time now!” she said.

  Food, Korean food … I think about it, I dream about it, in my dreams there is no Korean food, or I am eating Korean food, or Korean food appears. This is what I dream about. When I first came … it was terrible, I wanted so badly to eat [Korean] food, it was terrible. Oh, I suffered very very much.6

  The year after Ellie and her family left, there was Kay.

  When Kay and her little brother arrived at my school, the teachers didn’t know what to do. They had no capacity to help immigrant kids transition to life in America, so the school personnel came to me. They put Kay in my first-grade classroom and expected us to become lunch buddies, and we did.

  Kay and her brother were not ordinary immigrants, because they came alone, at the ages of five and six. Kay told me the story of how they had gotten here. Her mother took them to the market and said, “Hold each other’s hands tight, tight, and do not let go. Stay right here until I come back.” They waited in the middle of the busy market, gripping each other’s hands, letting go only to wipe the sweat from their palms. At nightfall, a man from an orphanage found the children, soiled and hungry, but still clutching each other per their mother’s instructions. He took them to the orphanage, and a few weeks later, put the children on a plane and sent them to Chehalis to be adopted by the Anderson family. I would later learn that Kay’s experience was not unique, and many Korean adoptees that came to the United States during that era were old enough to remember the families and homes they had lost in Korea.

  To welcome Kay and her brother, my school decided to organize a “culture day” so that students from “different” cultures could showcase aspects of their heritage. In other words, Kay and I were asked to go around to different classrooms as guest speakers. She dressed up in hanbok—long undergarments of hemp fabric beneath a wide-sleeved blouse and voluminous skirt—and explained that it was the traditional dress of Korea. I didn’t have hanbok, only gomu-shin, the rubber shoes that were shaped like canoes, but they no longer fit me, nor did I want to wear them for fear of being teased. My teachers were not particularly interested in having me dress up anyway. What they really wanted from me was my mother’s cooking. She knew better than to serve kimchi to a bunch of American kids, so instead she made japchae, a colorful mix of clear noodles, spinach, and strips of carrots, zucchini, beef, and egg seasoned in sesame oil and garlic.

  Kay gave a speech about her hanbok and fielded questions about being an adoptee, recounting every detail of her abandonment, then my mother plated the japchae and passed it around to the children.

  “Ewww. They’re made of worms!” one of them shouted.

  “They are potato starch noodles,” my mother shot back. “Okay? Potato, potato.”

  I stood in the back silently watching a bloom of crimson spread across my mother’s face as she repressed her anger at the wild accusation. We three Koreans continued to prance around the school like that—Kay in her hanbok, my mother carrying a tray of japchae, and me offering nothing in particular except the presence of my racialized self. And despite putting our ethnicity on display, the kids continued to call us Chinese or Japanese.

  My mother knew about Kay long before I met her in my firstgrade class. She had never formally met the Andersons, but everyone knew my mother by reputation. She was known as “the Oriental” or “the Chinese Lady” and the only person in town who could speak Korean. Now, all of a sudden, her language difference was a valuable commodity.

  The adoption agency had probably given Mr. and Mrs. Anderson a how-to guide: Children are often upset at leaving everything familiar to them. If your child appears upset, just smile and cuddle him a little. Soon he will join the ranks of other happy American children. And all these problems will solve themselves … Korean children are eager to please and most will learn quickly.7

  But when Kay and Jason broke into a crying fit that could not be soothed, my mother was called in to evaluate the situation. She returned home clucking her teeth. No one needed to ask her what had happened because she launched into the story for anyone who would listen:

  “Mrs. Anderson was fermenting some cabbage, you see, and the poor children thought it was kimchi … but it was sauerkraut.” She held their disappointment in her heart for a moment and exhaled, “Aigu, dap-dap-eu-rah!” The weight of her emotions had become too much to bear. “Dap-dap-eu-rah!” she repeated, her voice swelling with the sound of tears. It was the first time I had ever seen my mother cry.

  Then she collected herself and did the only reasonable thing one could do in this situation. She went to the kitchen and took some baechu out of the refrigerator, mixed a bath of warm water and salt in a huge metal mixing bowl, laid a cutting board on the floor, and got to work. She squatted down, quartered the heads of cabbage, and slid them into the brine. Next she pounded a fine paste of garlic with the handle of her knife, poured a stream of gochu-garu into another bowl, added brine shrimp, sugar, rice flour, and the garlic paste. She took the big ceramic jars down from the attic in anticipation of fermenting the kimchi. A few hours later, she rinsed the cabbage, added it to the bowl of chili mixture along with chopped scallions, and mixed it all up with her bare hands. She packed the seasoned leaves into the jars, and put them back in the attic to ferment.

  Nothing could change the fact that Kay and Jason had been suddenly plucked from Korea and given a new family in Chehalis that could neither speak their language nor understand their culture, but my mother decided that never again would they have to go without kimchi. She immediately recognized them as mouths to feed, and for a brief moment, she became the Korean mother these children had lost.

  I was always struck by her tenderness toward them, and as I learned more about my mother’s past, I wondered how much of it had been a projection of her own loss, and whether she was the mother or the child in that projection. Did the presence of these scared, sad children trigger memories of the time when she was a quasi-orphan, forced to fend for herself in the midst of war, or did it cut to the heart of her alienation in America?

  Well into my life as a researcher, and particularly through my collaborative work with Hosu, I would learn that the prototypical Korean birthmother looked a lot like my mother—the camptown woman of the 1950s and 1960s—and then I’d remember her complaining that the birth control pills she used to take hadn’t worked. The look on her face when she said it was one of regret and horror, feelings that
she never outwardly expressed about my brother or me. I couldn’t help but wonder if there had been another child she had relinquished. The most unspeakable of all her secrets. Did the Anderson children conjure up the specter of a third child, airdropped into some middle American home, who was crying for her and longing for the taste of kimchi?

  My mother visited the Andersons often and occasionally invited them over for a Korean dinner. But a few years later, when they adopted another Korean child, there came a breaking point.

  The new girl was almost seventeen, and she was the only one of the children who retained her Korean name, maybe because the parents knew it was too late for her to adopt a new identity, or maybe because it sounded ambiguous enough to be American—Mina. Or if my mother’s theory was correct, it was because their true intention had never been to make her part of the family.

  “They don’t want another child! They want a maid!” my mother cried. Again, she felt this child’s suffering deeply.

  I never knew what exactly transpired between her and the Anderson family, but the arrival of the seventeen-year-old Mina marked my mother’s complete disengagement from them.

  Mina, Kay, Jason, Kyeong, Ellie—all the Koreans who arrived after us—were either adoptees or from mixed race families like my own. We were joined by our common legacy as militarized subjects, having been borne out of the same murderous conditions of US intervention and war, the same sexist and imperialist social policies that fractured families in Korea. We were all bound by the discourse that said that the American family/nation rescued us.

  My mother ruptured that discourse when she voiced her disgust with the Andersons. She wanted nothing more to do with people who exploited a girl for her labor and disguised it as charity.