Tastes Like War

by Grace M. Cho

  A scene similar to that of Kay’s arrival played out in my fourthgrade classroom. This time it was a boy, a bit older than me. He was so bewildered that he ran around the room in circles, peeing his pants. A male teacher from another class was chasing him and yelling at him to sit down. The school did not have a translator, so the teacher looked at me, and said, “You! Please. Tell him to sit down.”

  “Anjda,” I said.

  The boy stopped and studied me, then slowly sat down. “Hanguk saram-iya?”

  “Umma Hanguk,” I said in my broken Korean. “Busan gohyang.”

  He smiled and sat still for a while.

  I told my mother about the new boy when I got home from school, and she prepared a fresh batch of kimchi.

  Whenever a Korean child or wife arrived to her new American family, my mother was there to welcome her in their native tongue. She held a jar of kimchi in her hands and said, “Hammeokja.” Let’s eat together.

  She offered kimchi as a balm for their dislocations because she understood that the everyday acts of eating and cooking preserved a connection to the people and places that one left behind. By inserting herself into the scene of induction, my mother also gave presence to the Korean kinship ties that had been lost or erased. And thus, in another, more subtle way, she ruptured the discourse that the American family/nation was our savior, to whom we owed everything.

  I don’t think she ever intended for her kimchi to be a kind of resistance, but there was something about making and sharing kimchi that made her feel alive, that made her fight to keep on living in the face of murderous conditions.

  The final recipient of my mother’s kimchi was me. When I left home to go to college three thousand miles away, she gifted me a rice cooker and a quart jar of kimchi. She wrapped the jar in multiple layers of plastic bags for me to put in my suitcase, but I initially rejected it because I didn’t want it stinking up my clothes.

  “Grace, just take it,” she said. “These American college people don’t know how to feed Asian kids. Just take it so I don’t have to worry about you.”

  She knew that I’d have access to unlimited food at the campus dining hall, so her concern wasn’t just about me getting enough to eat. For my mother, kimchi represented survival, and she believed that it would get me through whatever challenges life might throw my way.

  A few years later, when I got my first apartment, I asked for her recipe so that I could be empowered to have it at all times. For years I’d been begging her to teach me to cook Korean food, but she always refused, claiming that it was a “waste of time” and that I should be studying instead. Yet she gave me the kimchi recipe without hesitation. If there was one thing from my family’s culinary history she wanted me to hold on to, it was this.

  One night, shortly after my mother’s death, I lay in bed doubting my capacity to live in a world without her. The pain of her being suddenly gone, and of knowing how much her existence had been consumed by suffering, was so intense that I wished for my own death as relief. I began to drift away, and a scene from my early childhood flashed beneath the surface of sleep:

  I am seated in a high chair, watching my mother. She stands at the kitchen sink, in a loose cotton jumper—sleeveless and short, in lavender pink—her long hair free, her feet bare. My mother’s delicate hands are under a running faucet, rinsing a soft leaf of fermented cabbage until every flake of chili washes away. She tears the leaf into small strips with her fingers, first lengthwise, then pinching with the nails of her thumb and forefinger, she cuts the strips crosswise. I can see her slim nut-brown hands in great detail—her fingers long and tapered, the quicks of her nails reaching the edges of her fingers. They work swiftly to remove the heat from the kimchi. She brings the little pieces to me and feeds me with her hands. “Not too spicy, Grace-ya?” she asks. I eat. “Oh, kimchi jal mung-neh! Good girl!” She is smiling, pleased that I am developing a taste for kimchi.

  As I became more lucid, the image remained and I knew with all my senses that it was not a dream. It was my earliest memory of eating, and my earliest memory of my mother. I closed my eyes to be with her again, to see the look of comfort on her face as her hands poised to feed me, to hear her say, “Ja. Kimchi deo mu-ra. Grace-ya, we are survivors. You can endure anything.”

  6. MADAME MUSHROOM

  Chehalis, Washington, 1979

  WHEN I WAS ABOUT SEVEN OR EIGHT, my mother developed an addiction to foraging. From the stories my father told me about her penchant for all-night gambling in Korea, I knew that she had an addictive personality and a bit of a wild streak. “You should have seen your mother go. She could outlast every damn one of them,” my father would say, his pale cheeks blushing as he recalled my mother’s blackjack binges. “Boy, she was a pro.” He said all this as a warning to me when I invited her to play Old Maid.

  I remember that restless side of her too—of her constantly wanting to infuse a little excitement into our humdrum rural American life by raising the stakes. She made wagers on the most mundane things, like guessing the number of seeds inside a tangerine or competing to see who could peel the longest continuous strip from an apple. These were minor diversions of no consequence, but whenever there was anything real at stake, you couldn’t help also feeling the rush of my mother’s adrenaline. She always exuded an unnatural confidence that she could win, and once she was in the game, she’d stay till the bitter end.

  Chehalis was made up of three distinct landscapes. The residential and commercial area, known as “the city,” was buttressed by sprawling farmlands on one side—“the country.” On the other side of the city was lush, green wilderness, a combination of secondary-growth forest and patches of land still untouched by the burgeoning timber industry. While there was a lot of movement across the “city/country” border as “city” folk went to visit relatives or purchase produce straight from the farm, it was not as common in that time and place to see people search for food in the wild. Although the forest had once fed the Chehalis people and the white settlers who displaced them, by the 1970s there was a clear distinction: the farmland was for growing food, and the forest was for growing timber.

  Both of my parents came from agrarian roots, but my father was much more intimate with the farm. He got his first lesson in steering a plough horse when he was a toddler, and started raising pigs when he was fifteen. For my mother, the wilderness held much more allure. When she was a child in Korea, when all the farmlands had been destroyed, hunting and foraging in the mountains was one of the things that had kept her family alive. The forest provided nourishment, not just during the war, but throughout all of Korea’s culinary history.

  My mother had found other wild food sources in the Pacific Northwest—the rocky beaches of Puget Sound were abundant with seaweed and fish, but she always ignored the posted warning signs about penalties for overfishing. She got in trouble with the law for depleting the smelt population, and despite a hefty fine, couldn’t stop herself from doing it again. After the second citation, she stopped going back. “What’s the use if I can’t get a lot?” she said. There was no law against picking seaweed, but the coast was an hour drive away while the forest was right there on the outskirts of town.

  After years of struggling to get by in Chehalis, of trying to follow the rules and play the good wife, my mother’s spirit needed something more. Maybe she could no longer resist the little voices in her head that told her to cross over to the other side—to that uncivilized and uninhabited place—to see what she might find.

  The first time she went into the woods, she snatched up a few stray plants that she had eaten in Korea, like wild onions or burdock, without any grand plans beyond that night’s dinner. But my mother knew a gold mine when she saw one. Once she discovered that this forested area was fertile ground for foraging, it didn’t take long for her to become hooked. The forest was the one place in Chehalis that called her. It felt familiar, and at the same time, was rich with discovery.

  By the time my mother started fora
ging, she was working fulltime and single-parenting half-time, whenever my father was out to sea. Her first paid job in Chehalis had been to clean the house of the logging magnate who lived in the next town over. She made one dollar an hour—slightly less than half the minimum wage in the mid-1970s, and after she fell off the ladder washing his windows—an accident that left her with chronic back pain for the rest of her life—she told the millionaire to find another maid. That summer when we went to Korea, she cut her waist-length hair short and sold it. Upon our return to Chehalis, she got a full-time job working the graveyard shift, from 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m., at a juvenile detention facility called Green Hill, where she stayed for the duration of her working life.

  One night early on during her tenure at Green Hill, as my brother and I were sleeping on the red-and-green floral mat we had brought back from Korea, she came into our room, turned on a dim light, and woke me up. She kneeled down next to me and whispered, “Grace-ya, promise me something. Don’t tell anyone that I’m going to work at night or they will take you away from me.” Though I didn’t understand what she was talking about at the time, I could feel her fear. I nodded, and she stroked my hair with her slender hand.

  In my adult life, I would remember this moment as I learned about the case of Chong Sun France, a Korean immigrant woman and former sex worker whose young child died when she left him alone at night. France’s husband had abandoned her and their children after bringing them to North Carolina. Tasked with the responsibility of supporting her family, she got a job working in a nightclub. She made the decision to leave her children alone while she went to work, and one early morning she came home to find that her son had been crushed to death by a dresser. She took the blame for her child’s death, as any mother might do, but she phrased it in a distinctly Korean-mother kind of way: I killed him! I killed him!

  She wailed the words over and over again to the police. This admission of guilt, combined with her heavy accent, immigrant status, and history as a sex worker, got her convicted of murder in the second degree and sentenced to twenty years in prison.

  I saw my own mother in France and felt grateful that nothing bad had ever happened when my brother and I were alone at night. He was twelve when she started working the graveyard shift, and although she probably felt that he was mature enough to handle being the babysitter during our sleeping hours, she must have lived with constant anxiety. If one of us had gotten hurt, would she have gone to prison? And where was my father’s culpability in this? He knew she was working, and in fact, helped her to find the job. Although he made a good income as a merchant marine, he didn’t give her access to his money, and instead left her an allowance during his monthslong absences. According to my mother, my father was a “cheapskate” and a “scrooge” because it wasn’t nearly enough to take care of a family. According to my father, she could make do if only she tried harder and gave up the things that he deemed unnecessary. Regardless, my mother felt compelled to go out and earn her own money, and my father agreed to the plan.

  I was never sure what exactly she did at Green Hill, though she told me that she was a counselor. I wondered why they needed a counselor when people were sleeping. Once, after she told me about a fight that she broke up between two of the detainees by hitting one of them with a folding chair, I thought to myself that she must have been a security guard, but then again, she didn’t dress like a security guard. She styled her new short hair with a curling iron and put on fancy ruffled blouses, dress pants, and high heels to go to work.

  It was a few years into working this job that her forest outings began. She would get home from work between 7:05 and 7:10 in the morning, send us off to school, change her clothes, and then head out into the wilderness. On some days when I got home from school, she still hadn’t slept. I would find her sitting on the kitchen floor, surrounded by little mountains of greenery. Dinner was on the table by 6:00 p.m. and always featured whatever she had gathered from the forest that morning. And then she slept for three or four hours before getting up to go to work again.

  The focus of her early foraging expeditions was to find things that were not readily available in grocery stores. In the springtime she gathered fiddlehead ferns, or gosari, a popular ingredient that one might find today as a side dish in a Korean restaurant or on top of a sizzling bowl of bibimbap. As some intrepid forager must have discovered generations ago, raw fiddleheads are toxic to humans and must be treated carefully before they can be eaten. The Korean method of preparing gosari for human consumption involves sun-drying them first, and therefore my mother spent a lot of time on the roof of our house. The nights and mornings were misty, and it rained often, so she’d have to tend to the plants twice daily. She spread them out over big white sheets at midday and then gathered them up again before nightfall.

  “Why is your mom always walking around on the roof?” one of the kids in the neighborhood asked me once.

  “She’s drying ferns,” I said, embarrassed because I knew it didn’t make any sense to someone who didn’t eat gosari.

  Equally alarming to the people in my town was the sight of my mother picking dandelion leaves on the side of the road, in big open fields, along the railroad tracks, everywhere except for other people’s yards. She made that exception not out of respect for private property but because Americans considered dandelions weeds and sprayed them with herbicide. My mother was popping up in all kinds of unusual places, and her foreign ways made her seem like the town crazy.

  Most people in Chehalis got their food from the grocery store, or else they drove out to the country, or grew things in their backyards. Some people hunted deer and picked gooseberries or crab apples that had crept onto their property, but otherwise, the wilderness was not on many people’s radar as a major food source. It was a time when modern convenience foods had captured the imaginations of Americans (microwavable plastic pouches that turned into meals with the press of a button, just-add-water-and-chill instant cheesecakes). Industry was well on its way to displacing nature as the maker of our food. Though many people were still connected to the farm, they seemed to have forgotten that the wilderness could also feed us. My mother was about to change all that, however.

  Midsummer 1979

  IT’S 7:00 A.M. and the air is slightly damp, the sun not yet searing. My mother returns home from work, changes out of her dress clothes into jeans, a T-shirt, and tennis shoes, packs a water cooler and a bucket into the car, and ventures out into the forest. She’s ripe with anticipation, but doesn’t know exactly what she’s looking for. As she makes a clearing in the brush, her sleeve catches on a sharp sticker. She tries to free herself, then notices a cluster of tiny red fruit hanging just below the plant’s palm-shaped leaves. She takes a closer look and sees the hidden gems in a gamut of red and purple hues. The small berries are growing on strong, thorny stalks that jut out at forty-five-degree angles. The plants are tall, and she has to force her way through the thicket to get to the ripe fruit inside. Only a smattering of them are ready to be picked. The rest are beckoning her return.

  Later, she will come home with scratches all over her arms and face, juice-stained fingers, and a small bowlful of blackberries. Her eyes will be full of excitement, her voice breathless, as she says, “I think I het the jackpot.”

  Blackberries became my mother’s singular obsession. They were difficult to harvest, but the very challenge of it seemed to fuel her desire to pick them. The day after her initial discovery, she went back to that spot in the forest, equipped with large containers and long sleeves to protect her arms from the tangle of thorns. She returned home with five gallons of blackberries, intoxicated from the bounty. The next day it was seven, then ten, fourteen, twenty, each day breaking the previous day’s record. Literally overnight, the kitchen became filled with wild blackberries and all manner of blackberry products that got distributed to friends, relatives, and enemies.

  At first she did it for the satisfaction of knowing that she could feed everyone around her,
mingled with the thrill of the hunt. But once she started, my mother could not stop. Her hands had become tattooed with hundreds of tiny purple lines, where the blackberry juice had seeped into scratch marks on her skin. Soon there were far too many blackberries for one family and its associates to consume. On some days the kitchen was so completely dedicated to processing the blackberries that I was forbidden to set foot in it. Even if I had wanted to, there was no floor space left through which I could have walked. There would be an assembly line set up on the floor with giant metal tubs of just-picked blackberries on one side, a big basin of water in the middle, and fresh tubs for the washed berries on the other side. After the berries were cleaned, she would lay them out gently on sheet pans lined with paper towels and pack them into Ziploc bags that she put away in the fridge or freezer.

  After a few days like this, there was no room left to store any fresh food other than blackberries. The kitchen was literally overflowing. And that’s when it struck her. As she squatted on the kitchen floor, transferring some cleaned berries into a gallon Ziploc bag, she decided that it was time to start selling. Having schooled herself well in the ways of American women and their love of baking and canning, she found a business opportunity in our economically depressed town. She bought two industrial freezers and put an ad in the local paper: Small wild blackberries. Fresh or frozen. $13 a gallon.

  Within a few weeks, our house became the busiest regional hub of blackberry traffic, and my family renamed summer “Blackberry Season.” New customers came every day, and my mother greeted them with, “You want small wild blackberries? All right then. You come to the right place.” Her purple hands gestured for them to enter.

  This was the moment of her ascent, when she had something of value that others clamored for, that was exclusively hers to trade. In Marxist terms, she owned both the product and the means of production. In psychic terms, she had the capacity to feed the very community that had treated her as a second-class citizen, to rise above the fray and be the gracious one.