Tastes Like War

by Grace M. Cho

  If my mother hadn’t already been a recognizable character in Chehalis, she certainly became one then. Her celebrity grew as people from neighboring towns came to our kitchen to buy wild blackberries, as well as value-added products like blackberry pies and jams. Word spread and soon she became known as “the Blackberry Lady” instead of “the Chinese Lady.” People all over town greeted me with “Say, aren’t you the Blackberry Lady’s girl?”

  Once her new reputation set in, she worked even harder to keep up with demand. When one blackberry patch was picked clean, she would have to start the search over again. There were days when the forest was unyielding, prompting her to come home and snort with disgust, “I barely filled up one gallon today!”

  Her disappointment drove her deeper into the woods to uncover the vines heaviest with fruit. The deeper she went, the more dangerous her hunts became. She encountered hostiles—bears competing for the same berries, or white men with rifles who didn’t look too kindly upon foreigners encroaching upon their hunting grounds. But my mother was not intimidated. She bought herself a .38 Special to let the hunters know that she had leveled the playing field. Nothing was going to stop her.

  That summer changed my mother. She no longer depended on her femininity to get attention or make a profit. Working in the woods meant that she had to shed her frilly dresses and heels, and start dressing like a lumberjack. As much as she had once represented my ideal of feminine beauty, she also came to embody masculine strength. By this point, she had replaced my father as the masculine parental figure. He had become a frail old man in my eyes when, a year earlier, he had had a heart attack. I had found him splayed out and unresponsive on his bedroom floor, my mother shaking him furiously and screaming at me to call an ambulance. When I was on the phone with 911, amid the desperate cries of a vulnerable would-be widow, I thought I heard her anger break through. Don! Don! Don’t leave me, you sonofabitch! If there was any chance that he might abandon her in his wretched little town, then she’d better start making a place for herself in it. Perhaps it was the specter of my father as a dead man that gave rise to my mother as the fearless, gun-toting Blackberry Lady.

  Blackberry Season, 1980

  THE NEXT SUMMER, I begged my mother to take me with her to the forest, but she refused on the grounds that I’d slow her down.

  “Please, can I go with you?”

  “You’re going to whine and meow, and then I have to worry about you. What a nuisance!”

  “Please, Mama. Pleeeease! I promise I won’t bother you.”

  “Why you wanna go so bad? You are not going to like it.”

  I couldn’t understand that blackberry picking was work. Hot. Labor intensive. Treacherous. And a big source of my mother’s income. But I persisted until she gave in. Just as she predicted, the combination of summer heat, hilly terrain, and brambles was so grueling that I needed her to take care of me. We stopped frequently so that I could sit in the shade and sip on ice water from her cooler, and then we headed home a good two hours early.

  “Aigu! Grace-ya. I told you! No more blackberry picking for you.”

  A couple weeks later, when my father came home from work for the summer and decided he wanted to spend Blackberry Season by my mother’s side, she put up a similar protest.

  “I’m going with you from now on,” he declared.

  “Oh no you don’t! It’s too hard for you.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “Oooh yeah. You don’t know what it is like.”

  “Balls!”

  “What if it’s putting too much stress on your heart?”

  “I don’t want you out there alone anymore. You’re a woman! It’s dangerous.”

  “Darnit! Why you bugging me? I can take care of myself! I been doing it, aren’t I?”

  They volleyed like this for several minutes before my mother resigned herself to bringing him along. Though she had become the stronger of the two, he could not admit it.

  On the third or fourth day of my father’s company, my mother came home early. She plopped down in the plush swivel chair in our living room and scowled with her arms crossed. I approached with trepidation and asked her what was the matter.

  “It’s your father,” she snapped.

  “What did he do?”

  She shook her head and didn’t answer.

  “What happened?”

  “Your father’s heart stopped today.”

  “What? Where is he?” I asked, my voice beginning to quiver.

  “I had to take him to the hospital.” She got out of the chair, went to her bedroom, and slammed the door. I couldn’t tell what she was angrier about—that he almost left her widowed again or that she lost a perfectly good day of blackberry picking that she could never get back.

  My father had his first heart attack when I was seven, his second when I was nine, and his third when I was fifteen, so there were a good five years when his life didn’t hang in the balance. During those five years when my father was not on the verge of death, my mother focused her energy on her business activities. During Blackberry Season, she was at the top of her game, but like all seasons, it, too, waned. And then a similar pattern emerged with mushrooms.

  In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan muses on the “mushroom hunter” as a special brand of forager. The endeavor of harvesting wild mushrooms is called “hunting” rather than “foraging” or “picking” to denote the courage and skill involved in the act of distinguishing the edible from the poisonous. One wrong turn—mistaking a false chanterelle for a chanterelle, for example—could result in the mushroom hunter’s sudden demise. The other challenge that faces the hunter is that mushrooms camouflage themselves against the forest floor, so it takes a well-trained human eye to spot them.

  After experiencing blackberry withdrawal at the end of the summer, my mother realized that the fall was prime time to begin her search for mushrooms. In the damp, cool climate of the Pacific Northwest, mushrooms grew during many seasons. She first thought of mushroom hunting as something that could sustain her until next Blackberry Season, but as it turned out, mushrooms became more than just a temporary fix. Though my father had warned her about the dangers of poisonous mushrooms, she was again undaunted. Having already familiarized herself with the forest, all she needed to do was give herself a crash course in mycology. For $14.95, she bought an encyclopedic book called The Mushroom Hunter’s Field Guide, and despite her limited literacy in English and the dense academic nature of the book, she studied it cover to cover, several times over. When put to the test, she seemed to have a sixth sense for spotting mushrooms. In a split second she could coax a mushroom out of its hiding place and catalog it as either delicious or dangerous. If we happened upon a mushroom that was toxic, she blurted out ominous warnings.

  “Oh no no no! Don’t touch that! It’s make you sick!” She spoke with just as much excitement about the edible mushrooms. “Yaaaa! Porcini! I het the jackpot!”

  Mushroom hunting did not involve the same level of physical exertion as blackberry picking—there were no sharp thorns or thickets to navigate, no blazing sun—so my mother allowed me to accompany her on a few excursions. I loved being enveloped by ancient, moss-covered trees and the earthy smell of damp leaves. We were the only two people in the forest. She an explorer and I her sidekick, traveling through a mystical universe of undiscovered species.

  My mother’s enthusiasm for mushrooms was infectious, and without even realizing it, I learned to categorize them according to growing season, the type of tree with which they grew, and best culinary uses. There were fall mushrooms and spring mushrooms. Meaty mushrooms and dainty mushrooms. Half the year our dinners featured some variety of fresh mushroom: hedgehogs, chanterelles, lobsters, chicken of the woods, which indeed tasted just like chicken. By the time I was ten, I became an expert on gourmet mushrooms, though this was before I had any concept of “gourmet.” It was the early 1980s, when words like “foodie” and “locavore” were not a part of anyone’s vocabul
ary, yet my mother was on the cusp of an emerging market for wild mushrooms.

  She sold them to a distributor called Madame Mushroom that supplied restaurants and specialty stores throughout the Pacific Northwest. Once, she picked me up from school on her way to sell, and we drove down some winding dirt paths to Madame Mushroom’s roadside stand. It was a rare treat to be privy to my mother’s negotiations. There was a group of other hunters there selling their wares, but my mother’s exceeded theirs tenfold. I looked around and could see a clear demarcation line between the pros and the hobbyists, with my mother on one side and everyone else on the other. Whomever it was that dared to call herself “Madame Mushroom” could not have kept up that identity without my mother’s supply. After that trip, I knew who the real Madame Mushroom was. My mother. The Blackberry Lady by summer, Madame Mushroom by fall.

  I don’t know how she did it, but somehow she singlehandedly supplied the whole town, and later the whole region, with wild produce. She did it for six or seven years while also keeping her night job, and maybe, at the root of it, she didn’t want to see the people around her ever be hungry again.

  There was never a moment of my childhood when the kitchen wasn’t completely stocked. Though she sold most of her harvest, her rule was that a portion of it went first to our family. Around the time she began foraging, my father built an extension of our house, with another pantry. Behind the industrial freezers full of blackberries was a set of deep shelves, about ten by ten feet, filled with the fruits of my parents’ labor. The shelves were tightly packed with rows of mason jars, two shelves each of blackberry jam and wild mushrooms. The rest were filled with the things my father grew in his one-acre garden—corn, beans, tomatoes—and the stone fruit they had picked together at local orchards. Never have I seen as much food in one kitchen as I did in my childhood home.

  It took me a long time to realize that my mother’s level of productivity was extraordinary, that most people cannot work at the speed at which she worked, or live for years on so little sleep. As a child I was always in awe of her ability to do so many things well. To me, she was some butch forest goddess, earth mother, and breadwinner all wrapped in one, sort of like the woman from the perfume commercial who could bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan. I couldn’t see the darkness that was brewing on the heels of her meteoric rise as a professional forager.

  New Jersey Transit, 2001

  ON ONE OF THOSE rare but “absolutely necessary” occasions that my mother allowed herself to go outside, we traveled together by train from New Jersey to New York. As we passed through the more scenic portions of the industrial Northeast Corridor, I watched her eyes grow wide as she looked out the window. Her face twitched as she was transfixed on something outside.

  “What do you see out there, Mom?”

  “Suk. So much suk.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Those plants, you see?” She pointed, but from the moving train, all I could see was a blur of green.

  “What do they look like?”

  “I don’t know what you call in English.” She held out her index finger and squeezed the tip with the thumb and index finger of her other hand. “Leaves about this big, that got the silver color, kind of whitish color underneath. They’re everywhere! Oh god! They make the best soup.”

  Her focus didn’t waver the whole train ride, and every stop or two, she glanced at the door wondering if she had enough time to pick some suk before the train pulled away. After fifteen years, I saw the belated manifestations of my mother’s foraging withdrawals. The suk was taunting her to come outside. She had caught a glimpse of what the Northeast wilds had to offer, yet was powerless to taste it.

  For weeks she talked about her cravings for suk and the missed opportunity to pick it. But in time, she conceded, and things returned to the way they had been before she knew what grew outside the train window.

  Princeton, New Jersey, 2006

  MORE SEASONS PASSED, and I became her regular cook as cooking became something she could no longer do herself. She didn’t like it if I spent too much time or money on the meals, but on holidays, she gave me permission to splurge. “Okay, we get the best cut of meat because Christmas only comes once a year,” she would say. It became our tradition to prepare a beef tenderloin, and I usually made a red wine sauce to go with it, but one year I bought wild mushrooms instead, for old times’ sake. As soon as I opened the door of her apartment that Christmas Eve, I made the announcement.

  “Mom! I’m cooking mushrooms to go with the roast!”

  “Oh, really? What kind of mushrooms you get?”

  “Chanterelles!”

  “Chanterelles, huh? How much you pay for that?”

  “Oh, it was really expensive. You probably don’t want to know.” I was always reluctant to tell her how much things cost, but I could never lie to her. “Whole Foods sells them for forty dollars a pound.”

  “Forty dollars a pound?! Hwaaa!”

  “It was overpriced. I know. But it’s a holiday.”

  “Forty dollars a pound! I used to pick thousands of pounds of those! You remember?”

  “Was it really that much?”

  “Oh, easily!” She seemed put off by my question. “Maybe even more than thousands. Tens of thousands.”

  The memory struck a bittersweet chord. By that time, we were in year twelve of her life as a shut-in.

  “Remember how I cooked for you?” she asked. “I used to cook ’em with bacon and onions and put it over rice. You kids just loved it.”

  “Yeah, that was really good. You were a great cook.”

  “Forty dollars a pound!” She began to get agitated. “Hah! They are not even that special. Not like porcini. Now those are good. But chanterelles? For forty dollars a pound?”

  “Mom, don’t worry about it. Let’s just enjoy the dinner.”

  “I can’t believe it.” She shook her head and sighed. “I could make so much money now.”

  More seasons passed and the number of years she stayed indoors surpassed the number of years she lived unfettered, when the natural world was her domain. I wondered if, after all that time, her sense memory of the forest had grown dim, if her wild streak had finally faded away. Every once in a while, after the first spring rains, I’d see a familiar look of hunger in her eyes as she’d look out the window and study the trees in the distance. In the Northeast, conifers were sparse, but there were lots of elms, whose death gave life to some of the most delicate mushrooms. My mother would whisper their names in tandem with her breath, the sounds barely audible.

  Morel. Oyster. Inky cap.

  She’d imagine a horizon beyond the walls of her house and muse out loud, “What do you suppose is out there?”

  PART III

  Schizophrenia is the story of how poverty, violence and being on the wrong side of power drive us mad.

  —T. M. LUHRMANN, Our Most Troubling Madness

  7. SCHIZOPHRENOGENESIS

  People who are humiliated and abused and bullied are more likely to fall ill. People who are born poor or live poor are more likely to fall ill. People with dark skins are more likely to fall ill in white-skinned neighborhoods … when life beats people up, they are at more risk for developing psychosis.1

  SCHIZOPHRENOGENESIS = schizophrenic + genesis: the production of schizophrenia. Sometimes refers to the onset of schizophrenia, sometimes to the causes. The story of the mind’s cleaving. The story of being on the wrong side of power.

  Chehalis, Washington, 1986

  THE GROUND IS LITTERED with rotting fruit, little purple bodies seeping sweet, dark blood into the dust. No longer fit for pies, they have become wine for bees.

  At the site of one of my mother’s usual blackberry patches, the smell of decay wafts in the late summer breeze. The rains will come soon, and a blanket of pine and fir and deciduous leaves of all kinds will cover the dead berries. Nearby, an oak or elm will fall ill, and its withering body will nourish new life—perhaps a cluster of healing ma
itake will rise up at the tree’s trunk. My mother will not be there to find them this year.

  The seasons will turn again, and the winter will be uncharacteristically cold for the temperate Pacific Northwest. The sun will not come out for weeks at a time, and my mother will find new ways to spend her time indoors. Sometimes she will spend it taking care of my sick father, nursing him through his third and fourth heart attacks, but more often, she will be drawn to our new remote-controlled television. She will sit on the beige sectional with her feet propped up, looking for hidden messages in Wheel of Fortune and The Joker’s Wild. She will look for clues beyond the obvious—in the cadence of Pat Sajak’s voice, in the flick of a wrist or the speed of a wheel, in the pattern of jokers and devils, and in the repetition of all of these things.

  Spring will come again, but she will not go out to search for mushrooms or fiddleheads, nor will she look for blackberries in the summer. She will not go out into the wilderness ever again.

  The year I turned fifteen, the world grew dark as my mother became sick, my father became sicker, and our kitchen grew sparse. My sense of stability or instability had always been implicated in my mother’s well-being, and when she foraged, family life felt solid. But somehow I hardly noticed when she suddenly stopped going out into the woods. Her abandonment of the thing she most loved should have been a warning that she was developing what Western medical discourse calls “mental illness,” what Koreans might describe as a “pained spirit.” Whatever you choose to call it, it took me a whole year to see that it was consuming her.

  Her illness wasn’t obvious at first because it was overshadowed by my father’s, which was recognizable in a way that mental illness never is. In 1986 he had his third heart attack.