Tastes Like War

by Grace M. Cho

  It was my sophomore year of high school, a mild fall day maybe in late September or early October, and my mother came to pick me up from tennis practice so we could go to the hospital. My coach, who had been invested in my family ever since my brother emerged as the town tennis star seven years earlier, approached her to raise concerns about my performance.

  “I’ve noticed that Grace is having trouble concentrating,” he said. “She needs to step it up.” At six feet eight, he was well over a foot taller than my mother and me, literally talking down to us.

  This was shortly after the three boys interrupted practice to pretend rape and mock me in front of the whole team. My mother knew nothing about the incident, so she offered a different explanation.

  “You see, Grace is sad girl lately because her father had a heart attack.”

  “Mom!” I said under my breath, mortified that she exposed something so personal.

  “No, no. It’s okay,” the coach assured me before he turned his attention back to my mother.

  I felt embarrassed that I was embarrassed, as if I was a bad daughter for not putting my grief on display.

  The two adults continued to talk about my father’s condition as I bounced the racket against my calf and watched a cumulus cloud float in the sky. I became flooded with visions of his first heart attack: I am seven, visiting my father in the intensive-care unit. “Grace-ya, tell Abeoji what you got for him,” my mother says about the violets I insisted that we buy. My tongue is leaden and useless, but I manage to extend my hands and hold a pot up in front of his face. What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue, I expect him to say, but he can’t talk either. He mouths the words “Thank you, honey.” A creaking sound has replaced his voice.

  My dread grew as I remembered those violets under the harsh white lights of the hospital room, my father’s face extra pale, like the color of pie dough, from having had his chest cut open. The faint smell of flowers mixed with the stench of death and antiseptic.

  I couldn’t bear the thought of going to the hospital again. All I wanted was to finish tennis practice, then hang out with Jenny and listen to the Cure and talk about boys. Sometimes we talked about big philosophical questions too. “God isn’t a man in the sky,” she once said as we lay on the lawn of our high school, gazing toward the heavens. “God is the sky. And the clouds, and the trees, and you and me.”

  My awareness drifted back to the present moment, back to my tennis coach wishing my father a quick recovery. I spotted Jenny’s bouncy blond curls on the other side of the courts and waved goodbye.

  “Gaja,” my mother said. “Let’s go.”

  We got in the car and went to the hospital to see my father, and again, I sat in a chair beside his bed and stared at him without speaking.

  My father was once again the patient, my mother the nurse. Their now-familiar roles. She always made sure to follow the doctor’s orders, planning menus around what he wanted to eat but adjusting it whenever the doctor told him to cut back on sodium and saturated fat or add more fiber, serving “soysage” and tofu ice cream long before plant-based protein was a thing. She constantly fretted over his heart and tried to keep him out of physically demanding situations. She worked two jobs so as not to spend too much of his money, and still, she kept the house spotless and comfortable. Her third shift.

  She had never before faltered on her care duties, but what could she do when the doctor advised him to reduce his stress? My parents’ very relationship was stressful. My mother’s discon tent and overwork bursting the seams of her emotional labor. My father always reacting to her provocations.

  The only thing he knew to do was retire from his job as a merchant marine captain, but his retirement created new stressors. Mainly, they were money and my mother.

  Retirement ushered in a new era of my parents’ conflict. It was the first time since they met that they spent more than three months at a time together. Leaving his job as a ship captain with an all-male crew at his beck and call to be home with an angsty teenage daughter and spitfire wife—two women he could not control—must have been a hard transition. In his poor health, he wanted to be the center of attention at all times, and my mother, who had become increasingly independent of him over the years, would not have given him that even if she’d been capable of it. Each day he grew slightly more bitter, and it made me wonder whether distance had been the glue holding my parents together for all those years.

  Household bickering became a constant, and one of them was always threatening to divorce the other. I spent a lot of time in my room, trying to shut out my parents and their problems. Once, despite having the volume of Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Happy House” cranked up to drown out their fighting, I still heard my mother yell, “When Grace goes away to college, I’m leaving you!”

  It was too much. I ran out and screamed, “Just get a divorce now so I don’t have to listen to this anymore!” My outburst stunned them into temporary submission, ending the fight, but I was under no illusion that I had any real power to change things.

  They had been spending more time together, not just because my father had stopped working, but because my mother had suddenly quit foraging and was home more too. It didn’t take long before he began complaining that he wished he could go back to sea, that she would be the death of him. My parents’ marriage had always been volatile and sometimes violent. The most indelible fight in my memory happened when I was very young—the same height as my father’s leg, which must have made me two, maybe three. Perhaps he thought that I was too young to be able to remember. Indeed, I had repressed the event for well over a decade, until one day he teased my mother for being part elephant because of the ivory in her nose.

  “Why do you have ivory in your nose?” I laughed. She did not look amused.

  “It got broken and they fix it with ivory,” she mumbled, averting her eyes. I could feel her fuming some mix of resentment and shame, and I knew not to ask how it got broken.

  And then the memory came rushing back.

  My parents are yelling at each other in the dining room, and it quickly escalates into my father hitting her. I howl and beg him to stop, but he hits her again. I run to him, throw my arms around his leg, and stand on top of his foot, thinking that I can hold him down long enough for my mother to run away. He drags me along as he corners her. I can’t see what’s happening because my face is buried in his thigh, but then I hear the cracking sound of bone against bone, her screaming. I sink my teeth into his leg, and he shakes me off with such a forceful kick that it sends me flying against the dining room chairs. He doesn’t even look in my direction, but maybe it’s because I don’t cry. Unfettered, he starts in again on my mother. The sight of him beating her fills me with such terror that I feel no pain in my body. I pick myself up and attack his leg again.

  I write this now as the mother of a young child and can barely fathom how deep my father’s passion must have been for him to not see what he had done to me, what he was doing to me. Or that this was a seed that he had planted. I tried to talk to him about it when I was in my twenties, but he was flabbergasted that I had even questioned it. “But she deserved it!” he insisted, throwing his hands up in the air.

  I can remember neither how the fight started or ended nor the physical injuries left in its wake, and I’m uncertain of whether this fight was the cause of my mother’s broken nose. The only things I’m certain of are those fragments burned into my mind: the screams, the punching sounds, the dining room chairs. Above all, I remember clinging to my father’s leg as if my life depended on it.

  The fight I witnessed when I was a toddler was not the only time he had been violent toward her, but as he got older and weaker, my mother became a formidable opponent. Once, when I was in eighth grade, she took one of the same dining room chairs that I had fallen against and hit my father with it. I wasn’t there to witness this particular fight, but I walked in on them just as things were simmering down. My father was in the bathroom, fumbling through one o
f the cabinets, then opening a box of Band-Aids with his trembling hands. His glasses had snapped in half and the jagged metal frame had cut the bridge of his nose.

  “That’ll teach you to mess with me, you no-good sonofabitch,” my mother spat from the hallway.

  “Your mother hit me with a chair!” he said to me as I stared dumbfounded at the two of them.

  In the days that followed these episodes, my parents carried on as if nothing had happened. Their fights were storms that punctuated stretches of dreary weather.

  But as my father’s health deteriorated, I became more sympathetic toward him, and by the time I was in high school, I often took his side. It had become challenging to live with my mother.

  She was often agitated, obsessing about certain people in town and their “nosiness” into her affairs, often worrying that her coworkers at Green Hill or our neighbors were spreading rumors about our family. This was nothing new, because we had long been the subject of gossip, but then her suspicions would grow into an elaborate pyramid of potential enemies. Anyone within six degrees of separation from someone she mistrusted could come under her scrutiny; anyone within two was automatically blacklisted. Soon, entire geographic regions would be the hotbed of malicious activity.

  One day, I was talking to one of my friends on the phone in our kitchen and I heard the slight rustle of someone picking up the other phone in my parents’ bedroom. My mother’s voice interrupted the conversation with a stern but measured, “Hang up. Hang up the phone right now.” And I did, out of embarrassment.

  “Jesus, Mom! What did you do that for?”

  “You cannot talk to that Julie anymore. She’s one of the bad people.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “She lives in Adna, doesn’t she?”

  “So?”

  “Don’t you know, Grace?” She sounded exasperated by my naivete. “All people from that town want to hurt us.”

  “Oh my god!” I yelled as I burst into tears and ran to my room.

  For months, she’d been telling my father that people were watching her, talking about her behind her back, or openly confronting her. I can’t remember if he ever tried to do anything about it or just dismissed it as her “nonsense.”

  March 24, 1986

  Dad,

  Hi! How are you doing? I’m doing all right … Mom wanted to write to you but she’s been busy. She’s working for Mrs. Murdock doing yard work. She has really been driving me crazy with all her Green Hill nonsense. Maybe it isn’t nonsense but she’s taking it way out of proportion. Any person that is nice to me she thinks is actually trying to harm me. She has ruined my social life. A good social life is important, not just grades, especially at my age. I think you can understand that better than Mom can. Well, I don’t have much more to say. I just wanted to say hello to my dear father. Mom sends her love. I love you, too, even if sometimes we don’t get along. I don’t know what I would do without you.

  Love Always, Grace

  In 2016 I found this letter addressed to my father in Guam, the last place he was stationed before retirement. It’s the only concrete piece of evidence I have of what transpired that year, and it contradicted my memory, which told me that her paranoia had started in the fall.

  I don’t remember if my father ever responded to the letter, nor do I remember writing it in the first place, but what I see now is that my words were an appeal for help. In March 1986, I had already internalized my mother’s complaints as “nonsense,” and yet, I also had a flicker of doubt that maybe she was telling the truth.

  There was something real in her protest, not just the ravings of a lunatic. How many times had women who told the truth been muzzled with the label of madness? This is a question I would come to ask myself time and again once I became a graduate student in New York.

  The first time I can remember articulating what I wanted my adult life to look like, it was 1984. Rebecca Brown, a then up-and-coming writer from Seattle who had just published her first book, came to my junior high school to do a creative-writing workshop. She approached my desk to ask me what my aspirations were, and without skipping a beat, I told her that I wanted to live in New York. “You would fit right in there!” she replied.

  Although I wasn’t sure what she meant, I took it as a compliment. I wasn’t sure what I meant either, except that New York was the polar opposite of Chehalis. New York was a big city full of possibility, full of different kinds of people.

  By 1986 I had a much more concrete idea of what exactly I wanted to run away from. It wasn’t just my parents, but the whole town. The narrow-minded people who hated everything that I loved, everything that I was. The people whose mission was to spread their hate. At fifteen, I didn’t yet know how well organized they were, or that the same people were at the epicenter of my mother’s torment.

  Besides her coworkers at Green Hill, the other group that gave my mother the most grief was the John Birch Society, a radical right-wing organization founded in 1958 and named after an American who had been killed by the Chinese at the end of World War II. Their mission was to fight the Cold War by weeding out communism at home. In their view, desegregation, civil rights, and any sort of social welfare or social-justice work were all part of a communist plot to weaken America. They warned their followers of government conspiracies and put scare quotes around words such as “human rights.”

  But few people in the American mainstream took the JBS seriously. In 1961 the New York Times dismissed them as part of the “lunatic fringe,” and in 1963 Bob Dylan wrote a scathingly satirical song, “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.” By the 1970s, they seemed to have faded out of American politics. Yet in places like Chehalis, they were still alive and well when my family lived there, supplying the Hamilton Farm sign with many of its slogans.

  My mother often speculated about which of our neighbors and associates were Birchers. Even at the time I didn’t think there was anything unreasonable about her wariness, since it was a well-known fact that they wanted to purge the town of immigrants, particularly the ones who had come from communist parts of the world. There was a point at which white people in rural Washington State began to recognize Korea as a country separate from China and Japan. The question began to shift from “Are you Chinese or Japanese?” to “Are you from North or South Korea?” Either question was loaded when coming from a Bircher. Look out you Commies!2

  I moved to New York to pursue my graduate studies when I was twenty-five, and I never encountered anyone there of my generation who had heard of the John Birch Society. It felt like I had moved far, far away from the hateful, paranoid politics of my upbringing. But by the mid-2010s, news articles began to pop up in progressive media outlets about the group’s resurgence. Some articles warned of its growing influence in the Republican Party and the dangers it could pose to American democracy if not taken seriously, while others argued that the damage had already been done, that they had already spread their roots far and wide enough through conservative America. One observer noted that Trump’s election was evidence of the group’s lasting impact on American politics.

  In 2018 the JBS website would say of the so-called migrant caravan, “This is an invasion, and it is NOT a ‘human right.’” The article would urge its readers to call the president to demand a wall, a militarized border, an end to asylum.

  In quiet rural communities such as Chehalis, their stealth operations to smoke out commies paid off. The Birchers’ agenda would become national law. Yee-hoo, I’m a real John Bircher now!3

  Although my parents seemed more and more irritated by each other’s presence, they still had some residue of loyalty toward one another, and my father urged my mother to quit her job because she was always coming home from work distressed.

  She did quit Green Hill, and without that job or foraging, her life suddenly became sedentary. She began watching television, something she rarely had the time or inclination to do before, and I thought at first that some leisure would do her good
. She was especially drawn to Wheel of Fortune, and would talk to herself in a quiet but animated voice about the puzzles, sometimes just guessing the hidden words and sometimes questioning the meaning behind them. Why they say that, I wonder? She would pause as if listening, her eyes intensely focused on the screen. What do you mean by that?

  There were other times when it seemed like she was talking to a presence that wasn’t really there—a few words and phrases whispered to household objects. I wavered back and forth between worrying that she had a psychological problem and telling myself that we all talk to ourselves sometimes. But my mother wasn’t just talking. She seemed to be arguing with someone under her breath, sometimes getting so worked up that she couldn’t focus on the person that was actually there talking to her.

  One day, on our way to go shopping, we stopped to make a deposit at the bank. We pulled up to the drive-through, and a pretty blond teller greeted us with a bubbly “How are you all doing today?”

  “Fine. Thank you. And you?” said my mother.

  “Oh, can’t complain. How’s Don been feeling?”

  My mother furrowed her brow and glared at the teller. “You stop talking about my husband.”

  The woman was taken aback. “Oh, I—”

  “That is none of your business,” my mother snapped, her eyes wild. “Why are you always nosing around and sniffing around my family? What do you want with us?”

  “Mom, stop,” I pleaded. She fixed her eyes on the girl a while longer, who now looked petrified, then drove away.

  “Why did you do that? She didn’t do anything!”

  “Didn’t you hear what she said about your father?”

  “Huh? That’s just what people say when they’re making small talk. God, Mom! What’s wrong with you?”

  At the time I thought that she must have believed that the young blond had designs on my sixty-seven-year-old father, but now I think that it’s far more likely that my mother’s brain probably translated the words “How’s Don been feeling?” into something entirely different: Is it true that Don has another family in the Philippines? You’re a fool to believe he’d be loyal to you. Don is leaking secrets to the Russians. He’s told Gorbachev about your brother in North Korea. North Korea … You’d better watch out, ’cause the Birchers have you in their sights.