Tastes Like War

by Grace M. Cho

  Love, Grace

  By Christmas of my sophomore year, my father initiated my parents’ first separation and had moved in with his cousin in Raymond, a fishing town even smaller than Chehalis. We had the house to ourselves on Christmas, sharing it only with the cousin’s two Siamese cats. The space was small and cluttered with extraneous housewares like horse figurines, throw pillows with chunky crocheted covers, and candy bowls of peppermint ribbons.

  “How is it living here?” I asked.

  “It’s all right. Can’t complain. It sure as hell beats living with your mother.”

  He opened the fridge, took out a plate of ham, and heated it in the microwave.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked as he lifted the lid of a simmering pot. The scent of sugary baked beans filled the room. “Your father’s not much of a cook, but I tried to fix it up with some garlic and spices.”

  We set the small dining table for two and ate leftover ham and baked beans from a can. The humble meal we shared that night seemed more intimate than any of the meals we had eaten together at home. It was the first time he had ever cooked for me. The strangeness of the environment made my father more familiar to me, yet at the same time, the change of scenery revealed new things about him. His voice was soft, in a tone that sounded like gratitude.

  After dinner he presented me with a pair of dangling silver earrings that looked like Tlingit totem poles: one of the pairs that I had asked for. I couldn’t remember the last time he had attempted a surprise gift.

  My mother had selected most of my gifts in the past, with the exception of my sixth birthday. I came home from school that day to find a Baldwin spinet piano in the living room and was so stunned that I could have gotten a present that big that I shouted, “This is the best birthday ever!” My father radiated pride. He dreamed that one day I would perform his favorite piece of classical music—Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C-sharp minor—and I was diligent in my practice for nine years. I stopped playing the piano at age fifteen, when my interests began to wander in other directions and my mother went mad, but I did perform the Rachmaninov concerto for my final piano recital. My father watched me from the front row, his eyes glistening.

  I opened the jewelry box, feigning anticipation. “Thanks, Daddy. I love them.”

  “You’re welcome, honey. I’m glad you like them. Now, your birthday’s coming up. Is there anything you want?”

  “Well, I could use some kitchen stuff. I want to learn how to cook.”

  All of my prior college cooking experience had been executed with the use of three instruments: a microwave, a hot pot, and the rice cooker my mother had given me as a going-away present.

  The next day we drove to a kitchen store at the local outlet mall. I picked out two metal mixing bowls, a whisk, two wooden spoons, and a spatula. The total rang in at around forty dollars, which was no small purchase for my father during his retirement, yet he asked me several times if there was anything else I needed. “No,” I said. “That’s enough to start.”

  When it was time for me to go back to my mother, he asked if he could take a picture of me. The next few times I visited him, that picture of me from Christmas 1990 was on his desk. In the photo, I am standing in his cousin’s living room against a backdrop of barn-themed wallpaper and a synthetic Christmas tree, wearing a purple alpaca sweater that I had bought from some hippies at the student union that fall. The totem-pole earrings peek through my long black hair.

  I barely remember my mother that Christmas or for much of that year. The most salient memory I have of being with her during sophomore year was when she came to visit me for Mother’s Day weekend, the last vacation she would ever take. My brother flew her out to Rhode Island and drove himself up from New Jersey, and the two of them stayed at the downtown Omni Biltmore in a room that overlooked the city—all of it a Mother’s Day gift from my brother. I was grateful to him for making it happen, and even more so now, realizing that a visit from Mom was something that he himself had never gotten when he was away at college.

  How different this was from the travel she had experienced in the past. The family vacations of my childhood were road trips along the West Coast, where we slept in Motel 6s with vibrating beds and the scent of stale cigarettes. I only remember two trips: one to California in 1976 and another to British Columbia in 1980. In the years in between, the years after, were my father’s broken promises, my mother’s lamentations. You never take me anywhere! All I do is work. She wanted him to show her all the places that America was famous for: The Grand Canyon. Niagara Falls. Washington, DC. New York City. So many years I live in this country and why I still never see anything?

  Maybe the Biltmore brought her a little closer to her American dream. “Hwaaa, I like this hotel,” she said as she ran her fingers across the crisp white bedsheets. It must have been thrilling to experience business-class accommodations, to momentarily see herself as a person of high status.

  It was thrilling for me, too, to have her there. After two years as the only student I knew whose family had never visited, I couldn’t wait to introduce her and my brother to my friends. When we arrived at my dorm, they met two of my suitemates, but my closest friends were away visiting their own mothers that weekend. Seven years later, when Sandra, Jaquetta, and I were all living in New York, I would say to them, “It occurred to me that you must think I’m lying about having a mother because you’ve never met her and probably never will.”

  I spotted another friend in the courtyard outside my dorm and waved him over. “Hello. Nice to meet you,” my mother said to him in a flat voice. I had gotten used to her affect and hardly noticed that she didn’t make eye contact with him. I was simply relishing the joy and excitement of having her there to witness my college life. In that moment, I felt proud of her, prouder than I had felt in years. A few days later the friend would have only one thing to say about her: “Your mom is weird.”

  “What kind of thing is that to say?” I would snap back, unable to hide my hurt.

  Instead of apologizing, he would reassert: “But she is weird.”

  Being away at college had made me forget what my mother looked like through the eyes of others.

  There were no letters from me to my father in 1991.

  If I had written to him after sophomore year, my words were not the kind he wanted to hang on to.

  There were several moments when I could feel the fault lines forming between my father and me, but it was perhaps in my junior year that I first became aware of the cracks.

  I had started a semester-long study-abroad program, but six weeks in, my travels were aborted. During one of my regularly scheduled phone calls home, my father told me that he was dying. “I really don’t think I’m going to make it that much longer, Grace.” So I flew back home expecting to find him on his deathbed but instead found him gardening in the front yard. Another miraculous recovery.

  So I went back to Brown in the fall, and the fact that I had enrolled late meant that all the campus housing was full and I became one of the few juniors to live off-campus. For $250 a month, I shared an apartment with two senior girls in Fox Point, a sleepy Portuguese neighborhood that was a fifteen-minute walk from campus. We had the first floor of a two-story wooden house with a porch, and although the peeling mint-green paint on the exterior and the scratched floorboards inside made the house feel a little shabby, it also had a good deal of late Victorian charm—tin ceilings and decorative iron grates over the heating vents in the floor. For the first time in my life, I had a fully equipped kitchen of my own, and I finally put to use the mixing bowls that my father had gotten me for my birthday.

  I bought Molly Katzen’s The Enchanted Broccoli Forest and Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant cookbooks, and cooking became my new favorite method of escape. It was not a conscious escape, but rather something that allowed me to be immersed in the present of measuring and mixing and mincing, of tasting and fine-tuning my creation into a product that I could share with others. The level of concen
tration I put into cooking kept me from drifting off into daydreams or fretting over my parents’ problems. My adult life would begin to flourish in the space of the kitchen, the foil to my family’s disintegration.

  My parents’ first separation didn’t last long. They were back together when I returned from Brazil, but my mother had become even more withdrawn.

  She had stopped opening the curtains or turning on the lights. She just sat on the couch suspended in a state of perpetual darkness, with her feet reclined and knees bent, chin tucked into her chest and eyes half-closed. Despite two years of witnessing her gradually waste away on the couch, my father still believed that she was doing it to spite him.

  “Your mother could go back to work if she wanted to. Hell, she can be like her old self if she really wanted to—take care of the house, cook dinner, keep me company. You know, like she used to. But she just doesn’t want to, dammit.”

  The newly minted feminist in me reacted negatively to his expectations. “Why does she always have to cook and clean for you? Huh, Dad? You can do some of it yourself, you know!”

  I neglected to consider his age or his ailing heart. Although I knew he had almost died four times, I still had no real concept of what it was to be old and in need of physical help. But the bottom line was that my mother could not snap out of her schizophrenia no matter how much he complained, so he told her that it was her turn to leave. This time, their separation turned into a divorce.

  My mother got an apartment in Oregon to be near my cousin Jinho, whom I had always known to be one of her closest family members; he was five and my mother was nine when my grandmother adopted him.

  I never questioned whether or not she was in good hands with Jinho and Sun. It wasn’t until the following year that I learned that my cousins rarely saw her because she was reluctant to leave her apartment and had stopped answering the phone. They never found out that she was mentally ill, and probably wondered why she never wanted to see them. In Korean, there is almost no concept for mental illness, which I would be reminded of throughout my thirties whenever I tried to explain to my aunt why my mother never came with me to Korea. The closest I could get to a translation was “Mah-eum-i apa-yo.” Her spirit hurts.

  Once I knew what it felt like to not live with my parents, being around them again began to make my spirit hurt. My mother’s was not the same kind of hurt. Mine motivated me to leave, while hers kept her chained to the couch.

  The other unanticipated benefit of returning to Brown in the fall of 1991, besides the kitchen, was a new best friend. Rafael was getting a master’s degree in Portuguese and Brazilian studies, my undergraduate major. He was Mexican American of Polish and Spanish descent, but he poked fun at the culture of identity politics on campus. “I identify as Chicana,” he said, imitating one of our classmates. “What do you identify as?”

  It was not easy to fit him into a box. He was also Jewish, gay, transnational (having grown up in Mexico, Brazil, and Texas), irreverent yet soft-spoken, and a self-described freak of nature. In elementary school he was asked to draw a picture of the animal that best represented him, and he chose a duck-billed platypus, one of the few mammals that lays eggs. His influence on my thinking propelled me to question the societal norms I had grown up with on an even deeper level. I had been questioning my sexuality for several months when I met him, but was too afraid to vocalize my feelings out of fear that my father would stop loving me. When I was in junior high and high school, during the early days of the AIDS crisis, my father had some choice words about “those goddamn degenerates” and warned me to steer clear of them. But my new friendship overpowered my fear. I had never felt more accepting of myself than when I was with Rafael.

  Above all, Rafael showed me the importance of play and exuberance. We would sometimes smoke weed to heighten the pleasure of eating, then indulge our larica—the Portuguese word that Sandra had taught us for “the munchies.” We trekked into neighborhoods beyond College Hill in search of exquisite treats like cheesecake sundaes, which we devoured between giggles. He taught me to dance salsa and shed my inhibitions in spades, as we danced late into the night, patronizing both Latin places like La Fragancia and gay clubs like Gerardo’s. If cooking in my new kitchen grounded me, then dancing with my new friend released me. Being with him allowed me to exist in the moment, to liberate myself from the traumas of the past.

  He meshed well with my other friends, especially Sandra, since they shared a connection to Brazil. I felt a sense of great accomplishment and relief that I had finally found a community, and not only was I a part of it, I was the “glue,” according to Rafael. You’re always the one to bring people together. Rafael became my chosen family. Decades later, my son would come to know him as Uncle Rafa.

  More and more, my college experience was broadening my worldview in such a way that it became incompatible with my father’s. It was not just my kinship with the “goddamn degenerates” that did it but also the subjects I had chosen to study.

  My father was a blue-collar man with a strong intellectual streak. He was an avid reader of English literature and even nicknamed himself “the Ancient Mariner” after Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem. His love of reading rubbed off on me, and I took comparative literature classes every semester. He had invested most of his hard-earned money in my education—not just for college but also in all the things that helped get me there: two years of private French lessons in junior high and two study-abroad trips to France in high school so that I could become a fluent reader of French.

  When I got to Brown, I found that I was more drawn to literature from parts of the world that were unfamiliar to me—not France, but the Francophone world, places like Martinique and the Maghreb. As I learned Portuguese, I glimpsed the vistas of the Lusophone world too. And I studied Japanese literature in translation alongside African women writers such as Tsitsi Dangarembga and Mariama Bâ. I thought my father would have approved of this, because he had long nurtured my desire to see the world by bringing me trinkets from far-flung places like Singapore and Goa. But then again, they were trinkets, not literature.

  “It’s a damn shame they’re not teaching you something else,” he said after a few semesters of patiently waiting for me to take the kind of classes he thought I should be taking. By “something else,” he meant the Western canon. He had been reading Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind at the same time that I’d been reveling in the writings of people of color. I took it personally that he disapproved of my choices and dismissed the literary contributions of the authors I was reading. My studies and social experience at Brown allowed me to feel, for the first time, that I was good enough. I didn’t have to be white or try to be white to have a voice.

  “Western writers aren’t superior,” I told him. “It’s just that people from the colonized world have been silenced for so long that you never got a chance to hear them. How would you even know how valuable they are?”

  “Look at what happened to Africa and India after they became independent!” he said, shaking his head.

  “What?” I was completely thrown off by the turn the conversation had just taken.

  “Those people don’t know how to govern themselves.”

  “Those people?” I worked to process what my father was saying. It wasn’t just about literature anymore. “You mean you think they were better off colonized?”

  “They used to say that the sun never sets on the British Empire,” he said, his voice dripping with nostalgia. “And it was true, goddammit!”

  As my father and I had these arguments, I came to realize that I was one of the Others he disdained. My friendships and romantic interests gravitated toward men and women who had ties to the “third world”—though, even among us, there was debate over whether or not this was an appropriate term. “Developing country” became the politically correct term that replaced “third world country,” but “third world” was a more forceful reminder of unequal power relations between nations and peoples. I
t also included immigrant groups that might have originated in a colonizing country of Europe, but still lagged behind in terms of social and economic power. In Providence, Rhode Island, this included the Portuguese: a large linguistic minority community that was underrepresented at the Ivy League campus in its backyard, besides as janitors or cafeteria workers. I was coming into consciousness, beginning to understand myself as a colonized person.

  My parents’ divorce only lasted slightly longer than their first separation. They got married to each other again within the year. When I saw them after they got back together, I was so moved that I could barely stave off my tears. “How many grown kids get to congratulate their own parents for getting married?” My father just nodded, because he, too, was getting choked up. My mother was silent, her face unreadable. I prodded. “How do you feel, Mom? Aren’t you happy?” She pursed her lips together and gave the slightest of nods. I took it to mean that things were better between them and they had renewed their vows to care for each other.

  Again, I had forgotten. I had forgotten what it was like to live with my mother, what it was like for her to live with my father.

  1992

  Dear Don,

  Thank you for your generous contribution to David Duke for President …

  Nothing would ever be the same again between us after I found a letter on my father’s desk from David Duke. In 1992 the New York Times had described Duke’s followers as the “racial right,”1 while the Los Angeles Times noted that, according to Duke, “American democracy is in danger because the growth of non-white, non-Christian ethnic groups is turning the nation into ‘a Third World country.’”2 It was this kind of rhetoric that appealed to his supporters. In the Republican primaries, Duke fared worse in Washington State than in any other state in which he was on the ballot. Only 1.16 percent of Washington Republicans voted for him, and among that percentage of voters was my father.