Tastes Like War

by Grace M. Cho

  “Dad, what is this?” I said as I picked up the letter and blinked at it. I wanted to yell, “David Duke is a white supremacist!” but felt like I had just been punched in the stomach, so instead the words wheezed out of my mouth. Oblivious to my revulsion, he said that the United States was heading down the wrong path, and that David Duke was just the man to steer it back in the right direction. “It’s what our country needs right now.”

  Childhood memories began to flood through my body. There were the usual ones of being a victim of racialized violence, the ones I could never really forget, but they were soon interrupted by a different memory in which I was the perpetrator.

  I am three years old. Our paperboy, the only Black kid in town, arrives on his bike and I run to the screen door, delighted to see him. “Hi, N—!” I say, because I think that’s his name. In an instant my mother pulls me away. “I’m so sorry,” she says to the boy. “She doesn’t know what that means. Oh, I am sorry. Please forgive her.”

  She grabs me by the shoulders and says, “Grace, you can never call anyone that.”

  “But that’s what Daddy calls him,” I say softly, a burning sensation I cannot yet name spreading through my body.

  Reliving this scene in my mind filled me with horror and shame that my father had put that word in my mouth when I was too young to understand its dehumanizing power. How carelessly he tossed it about. Eeny, meeny, miney, mo, catch a n—by the toe.

  I wondered if the boy remembered me after all those years, if the face of bigotry that he saw when he looked back on his life was that of a three-year-old Asian girl. And then an even more disturbing thought occurred to me: What if that boy was the same boy from my brother’s high school, the one named Chris, who killed himself? The paperboy was about the same age as my brother, and Chris was the only Black teenager in my brother’s high school. What if I had been some small link in the chain of events that led to Chris’s death?

  The memory triggered another, this one of my father calling my mother “Mongoloid.”

  I am ten or eleven. I am sitting at the kitchen table when my parents begin to argue. “Why you have to say something like that?” my mother says. “I told you to stop.” He pushes back. “Well, you’re part Mongol, ain’t ya?” Then he makes a joke about me being the “baby Mongoloid.” She becomes furious and yells, “How many times I gotta tell you stop using that word?” He is once again unapologetic and smirking. “But that’s what it says on her birth certificate.”

  My hand clenched as I held the letter, crumpling the David Duke stationery. When the air returned to my lungs, I threw it at him and screamed with the entire force of my body, “Who do you think you’re talking to? I’m your Asian daughter!”

  My father stared and stuttered. “But—but—what are you talking about? You—you’re not Black.”

  “I’m not white either!”

  Having spent much of his adult life in Asia, my father had grown fond of Asians and was perhaps willfully blind to white supremacy’s mission to keep all nonwhite races subordinated. Or maybe he had always viewed Asians as more palatable than other nonwhite people. After all, he did grow up at a time when the colonial hierarchy of the “family of man” structured Western thinking on race (e.g., “Mongoloids” rank below “Caucasoids” but above “Negroids”). He had probably internalized the belief that Asians were hardworking model minorities that had the potential to approximate whiteness, with a little help from people like him. My rejection of white identity must have made him feel like a failure.

  He also didn’t understand that racial domination doesn’t just take the form of the white terrorist burning a cross in your front yard. It can also look like the man you live with, the man you love. The man who defends your birth country, the place where he found his wife. Don’t they know that Korea’s not a third world country anymore? But it sure was in the 1960s when he met my mother, at least by his definition.

  Nor did he understand that his opportunities to travel to Asia had been a consequence of the deeply unequal and violent relationship between the American military and the countries they occupied. He spent time in the Philippines, Guam, Okinawa, and Korea because the American military had bases there, and as a member of the American military, he was given special privileges, such as official access to local women. Official access to my mother. But I didn’t understand that yet either.

  I walked away from him and tried to calm down, but something that my brother had said to me a few weeks earlier buzzed in my ear like a mosquito. “Dad’s worried that you’re going to date a Black guy.” What fucking business is it of his who I date? I thought to myself, and with that, I charged back into his office.

  “I heard that you’re afraid of me dating a Black man. Well, would you feel better if it was a Black woman?” Although I had no dating prospects of any kind, my community was mostly Black and Brown, and increasingly queer. This hypothetical possibility was my way of telling him that, not only was I not his approximately white daughter, I was a goddamn degenerate to boot.

  My father’s face tightened into a scowl. “Does your mother know what you are?”

  There was no time to waste. I had to tell her before he did, so I rushed into the living room, sat down on the couch next to her, and took a deep breath. “Mom, there’s something I have to ask you.”

  “Wha?”

  “Would you still love me if I liked women? I mean, romantically?”

  Her eyes darted around the room for a few seconds, and she said in a calm, steady voice, “Oh. You are not one of those, are you?” But a moment later she patted my thigh. “Of course I still love you. Hmph! What kind of person don’t love their own children?”

  My father began sending me letters about my “degenerate lifestyle,” which he initially signed “Love, Dad.” Gradually his signoff changed to just “Dad” and then to no greeting or sign-off. At that point I stopped opening his letters.

  The topic of my romantic life never came up again until a year after graduation, when I moved in with Cesar, a boyfriend that I’d end up living with for ten years. My brother would tell me, “Dad’s okay with him being Mexican. He’s just relieved that it’s a man.”

  Though I couldn’t forgive my father’s bigotry when I was in college, later I would be able to see him within his social context. For most of his life, queer sexuality was treated as a moral defect, a crime, or a disease. It was illegal in Washington State until 1976, the DSM classified it as a psychiatric disorder until 1980, and it was grounds for barring an immigrant from entering the United States until 1990.

  My father had been born a white male in America in 1919, just four years after Woodrow Wilson screened The Birth of a Nation in the White House as a cautionary tale of the perils of allowing Black people their freedom. And when my father was five years old, the KKK held one of its largest “super rallies” in Chehalis.3 No doubt it was the biggest spectacle he ever could have seen, the town swarmed with seventy thousand cloaked and hooded Klansmen, a dozen of them for every inhabitant of Chehalis. Perhaps it was his equivalent of my bicentennial, a momentous occasion from early life that would shape his sense of self in the world.

  He came of age when the sun never set on the British Empire, while my coming of age happened when people from formerly colonized parts of the world were populating college campuses and revising dominant accounts of history to include themselves in it. As postcolonial scholars of the time argued: the empire was writing back. Through this new prism of the experiences of women, the colonized, and the oppressed, I began to see the injustices my mother faced. I had witnessed many of them with my own eyes, but I still didn’t know much about her past in Korea. All I knew for sure was that she had survived a war, had worked in some sort of a service job, and had been denied the opportunity to go to school. From what I had deduced, my mother had become her family’s breadwinner at some point because her father had died and her brother had disappeared.

  In a class on bilingual education, I learned about J
ohn Ogbu’s theory of involuntary minorities—groups with the most subordinated status of all minorities because they became part of a society by force, such as Chicanos, Native Americans, or African Americans in the United States, or Koreans in Japan. Then came a revelation. I realized that the reason my mother had been born in Japan, and the reason she shut down whenever I asked her about it, was because her family, or at least her mother, had been forced laborers. I told Sandra about the epiphany, and she chuckled at what she thought was an arbitrary distinction. “What’s the difference between forced labor and slavery?” I thought about her question. Was “forced labor” a euphemism or was it just a broader term that included various forms of slavery? It was deeply disturbing to think that my mother had been born into slavery of any form.

  The longer I was at Brown and the more distance I had from my childhood, the more I put my parents under a microscope. I saw the way that the power dynamics in my family mirrored a larger dynamic of social inequality, and my father became the main object of my criticism. The very thing that he had worked so hard for—my first-class education—was also the thing that created a gulf between us so wide and deep that we could never again stand on common ground.

  We had stopped talking until two weeks before my college graduation, when he called and said, “I’m ready to be conciliatory.” But I wasn’t.

  I cried on the phone to my brother because I wanted more than anything for my mother to come to my graduation, even though I knew full well that she had become afraid of strangers and certainly couldn’t tolerate a crowd.

  “Can’t you try to convince her?” I pleaded, not remembering that she hadn’t made it to his college graduation either.

  “Uh, I doubt it, but one of your parents wants to go.” I felt conflicted and spent the next few days wavering back and forth between whether it would be worse to have my father at my graduation or to not have him there. Ultimately, I couldn’t bear the thought of him coming while my mother stayed at home, huddled in the corner of her darkness.

  So I went to my college graduation, an event that I once imagined would be the proudest moment of my parents’ lives, without them there to witness it. I listened to the commencement speeches about what great heights I would achieve as a Brown grad and the exciting new life that awaited, but all I could feel was my parents’ absence.

  9. JANUARYSEVENTH

  Providence, Rhode Island, 1994

  WHAT I REMEMBER MOST about the year I turned twenty-three was the snow. It seemed to fall every few days that winter, sometimes by the foot, and although I’d been living in Providence for four years, I still hadn’t gotten used to the “windchill factor” (a concept I had never heard of growing up) or the sensation of tiny pellets of ice whipping across my face. In Chehalis, it rarely got cold enough to snow, and if it did, the snow came in the form of a soft ephemeral dust that coated the landscape for a few hours in the morning before melting into the damp ground by midday.

  After graduating from college, I moved to Smith Hill, a quaint neighborhood in Providence near the capitol building, where I lived on the top floor of a nineteenth-century carriage house that had been built on a slope. My awareness of the amount of snowfall that year was made more acute by my first car, a silver ’87 Volkswagen Golf with standard transmission. Even a small accumulation made pulling up the driveway treacherous, and there was a constant ache in my arms and back from shoveling.

  It’s a curious thing that my memory takes me to snow, because there were far more important things to remember about that year, like the gnawing fear that I was never going to get my old mother back. On the eve of 1994, the fictions that had barely held my family together came bursting apart and threatened to break me along with them.

  Sometime in late 1993, after my father announced that he was done with her, my mother moved to a leafy suburban neighborhood about a mile from my brother’s house in New Jersey.

  My brother and his wife had been working up to the idea of having her live near them for some time anyway, because my mother needed more than my father could give her. I was grateful that they were going to take care of her, though I doubt I was able to express it at the time. I had just graduated college and yearned for the opportunity to pursue a career and romantic life, while my brother and his wife were older and more stable. He had a lucrative job as an investment banker; they had just bought their first house and had their first child. Having my mother there could fit into the bigger picture of their lives in a way that it couldn’t in mine. Besides, my brother was my mother’s firstborn and her only son. Among Koreans, caring for elderly or sick parents was the first son’s responsibility. The adult daughter’s responsibility was to loosen ties with her mother and forge new ones with a mother-in-law. Although my sister-in-law was a white woman from Arkansas, she’d been aware of these cultural practices. That she was to act as my mother’s daughter. That my brother’s authority would always eclipse mine.

  “Your mother will do whatever he tells her to do,” she’d say, and this time he told Mom that she was coming to live in New Jersey.

  He also told her that she had to see a psychiatrist, and while I thought it was a godsend that she might finally get some treatment, this development would also stir up the years of emotional sediment about the situation—my frustration at not being able to get help for her, my embarrassment about the police debacle. The way my family had ostracized me for even daring to speak the word “schizophrenic” made me believe that the only thing that could earn their forgiveness was my silence.

  Somehow I managed to live with my mother’s madness because she was still able to do basic things for herself. She could feed and groom herself, or talk on the phone if she knew it was me calling. You give me a signal, okay? Let it ring twice and hang up, then you call right back. I managed to live with it because, until my sister-in-law came along, no one else would admit that there was something terribly wrong, and I lacked the resources to deal with it myself.

  I was a senior in high school the first time I remember my sister-in-law saying that my mother had “problems.” It might have been during the same visit when, seated at our kitchen table, she and my brother casually announced that “by the way, we got married”—the words making my father’s jaw go slack, my mother’s eyes skitter.

  Somehow this memory of my sister-in-law at our bright-white kitchen table, sitting under the glare and hum of fluorescent lights, morphs into another memory. The same scene but with a smaller cast, my mother and father absent. I think your mom has problems. Someone in her own family (an aunt?) had problems, too, she said. The knot in my chest tightened, then loosened ever so slightly as the words landed. Was this message for me more than it was for my brother? Was it to say that she could see what I’d been going through and that soon enough she would make my brother see too? Yes, my mother had problems. It was a euphemism spoken by someone whose place in my family was secure enough to speak what had always been unspeakable. Maybe an outsider was exactly what we needed to shake things up.

  By the time I graduated from college, both my brother and his wife could say it plainly: schizophrenic.

  Although my mother had already spent years staying more or less confined to the house, increasingly to one room, leaving the house she knew for a different one on the opposite side of the country seemed to have opened some traumatic wounds of her wartime childhood and of fleeing her home.

  Her new place was a one-bedroom apartment in a little wooden house surrounded by dense foliage. The trees shading the windows provided her some privacy, but the leaves were already turning, her camouflage dwindling by the day.

  It was perhaps the second or third time I visited her when I first felt winter’s quickening breath on my skin. The sky was gray and heavy with snow clouds, and night fell before she had even put on a pot of rice. We sat in her living room after eating, and the low, persistent wail of a siren interrupted the otherwise peaceful silence of our surroundings.

  “Do you hear that, Grace?” she
asked. “What do you suppose that is?”

  “I don’t know. Is it an ambulance?” I knew it wasn’t, but I wanted to give her an answer. The noise seemed like it was being radioed in.

  “Sounds like an air-raid siren,” she said in an audible whisper.

  “Have you heard it before?”

  “Every day at the same time.” She began wringing her hands.

  I was glad to have been there to hear what she heard, so that her reports of air-raid sirens would not be filed away as another auditory hallucination, another crazy thing that she did or said.

  Ten years later, while I was writing my doctoral dissertation, I would learn that the Korean War’s staggering civilian death toll had primarily been caused by aerial bombing with napalm. The Americans’ fire and fury decimating schools and orphanages, incinerating the flesh of screaming children.

  During my next visit, I arrived to find my brother picking up broken glass in front of the entrance. My mother had been on her way to a psychiatric appointment, but she couldn’t figure out how to unlock the front door. Then her key had gotten jammed, so she got a kitchen knife—the one she had used for as long as I could remember to crush garlic and slice bulgogi—and broke the glass out of the window to escape the house.

  I wondered if she had heard the siren when it happened, if that piercing sound had burrowed into her mind and convinced her that this was an emergency. That she needed to LEAVE NOW.

  “How am I supposed to explain this to the landlord?” my brother asked as he surveyed the wreckage.

  I would leave it to him to figure out the lie. The truth was just too complicated.

  At certain times each day, my mother would chant—something that my sister-in-law referred to as the “timing thing.” At 1:07 she repeated “January seventh,” my birthday, over and over again with the speed of an auctioneer, until the minute was up.