Tastes Like War

by Grace M. Cho

  It would take eight years, but a panel of three judges would rule in favor of fifty-seven of the plaintiffs—workers who had serviced the US military in the 1960s and 1970s, the same time period in which my mother worked on the base. The court determined that the government had illegally detained the women by locking them up in rooms with barred windows and forcing them to undergo medical treatment for sexually transmitted infections, constituting what one judge described as a “serious human rights violation that should never have happened and should never be repeated.”7

  According to Park Young-ja, one of the plaintiffs mentioned in the article, “They never sent us to doctors even when we were so sick we almost died, except they treated us for venereal diseases … not for us, but for the American soldiers.” Park also challenged the popular notion that she and her fellow sex workers at the American military bases were “willing” prostitutes. She pointed out that some women had been tricked by job-placement agencies, but even those who knew what kind of work they’d be getting into had never consented to the abusive conditions. “I was only a teenager and I had to receive five GIs a day with no day off. When I ran away, they caught and beat me, raising my debt.” The plaintiffs would later file a lawsuit against the US government.

  I heard my mother’s voice chanting as I read the article from the New York Times. Januaryseventhjanuaryseventhjanuaryseventh … I had always thought it was in reference to my birthday, but then I wondered if the date was also her vision into the future, the voice of her solidarity with the plaintiffs.

  Jenny came to visit me in February. She was my rock from the past and the only friend in my adult life that knew my mother. One night we went to a gay club called Generation X that was housed in an old industrial warehouse at the end of my street. Although it was just one block away, it was a challenge to get there without slipping on patches of compacted snow and ice as we walked downhill. We sat down at the bar, and after I warmed up with a cocktail, I told her what I’d learned about my mom.

  She covered her mouth and began to cry, yet didn’t break eye contact with me. She cried for a long time like that, muffling sobs and staring at me through her loose blond curls. When she was finally able to speak, she shook her head and said, “That’s so unfair.” It was the most satisfying response I had gotten from any of my friends, perhaps because she was the only one who knew my mother as a real person who had once loved her, not as a hypothetical mother, always hidden away behind her psychosis.

  In the years to come, after my father died and I became my mother’s cook, Jenny would say to me on the phone, “Oh, Gracie. When it’s all over, I want you to know that you did right by her.”

  There were a lot of things we didn’t know about schizophrenia in the 1990s, when my mother first entered the mental health care system. We didn’t know that “psychoses have a briefer duration in the Third World,”8 or that people in non-Western countries were ten times more likely to experience “nearly complete remission,”9 or that the “normative treatment for schizophrenia in American culture may significantly make things worse … that it does so by repeatedly creating the conditions for demoralization and despair.”10 We didn’t know that it was possible to recover from schizophrenia in some parts of the world, but that the United States wasn’t one of them.

  It wasn’t simply the bad luck of a faulty gene or an incurably diseased brain that made my mother suffer. She also had the bad luck of having schizophrenia in the United States, the very place she dreamed would bring her good fortune.

  The last big snow of the season fell in March, on the night that I began my first meaningful long-term relationship.

  I had met Cesar during college and admired him from afar whenever his salsa band played near campus. He was a slender six feet with thick, wavy, chin-length hair, a few strands of white gleaming amid the black.

  The summer after graduation, we started working together at a branch of the university—a center for ESL and bilingual education—but by this time his hair was shaved to half an inch. Cesar had graduated from Brown a year before me and already had a year of postcollege professional experience working there, even though it was just a day job to support his music career. Both of us were basically doing clerical work, but we had some sort of fancy titles so that the administration could report diversity in their hiring practices. He was Chicano and I was Asian, and together with the Cape Verdean secretary, we were token representations of several racial and linguistic minorities of Rhode Island.

  I had been nurturing a crush on Cesar since graduating, and it began to blossom into something more the night of the snowstorm, when he invited me to a party at his friend’s house in Fox Point.

  A squall rattled my bedroom window as I was getting dressed for the party—a pair of purple jeans, a black top, and a pair of Italian leather ankle boots that were about to get ravaged. If I had been the least bit rational, I wouldn’t have even entertained the idea of getting in my car and driving across town in five inches of snow, let alone shoveling my driveway first.

  When I arrived at the party, I barely needed to search the faces in the crowd before Cesar spotted me from across the room and smiled, the corners of his dark-brown eyes turning downward. “Hey, Grace. Glad you could make it.” I scanned the room to make sure he had come alone before giving him a hug. He handed me a cup of sweet rum punch as we sank into one of couches that his friend had salvaged through dumpster diving. The cushions sagged in the middle, pulling our bodies toward each other so that our legs touched. I felt the energy between us but wondered if I was reading too much into it.

  A few rum punches later, sometime around 4:00 a.m., he blurted out, “I think I love you, Grace.” It was clear that he had had too much to drink, and I probably had too, yet his confession jarred me into sobriety. I led him over to one of the mattresses that the host had set up on the floor so that his guests could pass out for the night, and told him to go to sleep. I lay down next to him and dreamed of a future in which his sunny disposition would be the light to my darkness.

  I woke up the next day around noon to the sound of a coffee pot hissing and party guests chatting. Cesar was still asleep, but I got up and walked out to the front porch, where two women were basking in the sudden arrival of spring. It was 60 degrees, and the sun was melting little rivers through the snow.

  “Glorious! Glorious!” one of them sang as she tilted her head back and opened up her arms.

  The forsythias lining the streets of Providence that spring burst into raucous yellow blooms, followed by the daffodils. Cesar and I kissed for the first time in April. He moved into my carriage-house apartment in May.

  Our collection of food magazines steadily populated our living room shelves: Food & Wine, Gourmet, Bon Appétit, Saveur, Cook’s Illustrated, Chile Pepper. We cooked decadent meals on our 1940s white porcelain stove: saucy French dishes or fiery Asian or Latin ones. Cooking became the incarnation of our desires and hopes, and trips to Stop & Shop were infused with the romance of building a life together.

  I lost myself to the fever of falling in love and spent entire days not thinking about my mother.

  One day in June, I picked up the phone to the sound of my sister-in-law’s voice. Grace, your mom …

  I didn’t want wake from my reverie. I wished that I could mute her, just this once, and not hear the end of the sentence.

  It was probably close to 11:00 p.m. that night when a state trooper pulled me over on I-95. I rolled down the driver’s-side window as I heard his heavy boots clomping up to the car.

  “Do you know how fast you were going?” he asked.

  I began to tremble and could see my hands shaking against the steering wheel.

  “You were doing almost ninety.”

  “My mom’s in the hospital,” I said, choking on tears. The officer’s face softened.

  “Where?”

  “New Jersey,” I said. We were somewhere in Connecticut.

  “Be careful, or you’ll end up in the hospital too.”
I nodded and croaked out the words “thank you” as the officer walked away.

  Six months after she started taking Haldol/Mellaril, my mother tried to kill herself. Suicidality was another common side effect of antipsychotic drugs, but it wasn’t until the second suicide attempt in July that I would wonder if the drug treatment itself might have made her do it.

  When she regained consciousness that first time, I grabbed her hand and begged her not to die, made promises I’d struggle to keep. I said I’d go to grad school. Maybe Harvard. Get a PhD. Anything to make her happy. With her hand in mine, I started down the path of finding things I didn’t even know I’d been looking for.

  10. CRUST GIRL

  Princeton, New Jersey, 1994

  “WORTHLESS.” THAT WAS THE WORD my mother used in the hospital, after she swallowed four bottles of antipsy-chotic drugs and was delirious from the chemical residue.

  “Why, Mama? Why would you do something like this?”

  She giggled and lolled her head from side to side against the pillow, reached her hand out and tweaked my nose as if I were a little girl and not a young woman starting my adult life. “Grace has a cute ko. Not big American nose like Abeoji.” She then lapsed into a mixture of Korean and gibberish before answering my question in clear, sober English: “Because I feel worthless.”

  That word, “worthless,” insinuated its way into my psyche and took up residence there like a disease. I spent the next fifteen years driven to find out where my mother’s feelings of worthlessness came from, to get to know that place intimately, and to somehow rid myself of the malady.

  After my mother died I spent agonizing years puzzling over the cause of death, the possibility—no matter how remote—that she might have taken her own life. Just as painful was the knowledge that I’d never find out the truth.

  When my anguish finally subsided, I started baking pies—twenty to thirty a week in a commercial kitchen. Until then I could count on one hand the number of pie shells I had made from scratch. The first one I made at age five, when my mother reluctantly let me use her dough scraps to bake a baby pie. It was the first and only time I was ever allowed to cook as a child, lest I derail my path toward academia.

  For a time, I did drift away from that path. It was when I became “ABD” (“all but dissertation”) in my doctoral program, a time when many students stray, and sometimes never come back. I put my studies on hold after taking the second of my three PhD qualifying exams, also known as “the orals”: two hours of speaking fluently on three different literatures.

  Public speaking had always been a weakness of mine, one of my biggest fears, and leading up to the exam I spent months buried in jargon-filled prose and self-doubt. When I passed the exam, Cesar, always my cheerleader in those days, gifted me with the shiny red KitchenAid stand mixer I had been saving up to buy with my $236 weekly income as an adjunct instructor at Brooklyn College. The mixer revolutionized my life. Gone were the days of hand-mixed doughs, half-beaten meringues, and whipped cream in a can. I started making cakes like never before, with perfectly structured crumbs and tight fluffy icings.

  The mixer was a gateway. Three months later, I enrolled in a professional pastry program. I dreaded telling my mother, but she was living with Cesar and me in our co-op apartment in Queens at the time, so I couldn’t exactly hide it. When I finally worked up the courage to tell her, she crossed her arms and turned her back to me. “I think someone is brainwashing you,” she said. Although I assured her that I would finish my PhD, she loathed the idea that I had temporarily exchanged a life of letters with late nights in an industrial kitchen, up to my elbows in flour.

  It was in pastry school that I baked four more pies from scratch. None of them came out perfect, but because we worked in pairs, the success or failure of the pies was not mine alone. I tried to explain this to my mother when she tasted one of them and said, “The filling is not bad, but that crust needs to be more flaky. It is not flaky.” Overall I did well in culinary school, but pie was neither my strength nor my passion, and when it was over I went back to using frozen pie shells because I doubted that I could produce anything better. I just kept them on hand for whenever the occasion might arise.

  Once, when I was invited to cook a three-course meal for a fundraising party, I pulled those crusts out of the freezer to fill with frangipane and fresh raspberries. I passed the crust off as my own, too embarrassed to admit I hadn’t made it myself when one of the diners complimented me on it. If my mother had been there, she would have seen me as lazy, just as she had when she discovered the grease stains on the sides of my cookware.

  “You need to clean your pots, Grace, or else people will think you don’t have ambition.”

  “No, Mom. It has nothing to do with ambition,” I said then, and would repeat again and again during the imagined conversations with my dead mother about my failure to execute a pie from scratch.

  That’s not it. I’m just a cake person.

  Cake had never been a part of my mother’s baking repertoire. Every cake that entered my childhood home had been from Safe-way—butterless and cloying.

  The world of gourmet cakes was uncharted culinary territory for me and became something I wanted to master. Cake was a delight, something whimsical, and at the same time, serious business. I continued to study cakes, like the good student my mother raised me to be. Even after culinary school ended, I took specialized workshops in icing and decoration. I practiced until I achieved the silkiest buttercream, the richest ganache, the most delicate piping around the borders. I baked until I earned a reputation for making the best cakes my friends and associates had ever tasted. You see, Mom. I do have ambition.

  Apple Pie

  MY MOTHER USED TO bake dozens of pies each month, hundreds of pies each year, her final pie count landing in the thousands. This proliferation of pie must have started with a taste somewhere of tender crust and sweet-tart filling, both completely foreign to her Korean palate. That first taste was probably on a US military base in Korea, where the foods were all-American: hamburgers, hot dogs, and apple pie.

  There was a time when my mother believed that she’d be able to melt into the homogeneity of my father’s hometown, and to that end, she embarked on a project of assimilation through the mastery of American cooking. Maybe she just got tired of the relentless interrogations from our neighbors. “Do they have this in your country?” “Is it true that they eat dogs in your culture?” Maybe she really believed that her role as wife and mother was to cook the things that were familiar to my father or to feed my brother and me things that would not mark us as foreigners. Whatever the reason, American cooking became something she took on with messianic zeal. Of course, she did not abandon Korean food in favor of American food but learned to eat some things in secrecy instead.

  “If American people see us eating this, they will be scared,” my mother said to me once as we chewed our way through a whole dried-roasted squid, clusters of tentacled legs dangling from our mouths. We laughed about it at the time, but decades later when I was on the tenure track, a student knocked on my office door and caught me eating dried squid legs. A rush of blood lit up my cheeks as I remembered her words. If American people see us eating this …

  She learned to make a distinction between her private eating and her public performance as a cook and eater. The performance featured her as a slightly off American housewife who tested new recipes from ladies’ magazines and found mentorship from the octogenarian spinsters who lived across the street. This was before the days of the “USO Bride School” in Korea, a training program for the Korean girlfriends and fiancées of American servicemen that taught them how to be good wives—first and foremost through lessons in American cookery. My mother’s cooking training was informal, and her immersion in small-town America left little room for error.

  But she did make mistakes. Ovens, for example, are not typically part of a Korean kitchen, and certainly for my mother’s generation, they were completely foreign. So the f
irst time she attempted baking, her chocolate chip cookies were burnt on the bottom and rock-hard.

  “They’re a little dense,” my father said after gnawing on a cookie with his molars.

  “What’s so dense?” she replied, unfamiliar with a cookie’s texture. Her answer to my father’s criticism was ultimately to keep trying until she produced a proper batch. With cookies under her belt, she moved on to something more challenging, and more quintessentially American: apple pie.

  Baking, for my mother, was a way to become American. Baking was a way to forget.

  Blackberry Pie

  THERE WERE THINGS that complicated my mother’s persona as our hometown’s immigrant Betty Crocker, not the least of which was the fact that she was not content with domesticity. Before she went mad, the hours she spent working outside the house in a given day exceeded the time she spent at home, and all the effort she poured into cooking and cleaning—scrubbing those grease stains off the sides of her pots—was fueled by ambition. As a woman with barely more than a middle school education, success was a tenuous thing that she could not measure by conventional means. Not by degrees completed or money earned, only by the number of superlatives her work elicited. During her years as a forager, the phenomenal quantity of wild blackberries she picked, sold, froze, jammed, and baked evoked many exclamations peppered with words like “most” and “best.” “Those are the most berries I’ve ever seen in one place!” “You have the best prices anywhere!”

  I didn’t realize what a steal her blackberries were until she was living with me in Queens, and I bought her a half-pint of cultivated blackberries at the Union Square Greenmarket. They were large and plump, and a half-pint sold for four dollars. I began to calculate in my head how much more expensive these were than the wild blackberries she used to sell. Four of these in a quart, four quarts in a gallon. Sixteen times four equals sixty-four dollars a gallon. Hers were thirteen dollars a gallon fifteen years ago. I had no idea how to calculate the rate of inflation, but I knew for sure that wild blackberries were far superior to cultivated ones. There was really no comparison. I selected the juiciest-looking basket, handed four singles to the cashier, and hoped that my mother wouldn’t ask me how much they cost. But when I got home and presented her with the little plastic clamshell, she just took one look at them and made the moaning sound she always made when she was disappointed. “Uuungh. The seeds are too big. Those blackberries are no good.”