Tastes Like War

by Grace M. Cho

  In the days immediately following my mother’s death, I became awash in memories of her better days, long before she uttered those words, I feel worthless. I asked all the people who had once known her what they remembered most about her. Unequivocally, it was the blackberry pie.

  It seemed as if her favorite pastime, aside from picking blackberries, was baking blackberry pies. It was, perhaps, not so much a pastime as it was a compulsion, a need to produce something with the sweat of her own labor that she could call her own, that she could choose to give away and not have taken from her. So many Sunday afternoons she spent with her sleeves rolled up and her arms immersed in giant bowls of flour and shortening, her fingers working the fat and flour together into little pearls of dough. By the end of the day, there would be a dozen hot blackberry pies cooling on the counter, waiting for someone to break open their shells.

  In retrospect, I see that the blackberries were the real stars of her pies—“small wild blackberries,” as my mother distinguished them from other blackberries. The ratio of crust to blackberries was always perfectly balanced, but to my immature palate, the filling was just a condiment for the crust, one that I considered optional. Sometimes I would ask if I could have just the crimped edges, and once she gave me permission to eat the entire outer crust, I took the liberty of helping myself the next time. One day, lured by the scent of caramelized blackberry juice bubbling against the flaky brown pastry, I went into the kitchen and ate the crusts of four or five fresh pies that were on the counter. My mother was somewhere else, maybe stealing a moment to nap or tending to her roses in the backyard. Later, when she discovered what I had done, she shrieked: “Graaaace! You ruined my pies! I was gonna give them away and now they’re so ugly! All that work for nothing!” Despite her initial rage, she found a moment of humor in it, and dubbed me “Crust Girl.”

  When my brother’s wife told me the big family secret, it was to explain my mother’s mental illness, as if her past were an answer and not, in itself, a question.

  The confluence of developments that year flipped a switch that could never be turned off. I devoured any film, novel, scholarly book, or article that engaged the theme of sex work, particularly if it was set in Asia or involved a military or an interracial romance, though much of what I consumed left me feeling queasy because of the absence of a big picture, the frame always drawing the eye toward the individual. I also became hyperattuned to the way in which people of all genders casually and frequently used the words “whore” and “slut” as pejoratives, the way in which these insults were pervasive in every aspect of popular culture. This would be the beginning of a wondering: How much had my mother’s sense of worth been bound up in that stigma? The excess of shame reducing her to nothing.

  I understood then why my education had been so important to her. It wasn’t only so that she could live out her vicarious dream of becoming a scholar but also to make sure that I would never have to face the same choices she had. “Work with your mind, not your body!” she would urge whenever I expressed an interest in physical labor, like the first time I took a job in a restaurant kitchen. As much as I liked school, my decision to spend seven years in graduate school was largely motivated by that fleeting moment, perhaps less than two seconds, during which I heard the words Your mother used to be a prostitute.

  By 1998 I enrolled at the CUNY Graduate Center, further committing myself to find out what could have shattered my mother’s spirit to the point that she’d feel worthless. My project was to eke out every possible connection between those two sets of words: Your mother used to be a prostitute and I feel worthless.

  I studied the feminist sex wars, which put commercial sex at the center of the debate. At first I was more on the side of the radical feminists, thinking that prostitution and pornography were inherently oppressive, even though I had a far more laid-back view of noncommercial sex. After a fellow student, a sex worker herself, introduced me to a group of sex worker activists, my perspective would start to inch toward that of sex radicals. Sex work was a choice, and should remain so, they said. It was an act of agency, empowering even. The things that needed to change about the sex industry were the working conditions and the lack of respect. I was sympathetic to these points of view and agreed that women could find power in their sexuality, that using it for profit or livelihood should be legitimated. But then I began to notice that the most prominent voices celebrating their choice to be sex workers belonged to white, often highly educated women. Of course the choice is less fraught if you have an advanced degree. What about the women who had been silenced because of their choices?

  Again and again, I’d return to the words of Adul de Leon, a sex worker activist from the Philippines: “[American feminists] spend all their time arguing about whether or not prostitution can be a free choice. We women from Third World countries got really bored with their fighting. Our issues around prostitution are different.”1 Having the “right to choose not to be a prostitute” was more urgent.2

  Ironically, years after publishing my first book, I’d receive an email criticizing me for portraying Korean camptown women as having been prostitutes “by choice.” The person had come to this conclusion because I hadn’t simply portrayed them as “forced.” In my reply, I countered that I would never use that term—“by choice”—because the idea of choice was far too troubled in the context I was writing about. When sex work is sponsored by the state to service a foreign military (the most powerful military in the world), when the relationship between the two countries is profoundly unequal, then the working conditions are already rooted in a place of coercion. It was true that many of the women who were sex workers for the US military were not tricked or trafficked, but neither did they have other good options.

  I had written that, despite how limited one’s choices are, there is always possibility for resistance. Maybe some of the women had embraced their roles as “bad girls”—a “fuck you” to patriarchal expectations of wifedom and motherhood—or maybe some had seized an opportunity to get closer to America. Working in the camptowns was the most likely path there for young Korean women in the 1960s. Even sex work for sheer survival is a way of defying a power structure that might otherwise leave you for dead. Survival is an act of resistance, but performing an act of resistance within an imperialistic order is not the same thing as “being a prostitute by choice.” Forced or free is a false dichotomy.

  While I had already spent years thinking about my mother’s situation, the work of systematically breaking it down began in my first-year sociological methods class, in which we were asked to write weekly research questions. I never explicitly mentioned her in the assignments, but she was present in the subtext of everything I wrote.

  What structures and systems and geopolitical events created a social context in which she dared to transgress her societal norms to enter the sex industry? Once there, what small actions and gestures slowly eroded her self-esteem? What large-scale transactions crushed her psyche? Once out, did the same things happen all over again, just in a different time and place?

  The answers to these questions were not at all obvious.

  Later, after I had spent a decade on my investigation, my sister-in-law would say that she had only told me because I “ought to know.” Because she was speaking “woman to woman.” Somehow she expected me never to do anything with those words except to lock up the secret myself and never speak of it again. When I had made it my life’s work to openly interrogate the words that had haunted me, when I had written hundreds of pages about them, my sister-in-law revised the storyline: “Your mother was a cocktail waitress. Nothing else.”

  But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter whether she was a cocktail waitress or a prostitute or something in between, because those words, when they were first spoken, changed me. Your mother used to be a prostitute. That bit of new information was so huge that it erased my old memories. It made me forget all those years when she was my mama, the woman who called me Crust Girl
and was famous for her blackberry pies.

  Mincemeat Pie

  AFTER MY MOTHER’S first suicide attempt, she moved back in with my father. According to my sister-in-law, it was my brother and father’s idea, and my mother acquiesced. It was a disastrous plan. Neither of my parents was capable of taking care of the other, and although I knew this to be the case because I had witnessed their dysfunction together, my opinion didn’t matter. Why should it have, when I was the youngest, the daughter, and in no position to provide my mother a home?

  The rationale for my mother returning to my father was that he would somehow prevent her from trying to kill herself again, but she tried again just a few weeks later.

  She had asked him to buy her a bottle of wine. Although he thought it a strange request because she didn’t drink, he did it anyway. She then went upstairs to the attic and hid in the crawl space, in the deepest corner where she stored things she would never use again: bolts of fabric, kimchi jars, foraging gear, all the remnants of her old life. Securely hidden away where no one would even think to look, she washed her pills down with a glass of the wine and waited to die. (She later admitted that she drank the wine only because the warning label on her medication told her not to mix it with alcohol.) The police came to the house the next day to investigate my mother’s disappearance, but found no trace of her, even when they checked the attic. But just as they started back down the attic stairs, my mother—unconscious and half-alive—let out a long moan. The police turned around and found her just in time.

  After her failure to carry out the suicide the first two times, she swore she would “never try that again.” There was disgust and conviction in her voice when she said it. “No, I am never gonna try that again.”

  It was less a promise to herself to survive than it was an attempt to avoid another failure, to shield herself from further humiliation. Regardless, it was somewhat reassuring.

  Our last Christmas together as a family took place in 1997, by which time my parents were still living together but no longer speaking. We flew to my brother’s house in North Carolina, me from New York and my parents from Seattle. For six hours they sat next to each other on the plane in silence. I wonder if the other passengers thought that my parents were strangers. My mother had become so good at tuning my father out, the way she tuned out other kinds of background noise so that she could listen to her voices, that she was able to sit next to him and show not even a glimmer of recognition.

  When they arrived at my brother’s place, my father took his things to the guest room while my mother unpacked a mincemeat pie from her bag and turned on the oven. I was happy to learn that my mother could still bake for special occasions. My brother and I sat down at the kitchen table, sinking our forks into the fragrant pie, but as soon as he took a bite, he hesitated.

  “Did you put meat in this?” he asked.

  “What’s the matter?” my mother said, puzzled by his question. “It’s good.”

  Apparently he hadn’t taken the name of the pie literally, nor had he been aware of the culinary history of mincemeat pie, which was traditionally made with a mix of meat and fruit, before it gave way to more common fruit-only versions. It wasn’t my favorite, but I ate it anyway. It didn’t stand up to her blackberry pie, but it tasted of Christmas with its spices and winter fruits. The bits of meat took the edge off the sweetness of the raisins. Perhaps my father, who had always been a fan of fruit and meat together, would have enjoyed the pie, but he didn’t sit at the table with us because he was avoiding my mother.

  I had warned my sister-in-law that having both my parents there for the holiday was a terrible idea, but she insisted, saying that it would have been cruel to invite one parent without the other. My father slept in the guest room while my mother slept in the living room, neither of them making any effort to thaw the mountain of ice that had built up between them. The day after my parents’ arrival, my father began complaining of constipation and asked me to buy him an enema at the drugstore. “Make sure it’s Fleet,” he said. “F-L-E-E-T.” I did so dutifully, and when I handed him the enema, he took off his pants and lay down on the living room floor where my three-year-old niece was watching a Madeline cartoon.

  “Dad? What are you doing?” I said below my breath. “Do that in the bathroom.”

  “There’s not enough room for me to lie down in the bathroom.”

  “But what if you don’t make it to the toilet in time?”

  “Oh, balls! I’ll make it. I’ve done this a hundred times.”

  This is not my responsibility, I thought as I walked away, but no sooner did I enter the next room before I heard my father shouting, “Grace! I didn’t make it!” The stench of his feces, trailing behind him as he ran to the bathroom, triggered my gag reflex and I ran outside to heave over the side of the porch. My mother and brother were outside enjoying the warm southern winter when I ran out.

  “What’s wrong?” they asked in unison.

  “Dad … just shit … all over your house,” I said to my brother in between gasps of air.

  My mother waved her hand in the air. “Oh, that. He’s doing it all the time at home and leaving for me to clean up.”

  The incident sabotaged our Christmas Eve dinner preparations. My mother’s mincemeat pie sat on the counter with two slices taken out of it, only one of them eaten.

  That mincemeat pie was the last my mother ever baked. For the next eleven years, the remainder of her life, she never turned on the oven again. I don’t know if it was the Christmas gone wrong, the lack of enthusiasm for her mincemeat, or the realization that no matter how many pies she baked, no matter how good they were, she could not resurrect the sense of accomplishment that she had once garnered from her pies. Baking had turned into a worthless pursuit.

  From that point forward, I began to bake in earnest, as if to salvage my mother’s crumbling legacy. Over the years, I put together little pieces that helped me come a bit closer to the things that fed her sense of worthlessness. She must have been immersed in messages of how little value her life had—when she was no longer regarded as a person, but as a thing. These messages came from the people around her, from Korean society, maybe even from her own family. She escaped Korea only to find that American society devalued her, too—this gray country, this violent foster home … land where they stuff our throats with soil &accuse us of gluttony when we learn to swallow it.3

  PART IV

  The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

  The gifts of the world are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on

  … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … …..

  Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling down selves as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

  This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

  Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

  We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

  At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

  Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

  —JOY HARJO, “Perhaps the World Ends Here”

  11. ONE TIME, NO LOVE

  Chehalis, Washington, 1980

  MY MOTHER PICKS UP a sizzling-hot mushroom with her fingers and pops it into her mouth. The scalding temperature never seems to dull her taste buds. She reaches toward the ledge of the stove, past my grandmother Grace’s pig-shaped ceramic saltshaker, and grabs the big glass one instead. She adjusts the seasoning and tastes another mushroom before moving the pan off the glowing electric coil, pulling broiled sirloins out of the oven, and fluffing the steamed white rice with a wooden paddle.
Another meal is cooked and about to be served, signaling the passage of time with surgical precision. The clock strikes six, and her voice booms through our one-story house. “Dinner ready!” She bellows it the same way she summons our cats to come home after a night of prowling through the wilderness, as if we are miles away and not in the next room.

  My father, brother, and I scurry in to gather at the white rectangular table affixed to the wall in the corner of the kitchen. Only two sides of the table are open, so we are unable to sit facing each other. My seat is on the end closest to the stove; my father’s is on the opposite end beneath the wall phone, which is mustard yellow to match the appliances; and my mother’s is in the middle. My brother sits on the short side of the table, and together we form an L.

  She stands at the stove, plating steaks onto white Corning-Ware dishes, while the rest of us sit down in squat oak chairs. “One time, no love,” she says as she piles a giant mound of rice and mushrooms next to the meat. In other words: If I only give you one serving, I am not giving you enough love. It is her mealtime mantra, her way of foreclosing anyone’s protest about the double portion. The unspoken rule is that we reciprocate by eating. I look at my plate and wonder how I can possibly eat that much, but I always manage to finish it.