Tastes Like War

by Grace M. Cho

  There’s only dinner conversation during the first few minutes, when my father asks what my brother and I did at school that day and then tells my mother that the food tastes good. Instead of saying thank you, she says, “I know.” For the rest of dinner we are so busy eating that we hardly talk. Instead we eat to the sounds of forks and knives clinking and the buzzing of the long fluorescent light bulb that’s mounted above the table. When we’re almost done, my mother breaks the silence by getting up to serve more rice and mushrooms. “Let’s eat it all because leftovers are no good.” If anyone refuses, she smiles and gives her stock response, “One time, no love.”

  The scene will repeat the next night, except that she’ll cook bibimbap with seasoned soybean sprouts and gosari, and the night after that, it will be spaghetti and meatballs with a salad, and the night after that, Cornish hens and roasted root vegetables. Sometimes my father’s chair will be vacant, if he’s out to sea, and by the time I turn eleven, my brother will be away at college. Even when it’s just my mother and me having dinner at our white Formica table with its two sides attached to the wall, we’ll sit side-by-side in our usual places, she’ll call “Dinner ready!” when I’m standing ten feet away, and urge me to eat more and more.

  When I was young and stuffing myself full of my mother’s food, I never once gave a thought to the meaning of our mealtime rituals or the possibility that cooking family dinners was anything more than a maternal obligation. Maybe only my father fully appreciated what my mother did. He knew that it was a symbolic act of how far she had come—how far they both had come.

  Although his life as a young man revolved around producing food, he never spoke of moments from his past when someone lovingly prepared food for him. Whenever he talked about his early memories of food, they were about hardship. “I would get a whipping if I turned my nose up at the food. We had to eat whatever was on the dinner plate!”

  Once he told me a story of a destitute family whose plight captured the hardships of the Depression. “They were so desperate …” His voice became strained, but he forced out the rest of the sentence. “They had to eat their own dog.” And with these final words came a gush of tears. After all those years, it still pained him to remember that kind of hunger, and I would always wonder if the family in the story had been his own.

  When he sailed to Korea and met my mother, he found a new horizon. Her food was the link to the places my father had traveled, a magic wand that allowed him to be both here and there at the same time, savoring the exotic from the comfort of his home. She fed him the spicy, pungent flavors of Korea alongside his American favorites. When he wanted to remember his trips to Goa, he gave my mother a bag of spices and a recipe. She whipped up a fragrant chicken curry with coconut and cashews, which quickly became part of her growing repertoire. She experimented with new recipes, cooked comfort food on weekends, made sumptuous feasts on holidays. She always kept the refrigerators full. Perhaps her cooking made my father feel like a wealthy man.

  For my mother, too, eating this way represented a world of possibility. Feeding others allowed her to transcend her origins. It was a testament to her survival and her hope for the future. The moments when I most experienced my mother’s food as love were during my first few visits home from college, after months of her fretting over whether I’d been nourished well enough by the “American college people.” The outpouring of affection would begin the moment I spotted both of my parents waiting for me at Sea—Tac Airport. Her first greeting, before saying hello or giving me a hug, before asking me how my flight was or how I was doing in school, was to reach her hand out and present me with a peeled orange. “Ja. Eat. I made chaltteok,” she said, raising the bag of sweet rice cakes in her other hand. “You can eat that in the car.”

  But soon—maybe after the third or fourth trip—there was no peeled fruit, no mother, to greet me at the airport.

  “Where’s Mom?” I asked my father the first time she was absent.

  He let out a long, exasperated sigh. “Beats me! Hell if I know why your mother does anything anymore.”

  We arrived home, and I saw the tree stump in the front yard, the remains of the old oak my mother had somehow managed to cut down a few months earlier. I remember my father complaining to me about it on the phone: She chopped down all the trees! What the hell was she thinking?

  Along the walkway leading up to our front door, the shrubbery was slightly overgrown and weeds were popping up in the soil. I walked into the house, through the dining room, and into the living room at the back of the house to find her on the beige sectional. She said hello but made no effort to get up, so I hugged her while she was still sitting.

  I saw that the pantry had withered down to a few dusty jars of jam and the refrigerator was almost empty. There was virtually no food in the house.

  My mother had been subsisting on the simplest fare of rice and kimchi and perhaps one other side dish of spinach in oyster sauce or green chili peppers stewed in doenjang. “Doenjang is made of soybeans. That’s protein, you see,” she said when I told her I was worried she’d become malnourished. Once in a while she went out to the Burger King and treated herself to a Double Whopper with cheese, but she had stopped cooking for my father. He got by on a combination of spaghetti, canned soup, steamed vegetables, and Meals on Wheels, where he was both a driver and a recipient of whatever meals they had left at the end of the day.

  Because neither of my parents had been eating well, I went to Safeway and loaded up on groceries, including a pork roast and potatoes that I had planned to bake that night. I hadn’t yet learned how to cook, but I had seen my mother do it enough times to know how to season the meat and heat the oven. And salad, I could make: chop some iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers, and cover with bottled salad dressing. My parents and I then sat side by side at the kitchen table, eating the meal that I made.

  “Tastes good,” my father said about the pork.

  “Sorry I overcooked it,” I said.

  While my father and I exchanged only a few words during the meal, my mother was silent the whole time, her eyes vacant. My desire to hear her voice amplified the sounds of the fluorescent light buzzing and the three of us chewing and swallowing and washing down the dry meat with gulps of water. The silent meal reminded me of my childhood dinners, but this time, it wasn’t bookended by my mother’s joyful refrain of “One time, no love.” The absence of her words made me aware of how much she had used cooking as a form of communication, and now her silence made her seem like an apparition. Although I could see that she was there, I could hear her eating, I could even smell the faded lilac scent of the White Shoulders perfume that clung to her clothes, it still felt like she was in some other world beyond my reach. It had finally registered on a visceral level that the mother I once had was gone. One time, no love. Part of me wanted to say it, but I hadn’t earned the right to take her place as the family cook, nor did I want to. I wanted those words to be hers and only hers, and if I didn’t say them, maybe she’d come back. Besides, the food hadn’t turned out very well, so I just cleared the table and washed the dishes.

  “Thank you, honey,” my father said as my mother returned to her place on the couch. It was the first time I cooked for my parents and the first of a thousand meals I would cook for my mother.

  Each time I visited them after that, I took on the responsibility of cooking while I was home, but my mother never said a word about my food. I wasn’t sure if her silence was a way of discouraging my culinary interests or if her mind had become so disturbed that she was completely indifferent to food. My early attempts to cook for her were bitter reminders of her unhappiness, leaving me to wonder if things could ever change.

  It was sometime after her second suicide attempt, after she had moved back to Chehalis from New Jersey, that she began seeing a therapist in Olympia, thirty miles north of Chehalis on I-5. Her therapist was Dr. Jeon, another Korean immigrant woman and the first Korean adult outside of our family that my mother h
ad spoken to in fifteen years. “I feel I can really talk to her,” my mother said with optimism in her voice. “She is not like a therapist, more like good friend to me.” Her words brought tears to my eyes, and for the first time in years, I dared to imagine a radically different future.

  But things changed once she started taking my father with her for couple’s counseling. Being in that intimate space of the therapist’s office, where he felt heard and seen again, my father began to crave the therapist’s attention. He started seeing Dr. Jeon independently of my mother, and sometimes outside of the office.

  My mother quit therapy, probably once she caught on to what was happening. I can’t say for sure whether his relationship with Dr. Jeon was sexual, but it was personal. He saw her on a regular basis, gave her gifts of money, and made no effort to hide his attraction to her. In fact, he shamelessly bragged about their friendship and once asked me to send her my first published journal article, as if she were a stand-in for my mother, who would never be literate enough to read my writing. I recoiled at the proposition.

  “No way! I don’t want anything to do with her!”

  “Now, now. What’s all that about? She’s a good person,” my father said.

  “Are you kidding me? She’s Mom’s therapist! What’s the matter with you that you think this is okay? It’s totally unethical of her to have a relationship with you.”

  More than anger or betrayal or disgust, I felt an overwhelming sense of defeat. I never brought up the affair with my mother, but I was certain that it must have destroyed her fragile trust in mental health professionals. After all those years, we would have to start over. The trajectory of her mental health once again would be always and only downward.

  My sister-in-law continued to be the person in my family to take the most prominent role in my mother’s situation, as the one who made things happen—the cross-country moves, the psychiatric visits—but also as the arbiter of information. It was never clear to me whether this was a self-appointed role or if my brother had asked her to be his proxy. Regardless, she was almost invariably the one who would break news to me about any new developments.

  As I was on my way to visit my parents in late 1997, she warned me that my mother’s mental health was taking another turn for the worse. This time the news was about a mouse that had been running wild around the house. “Your dad says she thinks it’s a pet.” I didn’t know what to believe, because my father was prone to embellishment and fits of confusion, and my sister-in-law had a tendency to overemphasize some of my mother’s behaviors because she thought I didn’t take them seriously. The truth is that I did sometimes shrug off her alarm because I was afraid of validating the stereotype that people with schizophrenia are dangerous or erratic, afraid of my own fear.

  I had forgotten about the alleged mouse until one day when I found my father trying to vacuum behind the couch.

  “Dad, what are you doing?” I asked, concerned that he was overexerting himself.

  “Dammit, your mother! She has a pet mouse that lives under the couch. She throws all kinds of crap back there for it to eat,” he said, pushing the word “crap” out through clenched teeth. He half sighed, half grunted as he struggled with the furniture. I helped him move the couch and saw the droppings mixed with hollowed-out sunflower shells, breadcrumbs, and bits of dried apple peel. Oh my god, it’s true, I thought. Perhaps feeding the mouse was related to a “bizarre delusion,” one of the symptoms listed in the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia, which unlike a “nonbizarre delusion,” had no basis in reality. What significance did that mouse have for her? Was she like the man who believed his “kitten was retreating into an alternate universe when she went behind the refrigerator”?1

  That night I confronted her. “So, I heard that you have a pet mouse.”

  “Oh yeah?” She sounded annoyed. “Did your father tell you where that mouse came from?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “He got it for his cat to play with. It ran away and I been feeding it.”

  “Did you name it?” I asked, trying to discern whether she really considered it a pet.

  “Well. I call it Bol-jwi. You know what that means? It means ‘smart mouse.’ Smart enough to get away from that cat … My mother used to call me Bol-jwi when I was a little girl. Aigu, dap-dap-eu-rah. I miss my mother.” She smiled faintly and her gaze wandered off.

  Although I had initially agreed with my sister-in-law that the mouse was a bad sign, I considered my mother’s situation carefully. She was a recluse and could have used the company of a pet, so when the mouse took refuge under her couch, she chose to take care of it instead of return it to the cruel fate that my father had intended for it. Like her, this vulnerable creature was a survivor. She identified with it because my grandmother, whose death she still mourned, used to call her “mouse.” It did not seem at all like a “bizarre delusion.” But this was a rodent on the loose, and without a cage, it delegitimized my mother’s logic and compassion in the eyes of others. A cage would have clearly drawn the line between rational and crazy, between pest and pet, but my mother hadn’t been well enough for years to leave the house. Who knows if she would have caged it anyway? Maybe the presence of an uncaged animal allowed her some small measure of vicarious freedom. Perhaps more than anything, what made me see the mouse as an improvement in her mental health was the fact that it rekindled her desire to feed another being. If my mother still had that in her, then maybe she still had some fight left.

  I thought back to our family dinners. It was a time of togetherness that both my parents enforced, yet neither of them used it as an opportunity for dialogue. The awkwardness of our seating arrangement mirrored the awkwardness of our sparse mealtime conversations. I began to see the currents running through the silence, and they were all flowing back to my mother’s early life and the things she would not, could not, talk about. I wanted to assemble a coherent narrative, but how was I supposed to articulate the things she couldn’t say? All I had to cling to were the things she could say. One time, no love. There was something about the memory of her standing in front of our mustard-yellow stove and piling our plates with food that sparked my desire to know more. Simmering beneath the surface of my consciousness was some inchoate story about my mother that I needed to tell. Who fed her then? Who was feeding her now? If food is love, how must the experience of going hungry have deprived her heart and mind? I had seen the scarcity of her pantry, but I still didn’t know enough to ask these questions. Nor did I know what it felt like to be starved of affection. How many years had it been since she had been nourished by human touch? Were the hugs from me and my brother the only times she ever got to feel the warmth of another body, a few minutes or seconds out of the year? One could ask the same questions about my father, but he remedied his need for affection by buying it from a few young women in town, sometimes bringing them into our house while my mother sat on the couch with her eyes closed, tuning out the external reality. What was it like for her to be reminded of her own past that she wanted to forget, of how she and my father had met in the same way, when he was lonely in Korea and willing to pay for a woman’s touch?

  My mother, too, found companionship in unorthodox places, but while my father’s actions may have been distasteful by normal societal standards, they were not considered insane. My mother’s companions were a feral mouse and a set of voices that only she could hear.

  It went on like this—my father’s company paid, my mother’s hallucinated—for a year or so until he kicked her out again in August 1998.

  Again, my brother would make her flight arrangements, find her another place near him in New Jersey. This time, things would be different, because there’d be no one left to want her to return to Chehalis.

  I would pick up the phone on Labor Day weekend as a steelpan band was practicing on the street below my apartment for the West Indian Day Parade in Brooklyn. On the other end, I would hear the sound of my father’s labored breathing, his gruff voice. “When’s yo
ur mother going out there?” he would ask, then snarl at my answer. “I hope the goddamn plane crashes.”

  This time, my mother would live in a three-bedroom house instead of an apartment, with a large eat-in kitchen and a sparkling new linoleum-tiled floor. The size of the house, the kitchen, were largely aspirational. I would be the only person to ever cook in it.

  12. OAKIE

  New York and New Jersey, 1998

  MY MOTHER LANDED SAFELY in New Jersey during the second week of September and moved into her new house, a few blocks away from my brother’s. It was a time of transition for me, too, as I was in the first semester of my doctoral program.

  My schooling had always been something my mother thought would put distance between her past and her present, whitening the stains of her history, but the more I pursued it, the more my sense of social justice became intertwined with my family history.

  In 1995 I had enrolled in a one-year master’s program in education at Harvard, initially to fulfill my mother’s lifelong dream to have a child at Harvard. While I found the climate there to be elitist and somewhat retrograde when it came to issues of race, I was fortunate enough to have studied with a couple of visiting professors whose radical perspectives on education pushed me further toward openly interrogating my family history. I read bell hooks’s Teaching to Transgress, and upon graduation, moved to New York to study with her and to seek out an intellectual community. After two years of taking graduate classes at CUNY as a nonmatriculated student, I enrolled in the Graduate Center’s PhD program in sociology with the explicit intent of studying my mother’s past as a sex worker for the US military. I had even said so in my admissions application. It was a peculiar coincidence that she would move back to New Jersey at the same time that I was starting my program, becoming the flesh-and-blood shadow to my academic life.