Tastes Like War

by Grace M. Cho

  “Mom, Hosu wants to say hi.” My mother began shaking her head in protest, but I held the phone up to her ear anyway. Hosu was a small person but she had a large presence, and I could hear her voice projecting into the room through my flip phone. She was speaking to my mother in Korean, in the honorific. “Eommeonim jal jinaeseyo?” Respected mother, are you doing well? My mother clapped her hand over her mouth, as if to keep her voice from escaping. Oakie had long forbade her from talking on the phone, or to anyone outside of our family, but she began to smile and nod her head as she listened to Hosu speak in their native tongue. Having come from the same region in Korea, Hosu could even speak my family’s dialect. Despite my mother not responding, there were no awkward silences; Hosu already knew that it would be a one-way conversation. I am thankful for Grace’s friendship. Be in good health, respected mother. And with that, my mother lifted her hand from her mouth and gestured for me to take the phone back.

  I could tell Hosu anything about my family without feeling the least bit of stigma. Her research on Korean birthmothers often intersected with mine on sex work in US camptowns, so she was highly attuned to the social forces that shaped my mother’s life. “That is so interesting,” she said when I told her about Oakie. “It sounds just like Ok-hee, you know? Popular girl’s name of our parents’ generation.”

  I wondered if Oakie was a double entendre, a manifestation of another lost sister, or maybe a lost child, someone my mother once loved but couldn’t bear to talk about. I kept thinking of Maxine Hong Kingston’s aunt that drowned herself in the village well, the woman whom the family was sworn to never speak of after her shameful death.

  Though I could never be sure of what they meant in her mind, in mine, Oakie/Ok-hee was a ghost from my family’s past, and I would soon begin to feel their presence in my everyday life when my mother moved in with me.

  13. QUEENS

  Jackson Heights, New York, 2001

  THE BEGINNING OF CESAR’S TOUR coincided with my mother moving to New Jersey, my father’s death, and the start of my doctoral program. Although I wished for Cesar to be with me then, during some of my life’s biggest transitions, he always reminded me that his absence was for the benefit of our relationship. “Keep your eyes on the prize, Gracie. We can buy a place when I get back.”

  On tour he was frugal in a way that both of my parents would have admired. For lunch he would buy a foot-long Subway sandwich, eat half of it, and save the other half for dinner. That way, he could put most of his per diem toward our nest egg, along with his regular salary. While the other performers on his tour drank all their money away at hotel bars, Cesar continued to pay half our $700 rent during the three years that he was away and still returned home with $40,000.

  In January of 2001, a couple of weeks after my thirtieth birthday, we closed on a spacious three-bed, two-bath apartment (with a patio!) in Queens and said goodbye to our shabby little Brooklyn rental. Having the luxury of space was going to be a game changer. I could host parties, big dinners, out-of-town guests. I could even host my mother.

  My first overnight guests were Jenny and her husband, who had flown in from Seattle for a babymoon when she was six months pregnant. One day I brought her with me to see my mother in Tribeca. My mother was startled when we first walked in and appeared to have been taking a nap. She smoothed down her bedhead for a minute before easing into her old familiarity with Jenny.

  “Oh, Jenny. You are having a baby. Let me see,” she said in a sleepy voice. Jenny approached the couch, and my mother placed a hand on her belly. “It’s a boy.”

  “You think?” Jenny said.

  “Oh yeah. I can tell by the shape.”

  They talked about the pregnancy and Jenny’s imminent motherhood for a few minutes and then she asked about my apartment. “Is Grace’s place all right?

  “Yeah, it’s really nice! It’s a lot bigger than her last place.”

  Although I had already told my mother that it was huge by New York standards, hearing it from Jenny must have reassured her.

  “Come see it for yourself, Mom,” I said. “Maybe you can stay with me for a while.”

  And then a month later, she did. When my brother called to let me know that his finances had become tight and he’d have to give up his Tribeca apartment, I was excited about the prospect of having my mother come live with me.

  “Yes. Yes!” I said.

  “It’s only going to be a few weeks until the renovations on her new place are done,” he said, referencing the work they were doing to convert the space above their garage into an apartment.

  “Yeah, no problem. I’m happy to do it. It’ll actually be easier for me if she’s here.”

  The advent of my homeownership, along with turning thirty, made me feel adult enough to accept the challenge of caring for my mother full-time. I hadn’t anticipated that the renovations would keep getting delayed, turning the six-week estimate into seven months, or that a few weeks into her stay, she would begin refusing food again.

  The day before my mother’s arrival, Cesar and I rearranged our apartment to make room for her, and he didn’t show the least bit of worry or resentment that she was moving in with us or that he’d be losing his music studio.

  “She’s probably just going to stay in here the whole time, so you should take out anything you need,” I said, reminding him that interacting with new people made her extremely uncomfortable.

  “No problem, Gracie,” he said as he smiled and picked up a conga and moved it into our bedroom. I exhaled a sigh of relief, grateful for his laid-back Southern California attitude, and started rolling our old cotton futon out on the gray-carpeted floor. Even though Cesar and I had been living together for years, he had only seen my mother once in 1999, and only after he had gently prodded me to introduce them.

  “Will I ever get to meet your mom?” he had asked during one of his tour breaks. “We’ve been together five years.” His question made me wistful, thinking about how quickly the days had turned into years. Two of those five years we had been together, my mother had been living in New Jersey, and I had never taken him with me to visit her. I didn’t know what to say, but Cesar, ever patient with my silence, waited a moment before adding, “I wish I could have met your father before he died.”

  “Really?” I asked, wondering why this was the first time he expressed an interest in meeting my family. I had always thought that he understood that I was trying to hide my parents’ dysfunction, shield him from the tension between my father and me, or protect my mother from her phobia of strangers. Yet his question made me insist to her that it was time for them to meet. She argued for a while but ultimately accepted my final word, and I felt guilty for the stress I knew it was causing her.

  Just a few weeks before their first meeting, I went to her house in New Jersey to supervise a plumbing job. The doorbell rang, and she frantically looked for a hiding spot while murmuring, “Oh no, oh no.” The plumber walked in and saw my mother crouching behind the couch, one hand clutching the white damask slipcover and the other covering her head. Like a young child playing hide-and-seek, she seemed to think that because she couldn’t see him, he wouldn’t be able to see her either. But she soon figured out that he was standing right next to her, so she said, “Oh! Hello!” but without once moving or looking up.

  When the moment arrived for her to meet Cesar, she showed none of her typically phobic behaviors, and even greeted him with a handshake and said, “Welcome.” He stood ten inches taller than her, but she didn’t look up. At no point did she look him in the eye, but she did look in his direction several times, her line of sight just skimming the side of his face, perhaps getting a good glimpse of his mahogany skin, his shorn black hair and goatee. By taking out the photo album and showing him old family pictures, she managed to carry on a conversation with him for thirty minutes without ever having to look at him. Although Cesar and I had just traveled three hours to see her, I knew that staying longer than that might have pushed her beyond he
r limit, and I didn’t want her performance to end in failure. It was time to save face and go. As I hugged her goodbye, I whispered in her ear, “You did a really good job, Mom. Good job.”

  I looked around the room that Cesar and I were setting up for her and knew that none of it matched her taste. But at least I could give her a private room and her own bathroom. There was even a door that closed off the back of the apartment from the rest, so she could move freely between her bedroom and bathroom without anyone seeing her. The next morning, I borrowed Cesar’s car to pick her up from my brother’s place. It was a twenty-year-old Chevy Citation II that smelled of must, the powder-blue exterior lightly chipping away.

  She walked outside into the warm breezy air of late June, and it was one of those rare occasions when she saw direct sunlight. She didn’t pause to feel the warmth of it on her skin, but there was a brightness in her eyes that I perceived as a look of defiance. I tried to imagine the conversation she was having with Oakie during that fleeting moment of freedom, whether they cheered her on for stepping outside or warned her that she was putting others in grave danger by breaking the rules. A wrong move could set off a chain reaction of catastrophic events, and therefore, she needed to be extremely careful. She got into the passenger seat of the Chevy, and I drove off toward Queens with the windows rolled down. Suddenly, she looked behind her, and I worried that something had frightened her, but then she cracked a smile and the twinkle in her eye returned.

  “Boy, this is a nice car,” she said.

  “Really?” If I had ever known her to use sarcasm, I would have thought it was a joke, but instead I was mystified. “I’m surprised you think so.”

  “Well, no. It is not really. But it’s nicer than I thought it was going to be. Not bad for an old car,” she said as she ran her hand along the vinyl upholstery of the bench seat.

  We exited the BQE onto the bustling streets of Jackson Heights with its twenty-four-hour ethnic food shops, representing dozens of countries in Asia and Latin America. I turned into the parking lot of a large Korean grocery store to stock up on some staples.

  “Do you want to come inside with me?” I asked as I turned off the engine.

  “No, I’ll wait here.”

  There was a slight gap between my question and her answer, and in those seconds of silence I heard an opportunity to persuade her. It had only been a few months since our near outing, and I felt certain that a part of her still longed to shop for Korean food.

  “Come inside with me. You’ll love it.”

  “No, I better stay here.”

  “What difference does it make if you’re in the car or in the store? You’re still outside.”

  “No, no.”

  “But people can see you either way,” I pleaded, frustration now spilling through the cracks in my optimism.

  “I am staying right here.” Her fists were balled up and pushing down against the seat cushion, as if to root herself into the blue vinyl.

  “Okay, fine,” I sighed. “What do you want me to get you besides rice and kimchi?”

  “Kong. Pa. Gochu-garu. Soy beans, misu-garu … Maybe some mackerel … No, maybe not. It’ll stink up your kitchen.”

  “It’s okay, Ma. I don’t mind.”

  “No, no. You don’t have to get it,” she insisted.

  Inside the store, a blast of cold air circulating the scent of dried red peppers and garlic woke up my senses. This market was at least three times the size of its Manhattan counterpart, with aisles as wide as city sidewalks, giving it the feel of a suburban supermarket. I put the hot pepper powder and toasted grain into my basket, and moved back toward the produce for the scallions and bean sprouts. Then something caught my eye. I saw a sign in Korean that said “suk.”

  I looked at the bundles of greens and remembered how she had salivated over the wild suk that was growing along the Northeast Corridor line of the New Jersey transit. I thought that this could be my chance to offer a temporary antidote to her psychic pain of living a life of confinement, to satisfy some small desire of hers to taste the wilderness again. I grabbed a couple bunches and put them in my basket, yet doubted that this was the same plant that she had been dreaming of. It didn’t exactly look like what she had described, but I figured there was no harm in getting it.

  I then walked up to the fish counter, pleased that I would surprise my mother with mackerel after she had told me not to get it. I worked up the courage to speak in my most confident-sounding Korean and said, “Go-deong-uh seh-geh juseyo.”

  The middle-aged man at the fish counter let out a throaty laugh. “Seh-geh?” he huffed, shaking his head and picking up the fish. I had used the wrong counting word at the end of “seh,” three. “Geh” is the counter for most inanimate objects, while “mari” is the counter for animals.

  “Seh-ma-ri,” he said in the kind of loud, slow voice that one uses with the native speaker of a foreign language.

  “Mi-an hamnida. Hanguk-mal jal mot-heyo. Go-deong-uh seh-mari juseyo.” I apologized to the man. I’m sorry. I can’t speak Korean well. Please give me three mackerel.

  “Seh-geh,” he repeated under his breath, looking slightly disgusted as he gutted the fish.

  Then I interjected before he could chop off the heads, “Meu-ri do juseyo.” Give me the heads, too, please.

  He looked up, studying my face. I wondered if he was perplexed that a fish-head-eating Korean American could have butchered the language so badly, or if he saw my freckled skin and the whiteness of my features and recognized me as a “Western princess’s bastard.” That was the name that Koreans of his age, of my mother’s generation, called the biracial children of Korean women and American men. We had no legitimacy either in law or in public opinion to call ourselves Korean, so I wondered why this Korean man who was serving me expected my speech to be flawless. Or maybe upon realizing that I was not “pure Korean,” his perception of my Korean improved. Could he have thought that it was not so bad for a non-Korean? But everything I knew about how Koreans regarded those among us who were mixed race—the systematic societal exclusion of children and their mothers that I had read about in my research, coupled with my vague early childhood memories of being in Korea—whirled in my head.

  An image surfaced: the little girl in my nursery school in Busan who stared me down, alternating her glare between my face and my yellow patent-leather Mary Janes before she grabbed one of the butterfly bows and tried to rip it off. Suddenly, I realized why she did it. I was the only child not wearing traditional shoes. I was brazenly Western, just like my mother, and even a four-year-old knew that she was authorized to keep me in line, to contain the foreignness that my being represented. My attention returned to the fish counter, and I saw the little girl’s hateful stare on the man’s face. I grabbed the bag of fish and rushed to check out.

  I tried to shake off the shame that the fishmonger had projected onto me as I got back into the car. My mother relaxed into her seat when she saw the paper bags packed with her familiar foods. I forced a smile and said, “Mackerel for dinner!”

  We arrived at my apartment and Cesar greeted us at the front door. My mother bowed her head almost imperceptibly as she said hello and avoided making eye contact. He knew enough to give her space, so he kept his distance as I gave her the grand tour of our new apartment: a long, rectangular living room with ample space for our oversize eggplant-colored couch on one wall and a wide L-shaped storage bench topped with twin futon mattresses built into the opposite wall. The living room opened up to a dining room, which now housed the six-seat country-style dining table that she had had to get rid of nine months earlier when my brother sold her house. She had put the dining set and my childhood piano in storage until I could get a place that was big enough for them, and now they were here in the open living space of my Queens co-op apartment.

  “Look up, Mom,” I said, pointing to the clouds painted on the dining room ceiling. “The previous owners were interior decorators.” I then walked us into the adjacent ga
lley kitchen and set down the groceries. “The kitchen looks a little dated. We might renovate it,” I said.

  “What’s so dated?” she asked, genuinely perplexed. “There’s nothing wrong with it.” Though I sensed her disapproval at my desire to spend money on the kitchen, I also felt relieved that it was up to her standards. Of course. The eighties style fit her aesthetic because that’s where she was frozen in time. The 1980s was the last decade in which she spent any significant amount of time in a kitchen.

  “It doesn’t look very modern, but you’re right. There’s nothing wrong with it,” I said, unpacking the groceries. Then I pulled out the greens. “Look, Ma. Is this suk?”

  She shook her head. “Sukat. Sukat. Not suk.”

  I felt myself deflate. I wasn’t literate enough in Korean to know the difference between suk and sukat. This was yet another instance of my language skills betraying me. Twice in one shopping trip.

  “Sukat is good too,” she said, sounding upbeat. “We make salad out of that for dinner.” If she had been disappointed, then she recovered quickly, perhaps because sukat was another thing she hadn’t tasted for ages. I put the fish and vegetables in the fridge. “Help yourself to anything in the kitchen. I’ll be around to make breakfast and dinner, but you’ll have to help yourself to lunch when I’m out. Don’t be shy, okay?” She nodded and followed me down the hall to the back of the apartment. Cesar popped his head out of our bedroom as my mother and I passed by, and for a brief instant she looked straight at him and said, “Thank you for letting me stay here.” I would later look back at that moment and be struck by how she thanked him and not me. I would wonder if it was because I didn’t need to be thanked, because I was performing a filial duty, while he was a virtual stranger.