Tastes Like War

by Grace M. Cho

  We passed through my office to the room in the back that was now her sparsely furnished bedroom. I looked at the cotton futon on the floor and remembered our trips to Korea, when we would sleep on thin pads on the floor of Halmeoni’s house. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do to make your room more comfortable,” I said as she sat down on the futon. She didn’t say anything but gestured with her hand that I could go.

  That night, as per my mother’s instructions, I rinsed the mackerel in cold water, then braised it in a broth of soy sauce, dashi, garlic, and a splash of water; tossed the sukat with vinegar, sesame oil, red pepper powder, and salt. I also made some kong-nameul, heavy on the scallion, and set it out in a bowl along with kimchi to accompany the greens. For a Korean table, it was a meager selection of banchan, but compared to how my mother had grown accustomed to eating, it was a feast. I piled steaming white rice onto her plate, placed the mackerel next to it, and spooned the spicy braising liquid over the rice, just as she liked it.

  “Hwaa, that’s too much!” she said, feigning protest as I set the plate in front of her. She smiled and lifted a forkful of fish to her mouth, then nodded her approval.

  Cesar joined us for dinner. It was one of only two times she came out of her room and ate dinner with us at the dining table, the second being for her sixtieth birthday. It was one of only three times in the seven months that she lived with us that she would interact face-to-face with him.

  It took only two days before it became clear that my mother was not going to come out of her room, though she still had an unusual interest in food, and that made me happy. The previous night’s mackerel dinner must have sparked her desire to taste her old favorites, because she asked for yet another dish I had neither cooked nor tasted before.

  “Graaace!” she called from her room. “Let’s make some kong-guksu!” Soybean soup with noodles. I could feel her anticipation as I walked into the room.

  “Sure,” I said. “How do you make it?”

  “First you make soymilk. Boil the soybeans in a pot—just for a few minutes. Then you put ’em in the blender and strain it. Put salt in it. Plenty of salt. Sometimes you don’t put enough salt in.”

  “Okay.”

  “You have to put salt, because otherwise it don’t taste good.”

  “Yes. I’ll be sure to add enough salt. What else?”

  “Then you just put the kong-guk in a bowl and add some cooked noodles and shredded cucumber and sesame seeds. So easy. Oh, and ice cubes. It’s summertime dish, you see.”

  “Why don’t you come to the kitchen so you can show me how to make it?”

  “Oh, it is so easy to make. You do it. I’ll stay in here.”

  I went to the kitchen, took out a pot for the beans and a blender, and put water on to boil. A few minutes after I poured the beans into the pot of bubbling water, my mother yelled from the back of the apartment, “Make sure you don’t cook the beans too long! Only a few minutes!” I wondered if she had timed it, visualizing each move I made in the kitchen, so that she could instruct me from a distance.

  “Okay!” I shouted back, cutting off the flame. I poured the hot beans and liquid into the blender and gave it a long whirr. I strained and salted the bean mixture, tasting it after each pinch. The richness and the depth of flavor was astounding. I had always used soymilk on my cereal and in my smoothies. How could I not have known earlier how far superior fresh soymilk was and how easy it was to make?

  I assembled the dish in two wide pasta bowls and set them on a large tray along with spoons and forks. The customary Korean table setting uses spoons and chopsticks, but in our adaptation to American life, my family always used spoons and forks for noodle soups. I carried the tray into my mother’s room and set it down on the floor next to the futon. She leaned over and inhaled the nutty fragrance rising from the bowls, then picked up a spoon and pushed one of the glistening ice cubes around in the bowl before tasting a spoonful of soymilk. We both became completely focused on slurping up the cold soup until there was nothing left but half-melted ice cubes and a few sesame seeds stuck to the sides of the bowls.

  “Wow, that was good,” I said, astonished by how so few ingredients, seasoned only with salt and sesame seeds, could produce something so flavorful. It didn’t even have any garlic or scallions, which I used liberally in nearly every Korean dish my mother had taught me to make. This was the soybean truly exalted. “How come you never made that when I was growing up?” I asked.

  “Huh? I don’t know. I guess I just never craved for it until now.”

  I made another batch of kong-guk, this time adding several pinches of sugar and a capful of vanilla extract, to use for breakfast on the next few busy weekday mornings. The richness of the soymilk on my cereal reminded me of how Halmeoni used to eat her cornflakes with half-and-half, dairy being a luxury and novelty for most older Koreans.

  A couple of days later, I hurriedly served my mother a bowl of cereal with the sweetened soymilk as I was getting ready to leave for the Graduate Center. I was teaching a seminar on social theory and incarceration for a group of women who had recently been released from prison, and that day was our first meeting. I was preoccupied with making sure I had everything I needed: the syllabus and copies of the excerpt from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, which would be the first reading assignment. Although it wasn’t my first time teaching a college-level class, it was my first time teaching theory, and I doubted whether I knew it well enough to teach it, whether I could make it relevant to women who had spent half their lives locked up for nonviolent offenses. What did I have to teach them? I had enjoyed every freedom in the world, but I reminded myself that my interest in incarceration was rooted in the experience of caring for my mother, who, under slightly different circumstances, could also have been institutionalized in a “correctional facility.”

  She had two children who housed and fed her, and she would never live behind bars, but then again, not all bars are physical. When she moved in with me, she was in the eighth year of her psychic prison sentence. The walls and prison guards were invisible, but the rules were very real. Oakie gave her clear boundaries about where she was allowed to go, how she could spend her time, who she could talk to, and what she could eat. Sometimes, instead of being granted permission to eat good food, she was mandated to eat things that were awful, given “disgusting commands.”1 That’s what I think happened the morning of my first seminar meeting.

  Everything was packed in my book bag, and I was as ready as I’d ever be, so I poured myself a bowl of mango passion Yogi Peace cereal with some of the soymilk. I shoved a spoonful in my mouth and instantly gagged. The soymilk had turned sour and fizzy. I dropped the bowl into the sink and spit out the cereal, then ran into my mother’s room. The TV was on in the background, a New York 1 recap of the day’s local news followed by the weather forecast. She sat in the middle of the futon with her knees bent and head down, not looking at the TV.

  “Mom, the soymilk went bad!” My heart was racing as I looked down at the tray and saw the empty bowl by the door. “No, please don’t tell me you ate it.”

  She didn’t answer, and kept her eyes focused on a spot on the floor.

  “I can’t believe you ate it!” I began to shout. “Why didn’t you tell me it was bad? Now you’re going to get sick!”

  She still didn’t acknowledge me. I felt flames of panic begin to consume me, and I was on the verge of crying. I had just served my mother rotten food and she ate it. Maybe I hadn’t stored the kong-guk properly. Maybe this dish was never meant to be stored, but simply eaten. Since it was my first experience with fresh soymilk, I had no idea it could spoil so quickly. She waved her hand for me to go away, without once lifting her head or speaking. I took her dirty dishes to the kitchen and started to clean up the mess in the sink. As I lifted the strainer full of soggy cereal, the smell of rotting fish rose up from inside the pipes and hit me square in the face, making me retch. It had been lingering ever since I cooked the mac
kerel a few nights earlier, the oil from the fish having coated the inside of the drain. Now I knew what she meant when she said it would stink up the kitchen. Maybe the distress of having just fed her spoiled food had heightened my senses, or maybe it even triggered an olfactory hallucination, but the fish smell was overwhelming. I grabbed a sponge and some Comet and scrubbed furiously until the scent faded, but I still couldn’t get it to dissipate completely.

  That night I dreamed of mackerel. A pile of blue-and-silver fish in the sink, their dead eyes glistening in the moonlight, shining through the dining room window and into the kitchen. How many did the fishmonger give me? Seumul-mari? Seoreun-mari? There were at least twenty or thirty. Many more than the three I asked for. Did I try to say “seht” and instead said “seoreun”? Did my Korean fail so egregiously that I ended up with ten times the amount of fish I wanted? Why didn’t the fishmonger correct me this time? In my dream, I can think of only one way to deal with this: I take out all my pots and pans and begin cooking, call up everyone I know, and beg them to come over and help me eat the mackerel. Soon, my apartment is flooded with fish and people. The mackerel are multiplying in the sink faster than I can cook and serve them, and I’ve run out of people to invite, so I urge my guests to eat seconds and thirds. I refill their plates again and again. Eat, eat, or it’ll go to waste. Mackerel is good for you. Please, I can’t let this fish go to waste.

  Over the next few days, the smell of rotten fish and the taste of spoiled soymilk followed me everywhere and tainted everything I ate. Although my mother didn’t appear to get physically ill after the cereal incident, things were taking a downward turn, and I feared I wouldn’t be able to get them back on track. I suspected that Oakie had told her to eat the bowl of cereal, or maybe this was some residue of the Korean War, when hunger overpowered the risk of getting sick. I also discovered that she had been eating the leftover mackerel straight from the fridge, not bothering to warm it despite the layer of solidified oil that had formed on top of the container. My stomach churned at the thought.

  There were other signs that she had regressed to the scavenging mentality of her days as a war survivor. One day, I came home from school and heard her footsteps scurrying down the hall from the kitchen.

  “It’s just me, Mom!” I called out.

  I walked into the dark kitchen and found a bottle of Log Cabin syrup on the counter and the garbage can out from its usual place under the sink. “What’s going on in here?” I asked.

  She slowly crept back toward the kitchen and stopped in the entryway. “I was eating a piece of bread. The end piece with some syrup on it. You know, the end piece is still good. You don’t have to throw away.”

  “Did I throw it away? You didn’t pull it from the garbage, did you?”

  “No, I was just eating over the garbage so the crumbs don’t fall all over the place.”

  “Mom, you can use a plate, you know. And there are other things to put on the bread. Syrup doesn’t sound very good.”

  “It’s okay. I like it.”

  I let it go at that because I didn’t want to argue, but I wondered if she had lied about not recovering the bread from the garbage or if she had anticipated that I was going to throw it out. Either way, it was stale, and my mother was eating like someone who was starving. I became meticulous about making sure every bit of food was consumed before it had a chance to spoil, and I took out the garbage immediately after putting any food scraps in it. These tricks worked to keep her from eating stale or rancid foods, but she was still eating cold leftovers, congealed fat and all.

  After 9/11, she started a new hunger strike. On some nights, I would get so frustrated by her refusal to eat that my temper would explode and I’d yell at her. On others I’d collapse on the floor crying, begging her to eat until she finally took a few bites.

  Cesar observed all this from a distance. After one of my screaming fits I apologized to him. “I’m sorry. This must be really stressful for you.”

  “It’s stressful for you,” he said. “You’re the only one who ever sees her.”

  14. COUNTING GHOSTS

  Princeton, New Jersey, 2002

  TWO MONTHS AFTER SHE MOVED OUT of my Queens apartment into the granny flat above my brother’s garage, my mother was admitted to Princeton House, an upscale private psychiatric facility, because she had stopped eating. I felt both grateful that she was going to get treatment and slightly jealous that I wasn’t the one to help her get it.

  We were by her side when the ambulance arrived. It was a frigid February night, and she plodded outside in her slippers, a thin coat over her robe, keeping her head down, eyes on the ground. Then she said something in a low, muffled voice.

  “What was that?” asked one of the paramedics.

  “I want to go with my children,” she repeated. Her voice was audible this time, but it was still so small, like that of a little girl using all her strength to not cry. It was one of very few occasions that she was able to express that she needed someone.

  “I’m sorry. We can’t take them,” he said.

  She looked petrified and stood frozen for a minute or two as my brother and I tried to reassure her, then climbed into the back of the ambulance. It pained me to see her so scared and vulnerable, being handled by strangers.

  During her weeklong stay at the hospital, I borrowed Cesar’s car to visit her every night or two. It was only a couple of days in when I noticed a marked contrast in her mood and demeanor.

  I arrived at the visitor’s desk, and the receptionist greeted me with a big smile. “You’re Koonja’s daughter?” he asked. “She talks about you all the time.”

  “She does?”

  “Oh, yeah. She’s really proud of you.”

  She is? In thirty-one years, I had never heard her say this explicitly.

  He escorted me into the rec room, where she was sitting at a table, beading necklaces with a group of other residents around her, abuzz with excitement. They seemed to be hanging on her every word.

  “Mom?” I approached tentatively, not wanting to disrupt what appeared to be her most triumphant moment in decades.

  “You’re Koonja’s daughter!” one of the residents shouted. “Oh, we love your mom.”

  There was a devilish grin on her face. All these years she’s been terrified of people, and now she’s the belle of the ball? Have they been giving her new meds? The only thing the nurse had mentioned the last time was the laxative. Whatever it was, the charismatic mother of my childhood had momentarily returned, and I was thrilled to see her.

  She led me to her room so that we could talk privately as we drank apple juice in plastic cups with tinfoil lids. When I asked how it was going, she immediately told me about her roommate, a sixtysomething woman whose son and husband died in a car crash. “She’s here because she’s very sad,” my mother said, her voice soft with compassion. I was moved by her empathy and felt grateful that she had had the chance to hear other people’s stories of loss and hardship.

  The doctors had in fact started her on a new drug regimen. This time she was taking one of the “new generation” of antipsychotic drugs that had fewer side effects, along with an antidepressant, but I knew it wasn’t just the drugs; it was too soon for them to have made much of an impact. She was benefiting from being around other people, from being reminded that she was lovable. And surely, group therapy at a nice facility like this one must have given my mother’s experiences a kind of validity that they had never had before. I tried to imagine how she presented herself, what she had told the others about why she was there. I’m here because Oakie gave me too much work to do, and I got kinda burnt out. I made mistakes and people died. I imagined that whatever she had to say was treated with respect and not dismissed as psychotic nonsense.

  We dined on tuna sandwiches from the vending machine and talked for a while, and then I apologized that I needed to go back to New York. “Tomorrow is my proposal defense,” I said, wondering if she would ask me what my dissertation was ab
out, but she didn’t. As usual, it was enough for her to know that I was getting a doctorate, and too much for her to know the details of it.

  “But I’ll come back the day after tomorrow.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about me.”

  “No, Mom. I’m coming back.”

  “No, no. It’s okay.”

  “Mom—”

  “Oh, all right.”

  My defense was scheduled for 10:00 a.m., and although I was on time, I felt harried and disorganized after having gotten home late the night before. I walked into the small, windowless seminar room at the CUNY Graduate Center to defend myself before the sociology faculty. Patricia, my adviser, was already there, and I beelined it for the seat next to her.

  “Hello, my sweet. How are you?” she said, in her soothing, sultry voice.

  “Well, I’ve been in the psychiatric hospital all week if that gives you any indication,” I said, trying to make light of the situation but also acknowledge that my mind had not been focused on the proposal and I was feeling pretty vulnerable. My palms were sweating, and I kept wiping them on my pants under the table. I had never had the easiest time in this sociology department—my interests were more on the side of cultural studies, while many of the professors were wedded to mainstream notions of sociological empiricism. Patricia, however, was a champion of students who were drawn toward creative sociology and the unorthodox research methods that seemingly unanswerable questions demanded. Because of that, the defense turned out to be at least as much about her as it was about my proposal.

  “My dissertation will analyze the figure of the yanggongju, literally ‘Western princess’ but more commonly translated as ‘Yankee whore,’ as a ghost that haunts the Korean diaspora,” read the first sentence. Some of my proposed methods were dream work, experimental writing, and performance—methods of the unconscious—to make unspeakable traumas audible and hauntings visible.