Tastes Like War

by Grace M. Cho

  There was a taut silence as the faculty reviewed my proposal, which was broken by the department chair, a middle-aged white man and one of the “quantoids,” as the qualitative sociology students called them. “Somehow I don’t think you’re using this word ‘ghost’ just to be cute. I think you really mean it.”

  Then another white professor burst out, “You’re not doing any interviews! It’s incumbent upon you as a researcher to interview your subjects!” She then turned to Patricia and shouted, “How could you let her do this?”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” interjected a third professor, the only Black faculty member and the one who had supervised my oral exam on the literature of sex work. He turned to the professor who had just spoken. “Let me explain something to you. If I’m writing about the figure of Aunt Jemima, I’m not going to interview Aunt Jemima.”

  I exhaled a long breath knowing that there was at least one person in the room that got what I was trying to do, but his comment did nothing to change the tone of the conversation. Faculty continued yelling at one another about my proposal, often talking about me in the third person as if I wasn’t even there. Each time someone took a jab at my proposal, or warned Patricia of my impending “career suicide,” I shrunk a bit more in my seat and heard my voice fading, until I felt myself disappear completely.

  Later, I would be able to see that much of the aggression had been directed toward Patricia for having encouraged me to experiment with what “counts” as sociology. Another professor would explain the politics of the department to me by picking up a plate and balancing a pencil on the edge. “If this is the discipline of sociology,” he would say about the plate, “then the pencil is Patricia. They don’t want her students to push the boundaries any further.”

  After the meeting was adjourned, the chair emailed Patricia: “I don’t think your student is mentally stable enough to get a PhD.” While Patricia and I laughed about how absurd it was that the word “ghost”—a word that was utterly commonplace and taken for granted in Asian American studies—had set off the alarm bells of an old-school sociologist, I also felt shamed and brutalized. I had already spent so much of my life thinking about misconceptions of madness and the silencing of women, and here was a white male professor suggesting that my place was not in academia but in the loony bin alongside my mother.

  As Patricia and I sat in her office continuing to process the defense, she scoffed at the other sociologists. “They think you should be counting ghosts,” she said, as if transgenerational haunting were quantifiable in such a way. And in the next breath, she expressed regret. “I know I encouraged you to do all this, but somehow I didn’t think you were going to listen to me,” she said as she put her head in her hands, messing up her wiry black hair.

  “I’m glad I listened to you!” I said defiantly, as a reminder to us both that she had made the margins the most livable place for me. “I don’t want to be a straight sociologist. I don’t even want to be an academic.”

  My professional desires had long gravitated toward becoming a pastry chef, and Patricia would sometimes fret, “Oh, Grace. Are we going to lose you to cakes?” She knew that what drove me in graduate school was not a love of sociology but a traumatic legacy so deep that I would never be able to find the bottom. She had been my adviser through my struggles to feed my mother, to confront the past—all of it tied up with my doctoral work.

  I had lamented profusely to Patricia about my mother’s agoraphobia, all those days she spent in my apartment wrapped up in a little ball, rocking herself on the futon. She had been doing that in one form or another for years, but to see her illness on a daily basis devastated me all over again, almost to the point of dysfunction. There had been instances at school when I felt like I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, unable to think about anything but my mother stuck in that little room. Then one day Patricia delivered a bit of psychoanalytic tough love.

  “Grace. Maybe you’re keeping her in the room.”

  “What did you say?” I thought she was accusing me of hyperbolizing my mother’s condition as a shut-in. Or maybe she was suggesting something even worse.

  “You’re keeping her in the room.”

  I heard these words not in Patricia’s voice but in the piercing sound of my own self-doubt and criticism, the one that for years had been reminding me of the debacle I had made out of trying to get help for my mother when I was fifteen.

  And now, she was stuck in the room because I had failed.

  The day after my defense, I fired up the Chevy and drove to the psychiatric hospital for my mother’s discharge. There was a crowd gathered around her waiting to say goodbye. One man reached out to hug her and she pulled away. “Oh, no, no, no,” she said while backing up, but with each step back, he stepped forward and almost put his hands on her shoulders. They danced across the floor like this, but she reached the front desk without ever letting him touch her. Then she whispered something in the receptionist’s ear that made him blush. “We’re gonna miss you, Koonja,” he said as we walked out the door.

  Back in her apartment, she sat down on her cream-colored couch and stared off into space. I marveled that just a few minutes earlier she had been working the crowd down at Princeton House, and now she was back to her lonely days of doing nothing.

  “Mom, you know, I could see that socializing was really good for you. What do you think of finding a day program?”

  “Hah! No,” she snorted, and waved her hand at me.

  “Well … do you want me to get you some beading supplies so you can keep making jewelry?”

  “No, no. That’s okay.”

  I began to feel frustrated by her stubborn refusal to do anything but sit on the couch, as if all the progress I’d just witnessed had never really happened. Again I had gotten my hopes up, only to have things return to the way they had always been. Yet something was different. She was in a better mood and more talkative. It could have been the new meds or the impact of the positive social contact. Or maybe it was me who had changed. Maybe I would finally be able to let her out of the room.

  “Do you understand that you have a mental illness, Mom? That you’re schizophrenic?”

  “Yes. However”—she raised her index finger in the air with an imperious gesture—“I am no ordinary mentally ill person.”

  A psychiatrist probably would have said that her declaration was further evidence of her delusional thinking, but I chose to believe that it was a sign that her self-esteem was on the rise. Everyone at Princeton House could see what I had seen as a child—that she was extraordinary, the most charming and charismatic of the bunch.

  Despite the few members of the sociology faculty who continued to see my work as having “absolutely no empirical basis in reality”—much in the same way that psychiatrists spoke about hallucinations—I started writing my dissertation in 2003, by which time my mother had taught me to cook about fifteen Korean dishes. Each time I visited, the pungent smells of garlic and fermentation would fill the air, bringing Korea into the room. The tastes and smells sometimes prompted her to tell me some tidbit about her youth that I hadn’t heard before. “You know, my father used to make the best bulgogi of anyone I know,” she once confided. “He used to feed me with his chopsticks straight from the fire. I was his favorite because I was the youngest, you see.”

  These meals with my mother and her minor revelations about the past punctuated my research and writing, but the boundaries between these two aspects of my life often blurred.

  When I was four or five, a ghost-child would sometimes visit me in Chehalis. On clear moonlit nights, it would appear by the camellia bush in the backyard and summon my body to float out my bedroom window. I knew it wasn’t going to hurt me, but its appearance frightened me. Downy white fur covered its skin, and there was a small hole in the middle of its forehead. As I got a little older I began to wonder if the ghost-child was perhaps a spirit in the guise of a living human or just a trick that my mind had been playing on me. Over tim
e, it receded into the depths of my unconscious until I began researching civilian experiences of the Korean War. Amid reading survivors’ aggrieved tales of massacre—of witnessing their loved ones murdered and then later having to recover the rotting remains for burial—alongside the cold rationality of US military memos—“Policy on Strafing Civilian Refugees” as “an excellent method of clearing roadways”1—the vision of the child flashed back with a vengeance. I wondered if it was an apparition that had crossed the Pacific with us, one of my mother’s relatives perhaps, or someone she had seen dead or dying on the side of the road. At that moment, its unusual physical appearance ceased to be a mystery. Suddenly, I saw it as a child that had been shot in the head and had begun growing mold on the surface of its decomposing flesh, an image that could have been taken straight from the pages of my research.

  As I was reenvisioning the ghost-child, I then contemplated how popular culture depicted children who could see and hear things that others couldn’t as highly perceptive, gifted with a sixth sense, yet adults that had the same experiences were simply crazy.

  Once, as we were eating dinner, I asked my mother directly what she remembered about the war. She answered, but her eyes went vacant as she spoke. “I remember traveling through the mountains and seeing North Korean soldiers. Girls. Girl soldiers. It was scary to me. I never imagined girls with guns.” She seemed so troubled by it, but it couldn’t have been the most horrific thing she had ever seen. Maybe it stood out in her mind precisely because the other things were too traumatic to remember.

  For a chapter I wrote on the ways the figure of the camptown sex worker haunted the cultural productions of diasporic Koreans, I read Nora Okja Keller’s novel Fox Girl. The story is set in 1960s South Korea and revolves around Hyun Jin and Sookie, two teenage girls whose lives bear the consequences of US imperial war. Sookie is the older one who introduces Hyun Jin to prostitution for American troops and teaches her to dissociate. You can do anything if you have to … it’s easy. It’s easy because the more you do it, the more you know it’s not the real you. The real you flies away.2 She is the ghost that haunts Hyun Jin’s dreams, the voice in her head, the imprint of her trauma. Did my mother have a Sookie? Was her name Ok-hee?

  There’s one scene in Fox Girl that I’ve never been able to forget, in which three mixed race children are singing a song that they had heard from American GIs. One of the few words the kids understand is “whore,” because they knew whose mothers they were.3

  I saw a whore by the side of the road.

  Knew right away she was dead as a toad.

  Her skin was all gone from her tummy to her head.

  But I fucked her, I fucked her even though she was dead.4

  Although Keller’s book is fictional, it is not unlike things I had found in my scholarly research, which made the song all the more horrifying. As much as I tried, I could not unhear the voices of these children blithely singing about the murder and rape of a woman who could have been their mother.

  I also read similarly disturbing accounts of former wianbu, the “comfort women” who were conscripted for the Japanese military, to look at the continuity between the two systems of militarized sexual labor. In one testimony, a woman named Okpun told of being abducted at the Korean age of twelve (American age eleven) and sent to a “comfort station” in Taiwan.

  On weekday evenings we were made to sing, dance and play the violin…. If we couldn’t play well, we were beaten…. The song dedicated to life in the comfort station went something like “my body is like a rotting pumpkin left out in summer.”5

  I was struck that I had found a recurring theme of the army song that depicted the woman’s rotting body, the woman whose purpose was to provide entertainment to imperial soldiers. One night, when I was in the middle of writing a chapter on the violence of the camptown, I lay on my mother’s couch trying to sleep, but the harrowing images from my research kept me awake. Yun Kumi splayed out on the floor of her ramshackle apartment, her body desecrated after having been murdered by one of her clients. The camptown worker who said she had witnessed an American GI throwing a woman’s body into the dumpster, then lighting it on fire. The smell of singed hair and smoldering flesh.

  It was pitch black except for the little red light of the smoke detector on my mother’s ceiling. The light seemed to grow brighter and brighter, burning my eyes with red.

  When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed that I was trapped in a dark room, searching for a door. I could see my face, distressed and crying out, “Please! Somebody get me out of here!” I didn’t know where I was at first, then realized that it was a brothel, and I knew that my body would stay there until long after my mind had fled, until no one on the outside remembered me.

  Her skin was all gone…

  Voices had gotten into my head too.

  You can do anything if you have to…

  They gave me instructions: Put the flesh back on the body.

  The body that had decomposed beyond recognition.

  15. CHEESEBURGER SEASON

  Princeton, New Jersey, 2002–2008

  AS IF SANCTIONS HAD BEEN LIFTED, my mother’s appetite completely returned. No longer skin and bones, her body looked healthy again, her eyes bright.

  Her discharge from Princeton House marked the beginning of the best years of her late life. It was during this period, while I was working on my dissertation, that she resembled the mother of my childhood, eating so intently that beads of sweat would form on her nose.

  I had seen glimpses of the first mother before, and perhaps my most concrete understanding that she was still there, ready to be resurrected by the right meal, had been on her sixtieth birthday when she was living with me in Queens.

  It was only a week or so after she moved in, but she had already established a pattern of staying in her room, curled up in her little ball. The day before her birthday, I approached her as she rocked herself.

  “Mom?”

  “Hm?” she said without looking up.

  “I’m going to make galbi for your birthday,” I said.

  The little ball began to unfurl as she lifted her head. “Be sure to put plenty of garlic in it.”

  “I’m also going to barbecue some chicken.”

  “I haven’t had that for years … Why you go to so much trouble? Don’t cook all that.”

  “Mom, it’s your birthday.”

  “Big deal.”

  “It’s your sixtieth birthday.” Among Koreans, sixty is the age that deserves the most fanfare, as a person has achieved a milestone measured by the completion of the entire lunar zodiac. “There’ll be cheeseburgers too.”

  She had avoided smiling since her front tooth had fallen out a couple of years earlier, but this time she couldn’t help herself. She sat straight up and covered her mouth to hide the missing tooth. “Cheeseburgers, huh? That sounds good!”

  When the moment arrived, I set the big dining table for three and filled it with plates of galbi, grilled chicken, potato salad, kimchi, kong-nameul, spinach nameul, cheeseburgers, sliced tomatoes and onions, baby lettuce, grilled corn on the cob, seedless watermelon, and a four-layer lemon cake.

  “It’s time for your birthday party!” I said from the doorway of her room.

  “I’ll just eat in here.”

  “No. I already set the table. Come out.”

  I was anticipating a struggle, but instead, she stood up and shuffled down the hall toward the dining room. When she came face-to-face with Cesar, she stopped and said to him, “It is my birthday, after all.” Then she walked up to the edge of the table, sized up the spread, clapped her hands, and shouted, “Manta! Lots of goodies!” The three of us feasted together and she relished everything.

  It comforted me to see the look on her face at the end of the meal, as she milked the corncobs with her teeth and sucked the last shreds of meat off the galbi bones.

  “Did you enjoy the food?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I been wondering if I was gonna get a birthd
ay party this year.” Her big smile returned and she said, “Oh boy! That cheeseburger is good!”

  The mother who had raised me was still alive.

  By the time I finally learned to listen to my mother’s cravings, she stopped making me guess what she wanted. She made regular requests for Korean dishes she hadn’t eaten for ages, like jangjorim (beef and spicy green peppers stewed in soy sauce) or chapssal tteok (a sweet red-bean rice cake). The flavors transported me back to my childhood, to my first mother’s embrace.

  Though it took years for me to fully absorb the significance of these meals, it was saengtae jjigae that would make me understand that feeding her had the effect of gently releasing the past.

  It was a dish that I had never tasted or heard of before, but I cooked it as per my mother’s instructions. Sautée radishes in sesame oil until they begin to soften. Don’t be ashamed to use sesame oil. Put in garlic, plenty of garlic. Now don’t be ashamed to use that either. Her recipes were like incantations against a history of being rendered inferior. Add fish, dashi broth, scallions, gukganjang, and gochu-garu. Bring to a low boil and serve with rice.

  We sat down on the floor around the glass-top coffee table to eat the fragrant fish stew, and I contemplated the balance of flavors—spicy, smoky, pungent, and sweet.

  “I haven’t tasted this in forty years,” she said. Her voice was soft, dreamy.

  “Wow! It’s so good! How come you never made this when I was little?”

  “I guess I just never craved for it until now.” That was always her answer when I asked why we were eating something now but not then. What was it about the now that stirred up her cravings?

  “Does it taste the same as when you used to cook it?”

  “I never cooked it,” she said between slurps of garlicky broth.

  “Really? How did you know how to make it?”