Tastes Like War

by Grace M. Cho

  “It’s how I remember my mother making.”

  I couldn’t believe that she had successfully taught me how to make such a delicious dish based on a forty-year-old recollection of watching someone else cook it. Throughout her life, saengtae jjigae was something that others cooked for her, the most comforting of comfort foods. The recipe—the memory of her mother’s hands—had been lying dormant on her tongue for all those years. Tasting it must have been a kind of homecoming.

  The experience of awakening her memories moved me so much that saengtae jjigae became a family treasure, something that I didn’t want to cook too often so as to not diminish its importance. I made it only when she specifically asked for it. After one such request, I heard from my sister-in-law that she had been thinking about it all week long. “Are you making your mom that fish stew?” she said to me. “She keeps talking about it, how she’s really looking forward to it.”

  Our Korean dinners became beacons around which her uneventful life was structured. From the moment I walked out the door, the countdown to the next meal would begin.

  That Monday, when I returned to the Graduate Center, Hosu and her girlfriend asked me what I had cooked for my mother over the weekend. They would always take delight in hearing about our dinners, but this time, as soon as I told them it was saengtae jjigae, they screeched, laughing so hard they doubled over.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  “Nobody from our generation makes that!” Hosu said, breathless from laughing.

  Visits with my mother were like culinary history lessons, encounters with Korea of the 1950s and 1960s. Everything we ate together during those last years of her life must have reminded her of her youth, but the cheeseburger stood out as the lone American dish in my old-school Korean repertoire.

  During my childhood, despite all the experience she had acquired with different kinds of food, her favorite meal was always a cheeseburger: medium rare with tomato and cheddar. Every year, when the Washington rains gave way to drier days, she would fire up the charcoal grill, throw some patties on it, and declare the commencement of “Cheeseburger Season.”

  The timing of Cheeseburger Season was different in the Northeast. We would kick it off sometime in April, as soon as it was warm enough for me to cook on the fourteen-inch Weber charcoal grill that we kept on her balcony. Though I could never get her to come outside with me, at least she’d let me keep the curtains open so she could supervise from the couch. Sometimes she’d get impatient waiting for spring to come and ask me to jumpstart the season: “You can cook ’em in a pan, you know. Not as good as barbecue, but they are still good.”

  At first I thought that the cheeseburgers were some throwback to my childhood, some residual fondness for her life in America, but then I remembered that this dish, too, she had first eaten in Korea.

  Her love of cheeseburgers went way back to the US military occupation of Korea. As a bargirl at a US naval base, she had access to luxurious American foods that most Koreans could only dream of; it was sort of a fringe benefit of serving American soldiers.

  My father used to tell this one story about how he fell in love with my mother because of her passion for cheeseburgers. He took her out on a date (the only one I had ever heard him talk about) to an American restaurant at the base.

  She had long been out of school and had never formally studied English, but she was a woman driven to learn. She compared her speech to that of other English-speaking Koreans and felt certain that she did not have an accent. Indeed, she pronounced many English sounds correctly. The Zs that most Koreans pronounced as Js did not intimidate her. She had little trouble with long As or words ending in consonants, except for words ending in both R and L, which were especially difficult if they were followed by another consonant. Nonetheless, the fact that she believed she spoke English without an accent illuminated her voice with the unmistakable sound of confidence.

  My father looked across the table at this young beauty, and wondered if she could possibly love an aging man like him. “Order anything on the menu,” he said. “Anything at all.” My father was frugal, but he believed that some things were worth the money. It was a much fancier restaurant than the other ones my mother had been to before. An irrepressible smile spread across her face, revealing her huge dimples. She was rapturous. The waiter arrived to take their order. My mother swung her feet back and forth and wiggled slightly in her seat. Her smile grew larger as she enunciated each word clearly, “I’ll have a cheeseburg, please.” She clasped her hands together and said to my father, “Oh boy! Cheeseburg is my favorite food in the whole worl!”

  At this point in the story, my father would always get dewy-eyed and often his telling would end there. But if he still had a handle on his emotions, he would conclude with the words “Your mother was the cutest thing I ever did see.”

  Before that, she was like any other Korean, whose first taste of American food probably came from scavenging in the dumpsters outside US Army mess halls. Right after the war, the American bases became a destination for hungry Koreans looking to buy bags of leftover food scraps, which were often mixed up with all kinds of inedible trash. I would learn about this when I was working on Still Present Pasts, an oral history project with Korean War survivors, many of whom talked about how common it was for people to get meals out of the Americans’ garbage. Their stories illuminated the dark side of my mother’s desire for cheeseburgers. I tried to picture the moment she first found a half-eaten cheeseburger beneath a layer of crumpled napkins and cigarette butts, and in her malnourished state of mind, thought it was the most transcendent thing she had ever tasted.

  The cheeseburger was a complex symbol of survival and subordination, a luxury item that the Americans could afford to throw away while Koreans starved. For my mother, it also symbolized all the hope and possibility that America had to offer. US imperialism seemed to be writ large on her unconscious, expressing itself through her alimentary longings. At the same time, taking pleasure in food offered her some relief from the stress of her militarized psychic space. The cheeseburger just happened to represent both symptom and remedy.

  I went through my own process of psychic decolonization during those years of cooking for her. The meals we shared nurtured me through the emotionally taxing work that I was doing in graduate school. She nurtured me. After dinner, she would massage my feet and calves as I stretched out on the couch. “Your legs must be tired,” she’d say about my long walk from the train station. Before heading back the next day, she would always encourage me to take a ten-minute nap. “It’s okay. Go to sleep. I watch the time for you.”

  It wasn’t until after I had defended my dissertation and was revising it into a book manuscript that we ever had a conversation about my research, though it didn’t happen the way I had intended. My sister-in-law spilled the beans, which I was ultimately thankful for. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it on my own.

  When I walked upstairs to find my mother in her usual place on the couch, there was a tense look on her face.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked.

  “Are you writing a book?” Now that she knew, there was nothing left for me to do but tell her as much as she could bear to hear.

  “Yes … I’ve been wanting to talk to you about it for a long time … It’s sort of inspired by you, your life.” I went on to try to explain the thesis as concisely as I could, but when I got to the word “yanggongju,” she interjected.

  “Oh, that is a bad word,” she said, turning her eyes away.

  “I know it was used that way,” I said, “but I’m trying to change the meaning of it by writing about it. I don’t want it to be a shameful word anymore. That woman, to me, she’s a hero.” My voice began to falter. “Mama … I don’t want you to feel ashamed of anything you’ve ever done. There’s nothing about you that I’m ashamed of.”

  She didn’t look at me, but I thought I saw a faint smile appear on her lips.

  “I won’t publish it if you d
on’t want me to,” I added. She paused for a few seconds, and in that silence I surrendered to the possibility that my writing might never see the light of day.

  “I want you to,” she said.

  Nearly every time I saw her after that, she would ask about the progress of my book, sometimes reiterating her wish for it to be published.

  It was that same year that she surprised me with a Christmas present, the only gift besides money she had given me during her fourteen years as a shut-in. After opening her gifts from me—a knife sharpener and a pair of tongs, both of which she had asked for, and some moisturizer—her face lit up. “I got present for you too!”

  “What? How?”

  She scurried over to the closet, pulled out a red metallic gift bag, and handed it to me with a huge smile on her face. Inside was a liter of olive oil, several different types of candies and cookies, and two pairs of multicolored fuzzy socks—a gift that I would have appreciated from anyone, but receiving it from my mother made me ecstatic.

  “Oh my god! Where did you get all this stuff?”

  “I been saving up for you!”

  She’d spent months squirrelling away things that my brother and his wife had been bringing to her so that she could give me something more personal than a check. As always, she was ingenious in her resourcefulness.

  She had transformed into a new mother—present once more, and at the same time open to the past, able for the first time to talk to me about Korea.

  For six good years she consistently enjoyed the dinners we shared, the food she taught me how to cook. Little by little, meal by meal, she traced her legacy. It was the most magnificent gift.

  After my mother’s death, I replayed our final moments together on loop. I obsessed over the exact sequence of events, minor details of the weather, the sound of her voice.

  “Surprise me,” she had said when we were planning that night’s menu, as if the suspense would add some excitement to her week, and maybe it was precisely her wish for excitement that told me she needed a meal that could lift her spirits.

  The air was cold but smelled vaguely of budding flowers. With the change of seasons on the horizon, I had the thought that it might be the last time we’d eat saengtae jjigae for months.

  As soon as I walked in through the ground-level entrance, I heard her call down the stairs as she always did. “Professor is here?”

  “Hi, Professor’s mom!” I called back.

  “What are we eating tonight?” she asked as I approached her studio at the top of the stairs.

  “Saengtae jjigae.”

  “Sounds good.”

  At dinner she nodded her approval of the stew, but something about her seemed a little off. Her short hair was greasy and flattened on one side, as if she hadn’t gotten out of bed for days, and her energy seemed low.

  “Are you sick, Ma?” I asked.

  “I had some diarrhea the other day. My stomach been bothering me a little. It’s no big deal.” It didn’t worry me, as gastrointestinal distress wasn’t unusual, and certainly nothing that registered as life-threatening. Plus, she was eating the spicy stew without any apparent discomfort.

  After dinner we talked about how the demands of the tenure track were eating up all my free time. “I have to work the next two weekends, Ma. I’m really sorry. I won’t be able to come back until March 22. Will you be okay until then?”

  She pursed her lips together and nodded. “It’s okay. You do what you have to do.”

  We covered all our usual topics of conversation—teaching, the status of my dating life now that I was single again, her visits with my brother and his family, the menu for next time—and then she asked about daylight savings.

  “When does the time change this year?”

  “Next weekend.”

  “Oh! Why so early?” She seemed troubled and furrowed her brow.

  “They’re doing it in March now, but I can’t remember why.”

  “Why does it have to be so soon? Why does it have to be so soon?” The way she said it under her breath made me think that she was talking to Oakie, but I didn’t think much of it at first. Her preoccupation with the time had been a constant through all her years with schizophrenia.

  The visit was shorter than usual because I wasn’t spending the night, and the few hours we had together had already slipped away. My commute to campus in Staten Island took almost as long as the two-hour-and-forty-minute trip to her house in New Jersey, and I needed that Sunday to rest and prep my classes.

  As I began packing to go back to New York, she stopped me. “You don’t have to leave right now, do you?” I had never known her to be clingy with me, so the very fact that she had asked me to stay made me want to do it.

  “I can take the next train,” I said as I pulled the schedule out of my bag and studied it. “Yeah, I’ll take the 7:54.”

  Later that night, as I was walking toward the train station, I would call my best friend to tell him the foreboding in my gut.

  “I just have this feeling that she’s not going to be around much longer, and I wish I could spend more time with her,” I would say with a tremor in my voice.

  “I know you’re super busy, but you can go see her more once the semester is over.”

  “Yeah … yeah, but I want to be able to spend more time with her now.”

  All we could really count on was now, and if I knew that, why didn’t I turn around and stay the night? In the coming weeks, I would torture myself with this question, then try to extinguish it by telling myself that it wouldn’t have made a difference. What’s another night compared to forever?

  As it was, we had another sixty-seven minutes.

  “Get comfortable. Put your legs out,” she said once I sat back down.

  Both of us stretched out on the couch, facing each other from opposite ends. She spread her orange floral blanket over our legs, the one she had brought back from Korea in the 1970s. Beneath the blanket she held my right foot in her hand, gently rubbing it with her thumb. The blanket, the sensation of her touch, reminded me of being a young child strapped to her back, my cheek resting between her shoulder blades. It reminded me of all the occasions when we slept together on heated floor mats while visiting my grandmother and cousins in Oregon. An intense, almost unbearable longing to lie next to her again washed over me, and then I realized that the very thing I wished to happen was already happening.

  Except for a few words here and there, we spent most of our sixty-seven minutes quietly lying on the couch. Relaxing into the warmth of each other’s bodies under the fuzzy Korean blanket. Listening to the ticking of the grandfather clock, the rise and fall of our breath. Being together in the now. We continued like that until the clock struck seven, announcing that our time was up.

  “I guess I should go now,” I said as I leaned forward and wrapped my arms around her. “I’ll see you in three weeks.” She nodded and gestured with her hand that it was okay to go.

  As I started to leave, I felt a sharp pang of remorse. I had already said goodbye and had taken two steps down the stairs when something compelled me to turn around.

  “Mom, just think that the next time I see you, it’ll be spring,” I said. “And then it will be Cheeseburger Season.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  GRACE M. CHO is the author of Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War, which received a 2010 book award from the American Sociological Association. Her writings have appeared in the New Inquiry, Gastronomica, and others. She is associate professor of sociology and anthropology at the College of Staten Island, CUNY.

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