Tastes Like War
Page 1
PRAISE FOR TASTES LIKE WAR
“As a member of the complicated postwar Korean diaspora in the US, I have been waiting for this book all my life. Tastes Like War is, among other things, a series of revelations of intergenerational trauma in its many guises and forms, often inextricable from love and obligation. Food is a complicated but life-affirming thread throughout the memoir, a deep part of Grace and her mother’s parallel journeys to live with autonomy, dignity, nourishment, memory, and love.”
—SUN YUNG SHIN, author of Unbearable Splendor
“What are the ingredients for madness? Grace M. Cho’s sui generis memoir of her mother’s schizophrenia plumbs the effects of colonialism, war, and violence on a Korean American family. Her moving and frank exploration examines how the social gets under our skin across vast stretches of space and time, illuminating mental illness as a social problem as much as a biological disease.”
—DAVID L. ENG, coauthor of Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans
“Raw, reaching, and propulsive, Grace M. Cho’s Tastes Like War creates and explores an epic conversation about heritage and history, intergenerational trauma, and the connective potential of food to explore a mother’s fractured past. This is both a memoir and a reclamation.”
—ALLIE ROWBOTTOM, author of Jell-O Girls: A Family History
“Tastes Like War is a requiem and a love song for a brilliant, elusive mother whose traumatic past shadows her daughter’s present. This searingly honest, heartbreaking memoir evokes the ways in which food in the immigrant household may just as easily be a path to assimilation, alienation, and forgetting as it can be to remembering, connection, joy, and possibility.”
—GAYATRI GOPINATH, author of Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora
“Exquisitely crafted, Tastes Like War will break readers’ hearts as it engages them in a daughter’s search for her mother in the traumatic effects of war, immigration, and mental illness. Cho brilliantly shows the possibilities of the genre to bring together thought and affect in the pursuit of understanding the ghosts of our historical present.”
—PATRICIA TICINETO CLOUGH, author of The User Unconscious: On Affect, Media, and Measure
“Grace M. Cho’s debut memoir follows and forages alongside her mother in the shadowed gendered histories of the unending Korean War in the United States. This is a book of care and homage to the persistent creativity of a Korean mother, her daughter’s love, and their resilience despite the ghosts of US militarism. Tastes Like War signals a powerfully evocative new voice.”
—JENNIFER KWON DOBBS, author of Interrogation Room
“In excavating the origins of her mother’s schizophrenia, Grace M. Cho untangles not only her own family history but that of a generation of survivors and their descendants marked by war. Her exploration leads readers on a poignant journey across time and space, revealing the scars on the human psyche wrought by the legacy of violence underpinning US-Korea relations. A moving tribute to all those ‘never meant to survive,’ Tastes Like War suggests that healing can’t always be achieved through solitary effort but requires a collective reckoning with the past.”
—DEANN BORSHAY LIEM, director of First Person Plural
Published in 2021 by the Feminist Press
at the City University of New York
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406
New York, NY 10016
feministpress.org
First Feminist Press edition 2021
Copyright © 2021 by Grace M. Cho
All rights reserved.
Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.
This book is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
This book was made possible thanks to a grant from New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
This book was published with financial support from the Jerome Foundation.
No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First printing May 2021
Cover design by Suki Boynton
Text design by Frances Ross
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cho, Grace M., author.
Title: Tastes like war : a memoir / Grace M. Cho.
Description: First Feminist Press edition. | New York, NY : The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020051100 (print) | LCCN 2020051101 (ebook) | ISBN 9781952177941 (paperback) | ISBN 9781952177958 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Cho, Grace M. | Cho, Grace M.--Family. | Korean American women--Biography. | Children of the mentally ill--United States--Biography. | Food habits--Korea (South) | Cooking, Korean. | Korea (South)--Social life and customs.
Classification: LCC E184.K6 C4733 2021 (print) | LCC E184.K6 (ebook) | DDC 305.48/89519073--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051100
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051101
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
Cover
Praise for Tastes Like War
Title page
Copyright
Contents
Dedication
Prologue
Chehalis, Washington, 1976
PART I
1. Tastes Like War
Princeton, New Jersey, 2008
2. American Dreams
Korea, 1961
Chehalis, Washington, 1980
Princeton, New Jersey, 2006
Chehalis, Washington, 1977
Chehalis, Washington, 1987
3. The Friendly City
Chehalis, Washington, 1977 / Population: 5,727 / Korean population: 3
1978
1980
1983
1986
New York City, 2016
PART II
4. Umma
Chehalis, Washington, 1976
March 9, 2008
5. Kimchi Blues
New York City, 2008
6. Madame Mushroom
Chehalis, Washington, 1979
Midsummer 1979
Blackberry Season, 1980
New Jersey Transit, 2001
Princeton, New Jersey, 2006
PART III
7. Schizophrenogenesis
Chehalis, Washington, 1986
New York City, 2018
8. Brown
9. Januaryseventh
Providence, Rhode Island, 1994
10. Crust Girl
Princeton, New Jersey, 1994
Apple Pie
Blackberry Pie
Mincemeat Pie
PART IV
11. One Time, No Love
Chehalis, Washington, 1980
12. Oakie
New York and New Jersey, 1998
13. Queens
Jackson Heights, New York, 2001
14. Counting Ghosts
Princeton, New Jersey, 2002
15. Cheeseburger Season
Princeton, New Jersey, 2002–2008
About the Author
Also Available from the Feminist Press
About the Feminist Press
Notes
Credits
Acknowledgments
For all of my mothers, each of whom fed me in her own way, and for everyone whose voices have gone unheard.
PROLOGUE
Chehalis, Washington, 1976
I AM FIVE YEARS OLD, walking down Main Street with my family. The usually sleepy downtown is a riot of balloons and streamers; a marching band thunders past. “It’s America’s two hundredth birthday,” says an old lady with short curls as she hands me a red-white-and-blue popsicle. Funny to have a birthday party for a country, I think, yet I am far too young to consider what it means to be patriotic, or American, or Asian in America. I’m ignorant of the raging wars in Southeast Asia, the stalemated war in Korea, or the ways in which Asian migrations are intimately intertwined with American imperialism and the grossly misnamed “Cold War” that slaughtered seven million innocents in the name of anti/communism.
I think only about the icy-sweet chemical flavor on my tongue, the sticky syrup dripping down my fingers. With my clean hand, I hold on to my father as we push our way through the revelers—my father, a fifty-seven-year-old white Anglo-Saxon farmer turned merchant marine, born and raised in Chehalis, who married my mother, the foreign girl, the China Doll, the war bride, the lovely lotus he saved from third world Korea.
Her waist-length black hair betrays her effort to style herself like a Western woman in a halter top, shorts, and platform sandals. Her sun-kissed skin is noticeably brown against the backdrop of an all-white crowd. My mother stands out because she’s the Oriental.
Then, for a moment, she pulls away from the celebration and grimaces slightly from the noise or the glare of the sun. Though I do not yet understand what it means to be an alien, even at the age of five, I can see that she’s on the outside, that maybe she doesn’t feel like she belongs at this party.
In my lifetime I’ve had at least three mothers.
The first was the mother of my childhood. I adored and admired her, my beautiful mama. A charismatic and savvy micropolitician, she fought tirelessly to gain acceptance in my father’s rural hometown, and in so doing made life more livable for her children. Food was her first line of defense against a deep and abiding fear of the Other that permeated the collective unconscious of the white working-class community in which we landed. She possessed the gift of being a social chameleon, at turns a glamorous and alluring party hostess who introduced our rural American neighbors to the exotic flavors of Korea, an enthusiastic cook who fed everyone that set foot in her kitchen, and a rugged and fearless forager who supplied the whole town with wild edibles.
Feeding others was a way of making a living and learning to live among people who saw her as always and only a foreigner. It was at once a gesture of nurturance and an act of resistance. And in the repetition of these acts, she created her own worth.
By the early 1980s my mother had begun to metamorphosize, like a pupa growing its wings. She wore her once long and lustrous hair cropped close. So much easier this way, she would say each time she snipped it away, black snow falling on our white kitchen table. The no-fuss hair matched her homemade power suits, her style an expression of her aspirations to be a career woman, no matter how low the pay or status of her actual job. With what she had made of herself, she sponsored relatives to come to the United States and supported others in Korea. All the while, my father sailed the Pacific for six months out of the year, leaving her to be a half-time single mother. Out of necessity, she had become the pillar of our family.
And then came the break.
What started as an interest in local and national politics quickly careened into “delusions of grandeur” and “paranoia.” Her mind had become so absorbed by the machinations of Ronald Reagan that there was no room left for thinking about food. Her shrinking pantry was perhaps the first sign, the prelude to a mental agitation that would turn our garden fallow and our cupboards empty for years to come.
In 1986, when I was fifteen, she developed what psychiatrists call “florid psychosis.” Florid. Such a beautiful image to describe the terror. A field of flowers from which my second mother bloomed.
This was the mother of my adolescence and early adulthood, the one that loomed so large in my consciousness that she overshadowed the other mother of my childhood and made me cower in the corner, not because she was violent, but because I had somehow, despite never having known a mad person, internalized the stereotype that equated madness with danger.1 Because schizophrenics are seen as some of the most dysfunctional members of society … homeless … inscrutable … murderers …2
I was afraid of my own mother, but even more terrifying was the prospect of losing her, as she became prisoner to the voices that told her to stop doing the things she used to do: Stop talking to strangers. Stop answering the phone. Stop going outside. Stop cooking. Stop eating. Stop moving. Stop living.
And I did in fact lose her to a kind of death—one where she withdrew from the social, a death in which society rendered her worthless and disposable. It was a stereotype that erased her personhood, and especially her motherhood. Because psychotics are not viewed as capable of loving or being loved.
My socially dead mother sat on the couch for years on end with the curtains closed, completely cut off from the outside world. This was the mother whose voices told her to make herself invisible and small, to sit in the dark, eat as little as possible, and let no one from the outside see her. This was the mother of my coming-of-age, the one around which my adult psyche formed, the one I could not let disappear, but could not yet fully embrace.
It seemed as if she heeded the call of the xenophobes to “go back to where you came from,” for her origins were not so easy to locate, and therefore the place she came from was a kind of no place. She was a Korean born in imperial Japan under conditions of forced labor, who returned to a divided, occupied, and wartorn Korea and was later exiled for her transgression of sleeping with my American father. Her retreat inward seemed to take her back to these places of conflict, making her want to stamp out her own existence and vanish into nothingness.
The town to which we migrated was not a refuge but another place of imperial violence, where the rescued must continuously pay a psychic price for their purported salvation. The town in which she became American was the same place in which she became schizophrenic.
At the age of fifteen, when I sought explanations for my mother’s schizophrenia, everything I found said that she had a broken brain, nothing more than the result of a bad gene. Even then, I knew that her madness had been mixed from more than one ingredient, though I couldn’t begin to understand what the others were. Seven years later I would begin to search for the exact recipe, and the search would lead me to research, in the form of a doctoral dissertation.
I began the project of writing my mother back into existence at a time when I only had two mothers, the before-schizophrenia and the after-schizophrenia mothers. Although I knew that I would never get the first one back, I hoped to at least understand the forces that had killed her.
The ten-year-long journey of my research and writing, from the start of my PhD program through the completion of my first book, coincided exactly with the time period in which I cooked for her. I had initially chosen academia as the method of investigating the personal because it felt like a safe and familiar place in which to take risks; cooking, on the other hand, had always been forbidden terrain to me, a distraction from what my mother envisioned as my true calling of becoming a scholar. Ultimately, cooking became an equally important part of my education about the past.
Whenever her hunger was satisfied, she showed me flashes of the first mother that had raised me. And in turn, that fed my hope. I continued to look for her traces in every book I read and every meal I cooked. In trying to understand how I got from mother one to mother two, a third mother was born.
This third mother was the mother of my thirties, who gradually accepted me as her cook and taught me to prepare the dishes my grandmother once cooked for her. And slowly, through eating these foods, she found a way home. Through c
ooking the foods of her childhood and getting a glimpse into her early life, I found one too.
No longer held hostage by visions of her as a madwoman, I was able to zoom the lens out and see her from a wider angle. This was the mother who gave me permission to investigate the very past that she had been hiding from me, and thereby let me imagine her before she was my mother—an adolescent in postwar South Korea under the regimes of Park Chung-hee and rising US military hegemony, who worked at a US naval base, selling drinks, and probably sex, to American military personnel. Although the second mother was the impetus to start the research, it was the third mother who gave me sustenance to finish it.
Through my academic work, I encountered many voices—of scholars and activists, of Korean War survivors, both civilian and combatant, and of sexual laborers in varying positions on the continuum between forced and free. Cooking and sharing meals with my mother amplified these voices as I began to tune in to hers.
Feeding her brought me closer to her schizophrenia and allowed me to break bread with her voices. I came to understand that the voices were not alien to her, but part of her, perhaps voices from a suppressed and violent family history that were searching for a witness. They were probably there all along in the first mother. Mute. Hungry. Lying dormant in her mind and poised to leave traces of a fractured history on the future. Through the act of communion with her voices, I learned to stop being afraid of them and listen to what they had to say.
After the completion of my first book, I hadn’t planned on writing another one about my mother, but her untimely death churned up new memories that needed to make their way onto paper. As Maggie Nelson said about Jane:A Murder, a collection of poetry about her aunt’s murder, “It took the writing of not only that book, but also an unintended sequel [The Red Parts], for me to undo this knot, and hand its strands to the wind.”3 This book, too, is an unintended sequel.
Paradoxically it was my mother’s very absence that gave her a new presence in my life. My grief was so powerful that it unearthed long-forgotten memories that had been buried beneath the weight of her illness and the traumatic history that I spent a decade researching. These were memories of the engaging, competent, and incredibly productive first mother that was perhaps the polar opposite of the stereotypical schizophrenic. Food was always in the foreground of these memories, whether as a source of pleasure, a source of income, or something more basic—a means of survival. By returning to the scene of eating, I discovered not only things that broke her but also things that kept her alive.