Tastes Like War

by Grace M. Cho

  I want to take the fragments of my mother and weave them into a story about her survival. I want to write her back into existence, to let her legacy live on the page, and in so doing, trace my own.

  PART I

  For those of us

  who were imprinted with fear

  like a faint line in the center of our foreheads

  learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk

  for by this weapon

  this illusion of some safety to be found

  the heavy-footed hoped to silence us

  For all of us

  this instant and this triumph

  We were never meant to survive.

  And when the sun rises we are afraid

  it might not remain

  when the sun sets we are afraid

  it might not rise in the morning

  when our stomachs are full we are afraid

  of indigestion

  when our stomachs are empty we are afraid

  we may never eat again

  when we are loved we are afraid

  love will vanish

  when we are alone we are afraid

  love will never return

  and when we speak we are afraid

  our words will not be heard

  nor welcomed

  but when we are silent

  we are still afraid

  So it is better to speak

  remembering

  we were never meant to survive.

  —AUDRE LORDE, “A Litany for Survival”*

  * “A Litany for Survival.” Copyright © 1978 by Audre Lorde, from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde by Audre Lorde. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  1. TASTES LIKE WAR

  Princeton, New Jersey, 2008

  I WALKED UP THE STAIRS for the last time into the one-room studio my mother never left except when it was “absolutely necessary.”

  I had never before entered her apartment without her there, and rarely had I seen it with the curtains drawn. Sunlight streamed in through the glass doors of the balcony, illuminating everything in the room. She was really gone.

  The cream-colored couch was gray and worn in the center of the seat cushions, where her skin had touched the fabric.

  The stains on the couch, a visible imprint of her sudden absence. The balcony, a bitter reminder of her inability to step outside and take a breath of fresh air.

  The apartment had been a labor of love and filial duty. In 2001 my older brother and his wife had turned the office above their garage into a granny flat so that my mother could have a permanent home.

  Her life had consisted of a series of displacements, the beginning disrupted by colonization and war, the end by schizophrenia and near homelessness. Though she never went a day without housing, her situation was precarious, moving from one temporary place to another, living with my brother or me when she didn’t have a place of her own.

  They had planned out the renovation with painstaking detail. The building codes did not allow for a full bathroom, so they put in a shower with a small wooden bench so that she could still sit down. Nor did the codes allow for a kitchen, but they installed a stainless-steel sink, marble counters, a bar fridge, and counter-top appliances that transformed the nonkitchen into a functional cooking space.

  They furnished and decorated the apartment in a dozen shades of off-white—the couch, the walls, the rug, the bedding, and the heavy floor-to-ceiling curtains that opened onto the picturesque balcony, overlooking an acre of lawn surrounded by woods. Her favorite colors had always been neutral earth tones like beige, ivory, taupe—colors that reminded me of the creamy mushroom casseroles I had seen on the dinner tables of the distant American cousins on my father’s side. To my mother, these colors were “high class,” a status she’d always aspired to but could never achieve.

  She was in her eighth year as a shut-in when she moved there. If it was a place she was literally never going to leave, at least she should love it.

  I don’t know if she actually loved it, though she did once say it was “okay.” Regardless, it must have been a step up from my New York City apartment’s guest room, where she lived for seven months during the renovation. At my place, there was no idyllic scenery or classy color palette. Instead it was all bright, mismatched colors with hand-me-down furniture and a view of traffic congestion on the Brooklyn—Queens Expressway.

  My sister-in-law had really talked up the balcony, telling me on several occasions that what the apartment lacked in space it would make up for in charm.

  “We’re going to put a bird feeder out there and a nice little table and chairs,” she said, tucking a strand of dirty blond hair behind her ear. Her Arkansan drawl was still prominent after ten years in the Northeast.

  “She won’t go outside,” I said.

  “You don’t know that. At least she can watch the kids play in the backyard.”

  Her certainty made me doubt my pessimism. Maybe. Maybe, I thought, she’ll look out the window if someone else opens the curtains.

  My mother opened the sliding glass door only once, though she didn’t actually set foot outside. Shortly after moving into the apartment, she put a potted flower that my then eight-year-old niece had picked out for her as a housewarming gift onto the balcony. And she left it there the whole winter, to die.

  “That was a present from her granddaughter! Why would she do something like that?” My sister-in-law was annoyed. She took it as an act of disrespect or carelessness, or at the very least, another sign of her ever-deteriorating mental health.

  “It’s hard to know what she’s thinking,” I said. But I was curious about my mother’s motivations, so the next time I saw her, I asked about the flowers.

  “Ma, how come you kept those flowers outside? Didn’t you like them?”

  She looked irritated and waved her hand at me, as if to shoo away my questions. But after a long pause, she answered.

  “Because of the name. I hate the name.”

  “Why? What’s the name?”

  “Cyclamen. It sounds like cycle.” She contorted her face as if she were disgusted, but when she resumed talking it sounded like she was about to cry. “I am tired of the same thing over and over. I wish things would change.”

  Vicious cycle. Cycle of violence. My mind free-associated into my research and my imagined family history.

  My memory flashed to an incident that had happened a few months earlier when we’d been watching TV together after dinner. A soap commercial came on, showing a woman lathering up in the shower, the camera’s gaze fixed on her hands and bare shoulders. My mother turned her face away from the TV and shaded her eyes with her hand. There was a vacant, disconnected look in her eyes and her affect had gone flat. Even the suggestion of a naked body was too disturbing for her to watch.

  I later told my friend, a doctoral student in psychology, about what had happened. “A soap commercial?” she said. “Now that is some trauma.”

  I looked out at the balcony and remembered the cyclamen, the cycle.

  Maybe the cycle referred to the relentless repetition of her lonely days, economized into the fewest possible movements:

  Get out of bed at 6:00 a.m. and eat a breakfast of plain toast, apple juice, and instant coffee while standing at the sink. Take medication. Go to the bathroom, flush toilet, wash hands and face, brush teeth. Sit down on the couch and watch the daylight begin to filter through the cracks in the curtains. Open the blinds in the kitchen only to send a signal to my sister-in-law that she needed something. Otherwise, keep them closed. Watch the hands on the clock slowly revolve until twelve noon. Get up and eat lunch: ramen or a peanut butter sandwich if there’s nothing left of whatever meals my sister-in-law or I have put in the fridge. Resume sitting on the couch and watch more time go by. Get up at 5:00 p.m. and eat the same thing for dinner. Wash dishes. Sit some more until the sun goes down. Do the bathroom routine again. Lie down in bed and stay still until falling asleep sometime around mid
night.

  Repeat.

  Once a week she’d take a shower. The only other things that disrupted this monotony were visits from one of her children or grandchildren. On days without visitors, her voices were her only company.

  Despite how devastated I felt by her death, I told myself that at least she would never have to live another day like that.

  When my mother moved into the apartment in December 2001, she’d hardly been eating. Her diminishing appetite had ebbed and flowed for years, hitting a low earlier that fall, when she was living with me in Queens.

  She spent most of her time at my place sitting on the futon in her room, keeping the TV on for a few hours each morning, sometimes just as background noise.

  On the morning of September 11, I popped my head in to say goodbye to her before I left for LaGuardia Community College, where it was my second day working as a writing fellow. She was hanging her head down, staring at the floor as she listened to the local news. The volume was low, and I didn’t notice what was flashing across the screen. The first plane had already struck, yet my mother said nothing about it as I walked out the door.

  Later that day, I would return home in hysterics, having run miles along Roosevelt Avenue after the subways shut down and the phone circuits jammed, demanding to know why she didn’t warn me, why she didn’t try to call my brother, who worked across the street from the World Trade Center.

  She said simply that she had failed. That she let me go to work because she thought she could stop it. And not to worry about my brother because she wouldn’t allow anything to happen to him.

  “Mom, this has nothing to do with you! This is not in your control.”

  She then put me in my place.

  “Why so much crying? You think you are so special? You are not the only one in the world who go through something like this.”

  Me and my first world privilege, never having known such destruction.

  I wondered about the family members she had lost in the war and whether she had somehow felt responsible for their demise. I wondered what it was doing to her already-traumatized mind to watch the images of New York as a war zone, replaying over and over, in the aftermath of the event.

  A few weeks later she started complaining about her stomach. For two days she vomited bile into a metal bowl, and then I made an executive decision.

  “Mom, we have to get you to the hospital.”

  “I am not going anywhere,” she said.

  “But you’re sick! Or you’ll get sick if you don’t start eating. Look, it might be something simple to treat, like an ulcer.”

  “An ulcer? If you are so worried about my getting ulcer, why would you feed me spicy food? Huh?” She looked me dead in the eye, spitting venom. It was the first time since my teenage years that I felt afraid of her.

  There was no way to force her to go anywhere if she didn’t want to, and the only way I could get her to eat was to tell her I was about to throw something away and then leave it outside her door. It must have appealed to the scavenger in her, the one that emerged during those months that she lived with me.

  At the end of the day, the food would always be gone.

  My brother and his wife seemed to think that things would improve once my mother had a place of her own. I suppose it was a reasonable assumption.

  During the first few months, she still didn’t want to eat. They tried some of the same tricks I’d resorted to when she was at my place in Queens, like leaving food for her in the hopes she’d eat it, knowing how much she hated for things to go to waste.

  They also stocked her pint-size kitchen with large quantities of packaged foods that required no more preparation than adding water or opening a can. According to my sister-in-law, my mother was eating the ramen and fruit cocktail, but had barely touched the powdered milk. Although I felt some relief knowing that she wasn’t starving, I also felt ashamed that her diet was so bereft of nutrition.

  “Mom, are you getting enough to eat?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “What about protein?”

  She nodded again, then snorted. “They got me powdered milk.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said, feigning surprise.

  She became quiet as if she had already lost her train of thought and was deep in some hallucinatory reverie.

  “I can’t stand the taste of it,” she said. “Tastes like war.”

  It was only the second time she ever brought up the war without my prompting. Her words jolted me into a reverie of my own, as fragments of my research tumbled around in my head. Images of babies sitting on dirt roads next to the bodies of their dead mothers and napalmed women bandaged like mummies. The words of a woman who survived the Nogeun-ri massacre, who lost her child when American planes dropped bombs from above: That day I saw the two faces of America.1 The words of a war bride who remembered American food aid: I had heard of the “Yankees” and how they were here to save us…. We were all hoping for rice or barley, and we drooled at the thought of so much food … but it was an endless supply of powdered milk that caused all who drank it to suffer for days with diarrhea.2

  In February 2002 my mother finally went to the hospital after my brother and sister-in-law called an ambulance and had her admitted to a psychiatric hospital on the grounds that she was trying to starve herself to death.

  After the hospitalization, she started meds again, started to eat again, but still not much. Not everything. Her resistance still took the form of rejecting food, but the foods she couldn’t or wouldn’t eat were very specific, like the powdered milk.

  After Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected as California’s governor, she asked me to stop buying her Arnold bread.

  “Mom, you know it has nothing to do with him, right? The name is just a coincidence,” I said.

  She smiled and let out a little laugh, as if she knew how crazy it sounded.

  She always seemed to put a great deal of thought into her choices to eat or not eat something. In time, I recognized these choices as an expression of agency, tiny acts of rebellion against enormous structures of power.

  It is not simply the “what” of what one eats that matters…. Most important, it is the many “whys” of eating—the differing imperatives of hunger, necessity, pleasure, nostalgia, and protest—that most determine its meaning.3

  My mother never wanted me to cook for her, but over the years, she reluctantly taught me to make Korean food. Maybe she got tired of eating instant ramen and canned fruit cocktail. She wanted, instead, to eat a steaming bowl of fluffy white rice with saengtae jjigae: an old-fashioned stew of pollack and radishes laden with garlic and red pepper flakes, spicy and bubbling hot. The first spoonful of it made her sigh and say, “I haven’t tasted this in forty years.”

  By her second year living in the apartment, it had become the norm for her to give me a grocery list of Korean products and tell me what meal I should cook on the next visit.

  The last time I saw her, she asked me to get fish pancakes from the Korean market and some Pepcid because her stomach had been bothering her. She’d also recently had diarrhea. The grocery list was one of several things that nagged at me for months after my brother found her lifeless on the floor.

  The official cause of death was “myocardial infarction.”

  I tried to imagine the way my sister-in-law described my mother’s body. “She was curled up on the rug with her head resting on her hands, like she was asleep. She looked like she was at peace.” I had seen my father have a heart attack, and I knew it didn’t look like a peaceful slumber.

  A few weeks before my mother’s death, during one of my visits, she got up off the couch and walked over to the small black mother-of-pearl vase on top of her TV cabinet.

  “This is where I keep my pearl earrings. In case something happen to me.”

  She gently lifted a wad of paper towels out of the vase, unwrapped them, and placed a pair of pearl studs into her cupped hands. She gestured them toward me.

  “For you. D
on’t forget.”

  Part of me wondered if she was planning another suicide attempt, but just as quickly as the thought arose, I dismissed it. She was so different now. Fourteen years had passed, and she was an entirely different person from the suicidal mother of my early twenties. Plus, she seemed upbeat when she said it, so I filed the comment away as part of the generalized catastrophic thinking and emergency readiness that had long been a part of her mindset.

  After she died, I remembered the earrings and the Pepcid, and debated whether it was more likely that she had overdosed or had been hiding a serious illness. And then there was my brother’s speculation: “Who knows what all those drugs were doing to her?”

  The pearl earrings were still there, inside the layers of Bounty, inside the vase. I put the little bundle in my backpack and a gut-wrenching feeling gripped me: she had known she was going to die.

  I took one last look around the room and let it sink in. This was the place of my mother’s mysterious death, the final scene of her lonely, tedious life, but it was also the place of her redemption. This was where she had spent the best years of her life after the schizophrenia had set in, where she learned to enjoy food again and ask for what she wanted. Where we shared the meals that she hadn’t eaten since her youth.

  As she talked about the things she ate or wished to eat or had been deprived of eating when she was young, she also shared minute details about her past, a trail of crumbs that would lead me to my family history.

  2. AMERICAN DREAMS

  Korea, 1961