by Grace M. Cho
There was a young boy in her neighborhood whom she watched with particular tenderness. He was a peddler of redbean ice, about eight or nine years old. At the height of summer, his covered basket was no match for the sun, and his ices turned to slush at a rate much faster than he could sell them. On those sweltering days, the boy crumpled up on the side of the road and cried in frustration as drops of red-bean syrup formed little rivers in the dust. Whenever my mother had enough change to spare, she would buy an ice or two to save him from the humiliation of failure.
These were some of the fragments of experience that my mother shared with me, but she never spoke about her work. I’ve always wondered if she moved to Busan already knowing what she would do there, or if she went with another purpose, only to be lured into a different kind of occupation. Maybe she had seen the US naval base where local girls walked hand in hand with American soldiers, who showered them with gifts of sweets and perfume, and marveled at their comfort. It must have seemed as if they wanted for nothing. Did she know from the beginning that she was going to be one of them?
My surviving imo, sixteen years my mother’s senior, was like another mother to her. Indeed, my imo’s children were only a few years younger than my mother. So when my aunt’s husband died and her sons were grown, she could spend more time looking after my mother. But as much as she fretted over her baby sister, she could not protect her from everything.
My mother dreamed of getting an education, but she was a girl. Girls helped pay for the educations of their brothers instead of going to school themselves. Jinho was preparing to go to university while my mother was working in Busan.
In the 1960s, South Korea was in the throes of massive transformation: postwar reconstruction, urbanization, and rapid industrialization. Rural people moved to the cities in search of work in the burgeoning factories. In 1963, when Park Chung-hee seized power, he implemented a series of economic plans that would put industry first and social welfare last. He would tell the people that their job was to rebuild the nation by working more and earning less. Misery would become the measure of good citizenship.
Bars and nightclubs were established around American military bases so that the soldiers could feel comforted by a feminine touch. Aspiring performers sang and danced. Pretty girls sold drinks on commission and chatted with men at the bars. Koreans went to the bases in droves, if only to beg for scraps or search for leftovers in the garbage. For some women, it was a small leap from eating out of the trash to exchanging services for food. Exchanging sex for dinner. Selling food on the black market for money with which to buy more food. Selling sex in nightclubs to pay for things more expensive than food, debt mounting with each passing day. These were the kinds of things people did to survive.
Because the Korean War was never resolved, American bases and the service industry catering to them flourished, and public sentiment toward the American presence in Korea remained ambivalent. The emerging South Korean nation depended on the United States for both national and economic security, and the bases provided much of the currency that the average person needed to get by. Koreans were grateful for the opportunities to work, but resentments still ran high because Americans enjoyed privileges that most Koreans had never imagined—spacious accommodations, an endless supply of food, and the guaranteed company of women.
There were two places of employment designated for young women who weren’t from elite families: the factory or the army base. I imagine that my mother, being a person of great ambition, chose the latter. She may have been attracted to the American base for its wealth of exotic foods, for its day-to-day life filled with small luxuries and opportunities to sometimes sing on stage. Most of the jobs in the camptowns offered shorter hours and greater earning potential than did those in the factory. More importantly, it promised the glamour of America and the possibility of one day moving there by building a life with an American soldier. The chances of that actually happening were slim, but my mother, and a million other women like her, made a wager.
I wonder if Imo tried to convince my mother that such a place would lead to her certain ruin. Or maybe my mother knew this already, and it was the prospect of ruin itself that drew her in. Maybe there was nothing about her life before the camptown that she wanted to keep pristine, and in a reckless moment, she plunged headfirst into the uncharted waters of America town. After all, what did she have to lose?
The women who flocked to the American bases could not have foreseen the consequences. The barmaids, the club hostesses, the singers, the dancers, the prostitutes, the waitresses, the shopkeepers who supplied convenience items to the soldiers, the beauticians who coiffed the entertainers, the black-market peddlers who traded in PX goods, the casual passersby who paid attention to catcalls—all of these women were branded “Western princesses” and “Yankee whores.” It was bad enough that they casually mingled with men who were unacceptable to their families, and that they did so in seedy settings, but what made it worse was that these men were Americans—the very Americans to whom the Koreans were indebted and subordinated. It was an affront to the nation. Although South Korea profited greatly from US military presence, to the point that the government aggressively promoted the sex industry around the bases as a form of “foreign diplomacy,” the women workers were gradually stripped of their rights. Korean society reviled these women so much that life in “normal” society became impossible. Fathers legally disowned the very same daughters whose labor paid off their families’ debts. Some women even died at the hands of their abusers—men who were never brought to justice.
The allure of America obscured the hazards of the work—that drunken soldiers with extraterritorial protections could be lethally violent. That club owners sent “slicky boys” after girls who didn’t play by the rules. That their children would become stateless subjects. That they would soon be sinking in quicksand and there would be only two ways out—death, or marriage to an American.
Chehalis, Washington, 1987
IT’S THE SPRING of my sophomore year of high school, and I am in history class. A boy named John is sitting behind me, whispering my name. I try to ignore him because his comments are often vaguely sexual, drawing attention to my developing body, but at the same time he is one of the smart kids in my school and sometimes my ally against the tide of ignorance that I face daily. This time he says something that catches me off guard.
“Hey, Grace? Was your mom a war bride?” He says this in a slightly mocking tone. I don’t respond. He asks again, “Was your mom a war bride?”
I don’t understand the question and mull over in my head how my mother could be a war bride when the Korean War was in the 1950s but my parents married in 1971.
“I heard that she was,” he says.
I want to put the question to rest, so I say, “My mom’s from Korea, not Vietnam.”
I do not yet realize that Korea is still at war.
Neither of my parents ever talked about how or when they met, but from the keepsakes my father left behind after he died, I know that he was stationed in Vietnam in 1968. By 1970 my mother was pregnant with me, and my parents were planning to get married.
According to my aunt, an insatiable hunger consumed my mother throughout her pregnancy. There were a lot of things she was hungry for, but some of her hungers were so big and beyond her reach that it was hard to translate them into words, so she asked for the nameable things she knew she could get. She would say to my aunt, “Unni-ya, cook for me please.” Of all the things my mother could have eaten, she singled out one dish in particular. “Unni-ya, please make me some nokdu-juk.” She ordered the mung-bean porridge almost every day, and if my aunt suggested she eat something else, my mother insisted, “But nokdu-juk is what baby wants to eat.” Even when my mother wasn’t pregnant, she had a habit of seeking out her craving and overindulging in that one thing.
She was a single mother at the time, raising my then six-year-old brother against the odds. In those days, and still today, sex outsi
de of marriage was such a serious transgression of Korean cultural norms for women that the men in their families would sometimes forge adoption papers to send away children born to single mothers. Women who carried the physical evidence of their sexual deviance—in the form of children and pregnancies—were pushed to the margins of society. My mother was no exception. The only women Koreans despised more than single mothers were the women who “mixed flesh with foreigners,” because they were whores, and traitors too.
Despite the constant reminders that she was condemning her child to a future of despair, my mother would not let go of my brother. Instead, she became determined to make a home with him in America, and my father was about to make that dream come true. Although her impending marriage to my father may have been a relief to my aunt and grandmother, it did not earn my mother any modicum of respect from other Koreans.
At fifty-one years old, he was a father figure whose promises of a life far away, where she could start over, offered my mother some solace. His very presence was a reminder of brighter days to come, but for most of their early relationship, he lived in the States while she waited in Korea. My father had important matters to attend to back home—namely, divorcing his first wife so that he could marry my mother.
My mother became lonely while she waited for him. I wonder if she hadn’t also started to fear that he was like so many other American soldiers who disappeared and left a trail of children in their wake. Without a marriage certificate, there was nothing obligating my father’s return. Alongside her beautiful dream of a new American life was the shadow of a night-mare—the possibility of another mixed race child that she would either have to give away or bring into a hopeless, stateless future.
To keep her spirits up, she sometimes went to the beauty salon, but her preference for Western hairstyles and clothing marked her as a Yankee’s girlfriend. One day after having her hair set in a flip, she was walking home, her bouncing hair and clicking heels adding a special jauntiness to her stride. A man called after her, “Hey! Hey! Miss Korea! Where are you going?” He persisted with his call and followed her down the street: “Hey, Miss Korea! Where do you think you’re going?”
The story, as my mother told it to me, ended there, but in my mind this episode led to another. Maybe he spat in her hair, or grabbed her arm and pushed her to the ground. Maybe he raped her as a symbolic reclamation of Korean territory from the Americans. Maybe this rape caused the pregnancy right before me, the one that my mother aborted, for which my father beat her until her eardrums broke. My imaginings were fueled by the violent incidents I had visualized through my research on Korean women who were sexual companions of US military personnel. Equally, they were fueled by childhood memories of the conflict between my parents. Go ahead, break my eardrum again, you no-good so-and-so!
During her pregnancy with me, she called on my aunt to visit frequently. Whenever Imo came, she massaged my mother’s feet, brushed her hair, and rubbed ointment on her belly. Over a game of cards one day, my mother told Imo a secret that would have shocked anyone who might have been eavesdropping: “I hope this baby is a girl.”
She had already given birth to a boy, and that fact gave her permission to wish that the second child be a girl. Besides, this baby was going to grow up American, and my mother had gotten the notion that women could do great things in America.
As I grew inside her, so did her loneliness. Whenever it was time for my aunt to leave, my mother became desperate. She would hide Imo’s shoes and plead, “Please stay a little longer, Unni. You don’t have to leave right now.” Their separations became more and more fraught, and the following year, when my parents were married and my mother was about to board a plane to America with my brother and me, it was my aunt who begged my mother not to go.
The scene would repeat each summer, climaxing with our final departure in 1976, my last and most enduring childhood memory of Korea.
A boarding gate at Gimhae International Airport, the air thick with cigarette smoke and steamy August haze. Imo on her knees, clinging to my mother’s arm and wailing the word for “little sister.” “Dong-saeng-aaah! Dong-saeng-aaah! Dong-saeng-aaah-aaah … Dong-saeng-aaah-aaah …” Imo in her hanbok, getting dragged across the floor. My mother, mortified and breaking free. Imo grabbing handfuls of her short permed hair. Imo with her voice trembling, “Gaji mara, Dong-saeng-ah. Gaji mara.” Don’t go.
3. THE FRIENDLY CITY
Chehalis, Washington, 1977 Population: 5,727 Korean population: 3
“CHINESE, JAPANESE.” A child tugs his eyelids upward, then downward, to slant. “Dirty knees, look at these.” He grabs at his nipples with his thumb and forefinger, pulling out the fabric on his chest to simulate a woman’s breasts.
At first I am stunned to silence, then find a retort. “I’m not Chinese or Japanese.”
The scene repeats every few days at recess, as I play alone on the always-damp log toys of my elementary school playground. It’s usually a boy or group of boys that taunts me. Each time, my reply is a little quicker. “I’m not Chinese or Japanese.” Sometimes I add, “I’m Korean.”
Over time my response evolves. “I’m half Korean.” I want to distance myself from the words that make slanted eyes and women’s breasts seem shameful, but it’s too late. The shame is already inside of me.
Chinese, Japanese …
“I’m half American,” I say. “My father is American.” With enough time I learn to make my mother disappear.
Drive along the I-5 corridor from Seattle to Portland, and where dense evergreens start to give way to sprawling pastures, you will see a double-sided billboard off the highway with a picture of Uncle Sam. Passersby in both directions can read his words: Bangladesh has clean air, but would you want to live there? and AIDS: the wonder disease that turns fruits into vegetables.1 The billboard belongs to the children of Alfred Hamilton, a farmer who erected it in the early 1960s in defiance of Ladybird Johnson’s Highway Beautification Act, which outlawed advertising on interstate highways. The purpose of the sign was to spread his “archconservative views in big block letters.”2 No Mexican Olympics team? All the runners and swimmers are here!
Just as you begin to digest Uncle Sam’s serving of right-wing patriotism, you will see Exit 76: 13th St, Chehalis, Washington—my father’s hometown, the place where I grew up. In the summer of 1972, when I was one-and-a-half and my brother was eight, we immigrated with our mother from Busan to Chehalis to join my father.
We were the first Asians to settle there, the first immigrants in decades.
Neither of my parents ever talked about why we moved to the United States, yet growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I internalized a story about it nonetheless: it was better than Korea. Despite not knowing the circumstances of our immigration, somehow I knew we were supposed to be Grateful.
My father’s roots in Chehalis ran deep, going back to the 1800s. His grandparents had been homesteaders who traveled westward from Tennessee and Nova Scotia to live off the bounty of the Pacific Northwest, on land stolen from the Indigenous people that Chehalis was named after. While people like my paternal great-grandparents were glorified in American history as brave pioneers who helped found the Pacific Northwest, the Chehalis were not even acknowledged as a people—they were disembodied, reduced to a foreign language. An Indian word meaning “shifting and shining sands,” according to the town’s official website.
The stories of people like my mother were written out of that history too. Her bravery went unacknowledged, and unlike my father’s grandparents, she traveled alone. In the 1970s Korean women who traveled without the company of a Korean man wore the stamp of impropriety, and Korean women who traveled to America with or for an American man became so sullied that they were no longer considered Korean. Like all Korean women who ran off with their American husbands, my mother was treated as a casualty. Once they crossed over to America, these women could never really return.
She may have had her doubts about my father and the new
world she was about to inhabit, but she also must have known that there was nothing left for her in Korea, no possible way of carving out a livable future. So she got on that airplane bound for America to start fresh in a place where she had heard that mixed race relationships and children were accepted. But in 1972, the United States had not yet undergone what the news called the “browning of America.” It had only been a few years since the 1965 Immigration Act, which lifted restrictions against nonwhite immigrants, and we arrived ahead of the big waves of Koreans that would come a few years later to cities like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Seattle. Not to my father’s economically depressed town of five thousand.
Most people in Chehalis had never come face-to-face with a real live immigrant until my mother moved to town. If they had looked beyond the surface, they might have seen that she was not one of those immigrants who clung to their foreign ways, spread them like a pestilence, and took everything from the rightful Americans. Those immigrants didn’t actually exist in our town; they were a mere abstraction, a composite of right-wing media images: The Yellow Peril. The Alien Invasion. The fabric of American society come unraveled at the hands of foreigners.
No, my mother wanted to be American. She tried to be American, conforming to every new custom she learned. She took nothing except the jobs that other people didn’t want, working subminimum wage or in the middle of the night. Even after the immigrant haters came face-to-face with her, they still couldn’t see her, and so she became their flesh-and-bones straw woman.