Tastes Like War: A Memoir

“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.”

Cho introduces the idea of her mother’s schizophrenia and the fragmentation of her personality according to the voices she hears when she states that she has had three mothers in the same woman. The idea of Koonja as a micropolitician indicates how every act of her life, no matter how mundane, is a negotiation against a racist hostile force that would deprive her.

“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.”

Cho resists the Western medical establishment’s idea that schizophrenia is a biochemical phenomenon by locating the onset of her mother’s disease in a specific American town and the social requirements of integration. The idea of continuously paying a psychic price for one’s alleged salvation alerts the reader to the harmfulness of the colonial project, which does not cease when the colonized subject has moved to the colonizer’s country.

“By returning to the scene of eating, I discovered not only things that broke her but also things that kept her alive. 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.”

Cho traces the intimate relationship between cooking, eating, and survival. This is an important counterimage to the traumatic memories that eating foods from her mother’s heritage may bring up. Cho wants to emphasize that this is a story of strength as well as one of being unable to cope. The idea of eating to survive ties in with Cho’s wish to write her mother back into existence and thus make her a concrete character on the page. She also traces a connection between her mother’s legacy and her own story, signaling the personal significance of her project.

“‘They got me powdered milk.’ […] 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.’”

The idea that powdered milk tastes like war does not make sense until Cho and the reader learn that American soldiers gave Korean civilians powdered milk during times of hunger, and as a result, caused them to suffer diarrhea. Thus, while Cho’s brother and sister-in-law regard powdered milk as a nutritious, easily digestible substance for a starving woman, for Koonja it has unsavory traumatic associations. Here, Cho emphasizes that not all dependents can be nourished alike and that the quality and emotional substance of food matters.

“She hates to talk about the past, but for the benefit of my education, she’s willing to do just about anything.”

Cho’s request to learn about her mother’s side of the family for a family-tree project is painful for Koonja. However, her wish that Cho should excel academically supersedes her wish for self-preservation. The repression of past pain in order to serve the present and the next generation is a recurring motif in Koonja’s life.

“She couldn’t admit that she pitied the dog traders, because they were regarded as the dregs of society, and no respectable person could excuse their filthiness and dishonesty of their work. One of her own dogs even fell victim to them and was turned into meat. As much as she hated them […] she could not help but wonder what circumstances led them to that fate. In some small way, she felt for them too.”

This passage conveys the depth of Koonja’s compassion. Having been motivated by desperation herself, Koonja intuits that desperate circumstances must force some dog traders to source meat unethically. Even as Koonja internalizes the prejudice against them, she exhibits empathy by acknowledging that deep suffering can motivate people to break social taboo.

“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.”

This passage conveys Koonja’s conscious attempts to integrate. However, she is aware that being an immigrant and of a different race to the white hegemony, she may only be able to access second-class living, performing underpaid, undesirable work. This is the metaphorical equivalent of eating scraps instead of a proper meal that will nourish her. The invisibility that Cho refers to indicates the depersonalized manner in which white people treat her mother. The idea of a “flesh-and-bones straw woman” is a paradoxical construct and refers to the white Chehalis residents’ denial of her mother’s humanity, even as they exploited and blamed her.

“And so I became an outsider, not only to the place where I grew up but also to the language of my birth country. I would always be excluded from the we of ‘woori mal’—our language, as Koreans call Korean.”

Cho’s experiences of childhood exclusion in Chehalis, and from the Korean community she because of her imperfect grasp of the language, give her the sense that she does not belong anywhere. At this point in the memoir, Cho feels that her multicultural background diminishes her sense of belonging rather than enhancing it.

“Cooking was the business of housewives and the working class—two categories that had largely determined my mother’s status in life. The funny thing is that she must have been cooking when this incident erupted because a knife suddenly appears in my memory.”

Koonja objects to Cho’s wish to become a chef because for her, cooking is associated with female subjugation and the working-class status that have degraded her and limited her opportunities. However, Cho’s memory of a kitchen knife in this conversation illustrates the centrality of cooking to her experiences of the world and by extension, to her education.

“My mother learned early on that the role of girls was to serve men and make sacrifices for their families. And she did serve and sacrifice, but she also wanted something more. And if this something more was not going to be hers, she wanted to make sure it would be mine […] my education could be her second chance.”

Cho’s mother transfers her own drive for an education and academic success onto Cho. Koonja thus fulfils her obligations to her parents and the Korean society that raised her while she takes advantage of the circumstances of more egalitarian America to ensure that Cho has the opportunities that were denied to her.

“This was perhaps the first time that she flipped the script; this was her territory, and she was now the host rather than the stranger, showing her guests how to properly welcome newcomers. My mother’s magnanimity, her delicious food, her seductive charm, were all self-devised political tools to get what she needed, and maybe these tools had always been part of her arsenal, going back to her days as a club hostess in Korea.”

As Cho’s mother throws a lavish feast for Cho’s teachers, she plays the role of host better than the people of her host country. However, the fact that these skills stem from her days as a hostess in Korea imbue them with the aura of survival mechanisms. There is thus a steely, essential purpose behind her elaborate sensory display.

“She dug up a jar, set aside a ration of kimchi and boiled a pot of rice, eating just enough to quell her hunger but not so much as to squander the kimchi. At the age of nine, my mother carried on like this week after week while she waited for her family to return. That kimchi kept me alive for almost three seasons. I might not have survive [sic] without it.”

This passage establishes the connection between kimchi and survival against the odds. The fact that the kimchi is buried in the ground by a grandmother frames it as a precious resource, and Cho’s mother must make an effort to access it. Much like a mother’s body, the jar of kimchi has life-giving properties as it nurtures Cho’s mother as a young girl who is prematurely separated from her family.

“She loved hamburgers and hot dogs, and any kind of meat, foods that had colonized the collective taste buds of South Korea during the American occupation and war. Despite liking these foods, she needed something more. For a Korean person, rural America was a food desert.”

Cho’s mothers taste buds are as complex and informed by as many places as she is. The idea of the rural US as a “food desert” despite its reputation for agriculture indicates the paradoxical fact that lack can be present in abundance. This acts as a metaphor for the lack of warm welcome she receives in the land that allegedly welcomes everyone.

“After years of struggling to get by in Chehalis, of trying to follow the rules and play the good wife, my mother’s spirit needed something more. Maybe she could no longer resist the little voices in her head that told her to cross over to the other side—to that uncivilized and uninhabited place—to see what she might find.”

Cho characterizes her mother’s foray into foraging the wilder places outside Chehalis as a form of rebellion from being the good wife and mother. Even prior to her diagnosis of schizophrenia, “little voices in her head” guide her to seek out a more authentic way of existence that acknowledges her repressed Korean origins.

“That summer changed my mother. She no longer depended on her femininity to get attention or make a profit. Working in the woods meant that she had to shed her frilly dresses and heels, and start dressing like a lumberjack. As much as she had once represented my ideal of feminine beauty, she also came to embody masculine strength. By this point, she had replaced my father as the masculine parental figure.”

The summer that Koonja begins foraging in earnest causes Cho to shift her perceptions of the former’s gender expression. The feminine woman who dresses elaborately to please men now dons the guise of the white, working-class lumberjack. She thus reclaims the masculinity that her husband aspires to, and so in Cho’s mind, her mother outplays her father at his own game.

“By 1986 I had a much more concrete idea of what exactly I wanted to run away from. It wasn’t just my parents, but the whole town. The narrow-minded people who hated everything that I loved, everything that I was. The people whose mission was to spread their hate. At fifteen, I didn’t yet know how well organized they were, or that the same people were at the epicenter of my mother’s torture.”

At 15, Cho wants to run away from her small town and its values because she senses that they threaten all components of her multiethnic identity. However, the adult Cho reflects that her younger self does not yet know the extent of the harm and how it relates to the issue of her mother’s mental health.

“Something about the social world gets under the skin, but that something cannot be reduced to any one thing. It is the horror of Green Hill, but it is also the strident anti-immigrant rhetoric that says This is an invasion, and it is NOT a ‘human right,’ the damaging Cold War that my mother faced on both sides of the Pacific. It is my father believing that she deserved it. It is the loss of my halmeoni, my mother’s first home.”

Cho quotes the modern psychological notion of the social world’s role in schizophrenia. However, the factors in the social world that contribute to her mother’s illness are as numerous as the voices in her head that symptomize it. The idea of a multiplicity of external factors being responsible for schizophrenia stands in direct contrast to the Western medical establishment’s view of the disease as having a singular biological cause. Cho’s definition puts responsibility for the illness at least partially on society rather than the individual exclusively.

“He also didn’t understand that racial domination doesn’t just take the form of the white terrorist burning a cross in your front yard. It can also look like the man you live with, the man you love. The man who defends your birth country, the place where he found his wife.”

This passage illustrates how Cho’s white father is racist without consciously trying to be. He recognizes racism only in its most extreme forms—hence the image of the burning cross associated with the Ku Klux Klan. However, Cho recognizes the racial biases that motivate her father’s behavior toward her mother, and his defense of Korea and his romance with Koonja do not negate his racist attitudes and actions.

“The longer I was at Brown and the more distance I had from my childhood, the more I put my parents under a microscope. I saw the way that the power dynamics in my family mirrored a larger dynamic of social inequality, and my father became the main object of my criticism. The very thing he had worked so hard for—my first-class education—was also the thing that created a gulf between us so wide and deep that we could never again stand on common ground.”

This passage illustrates the irony of Cho’s father paying for an education that will motivate their estrangement. Rather than causing her to be grateful, the education will make her see him as an oppressor who plays out global injustice on a domestic level. Cho’s understanding of history makes her see her father as an agent of imperialism, as she seeks to distance herself from him.

“I tried to visualize the transaction—the exchange of sex for money, my mother in the back room of a nightclub—and imagined her feeling ashamed and afraid, but finding some inner strength to cope. When it happened, maybe she pretended to be a Hollywood actress in the role of an impassioned lover, or perhaps she found ways to dissociate by staring at some spot on the wall the way she did whenever she avoided my questions about the kind of work she did in Korea. Maybe her voices had been there all along, talking her through it until it was over.”

Although Cho is shocked by the news that her mother was a sex worker in Korea, she immediately tries to empathize and figure out how Koonja coped. She tests out a variety of coping mechanisms in her head and imagines that the voices of Koonja’s schizophrenia were present then, with the helpful function of getting her through a difficult experience.

“Although my sister-in-law always referred to the voices as ‘the Oakies,’ my mother called them ‘Oakie’ singular—preferred pronoun, ‘they.’ They were a multiplicity, the many parts that made up a whole, the source of both torment and comfort.”

Cho conveys the Oakie voice that her mother hears as another sentient being that the family must live with. The idea that Oakie is singular rather than plural and has a preferred pronoun makes them an idiosyncratic and temperamental character and acknowledges that they are real to Cho’s mother. Just like a real person, Oakie has contradictory qualities, which can be comforting or disconcerting in equal measure. The multiplicity inherent within a singular creature also reflects Cho’s experience of her mother, and conventional understandings of schizophrenia.

“I suspected that Oakie had told her to eat the bowl of cereal, or maybe this was some residue of the Korean War, when hunger overpowered the risk of getting sick.”

When Cho discovers that her mother has eaten a bowl of cereal with spoiled soy milk, she decides that the cause of this is a combination of Oakie’s influence and the memory of the Korean War, when Koonja was so hungry that she would eat indiscriminately, not caring about the freshness of food. Here, Cho establishes the connection between schizophrenic hallucinations and trauma.

“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.”

As she delves into her doctoral research on sex work in the US military camps in Korea, Cho finds that her own head fills with multiple voices. The chant that she can do anything if she has to mirrors her imagined notion of Koonja motivating herself to perform acts outside her character in order to survive. The fact that Cho connects to these other voices gives her project legitimacy and urgency, as she seeks to give character to bodies and people who have decomposed and been forgotten.