Tastes Like War: A Memoir

From 2001 to her death in 2008, Koonja lives in an apartment above her son and daughter-in-law’s house in Princeton, New Jersey. Her children intend that this more permanent fixture will remedy the constant displacements of her life, both in its war-torn beginning and near its end, where she stayed in the spare rooms of their apartments. However, Koonja continues to live as a recluse, drawing the curtains and rejecting most food and company. She allows her granddaughter’s gift of cyclamen flowers to die, because the word cyclamen “sounds like cycle” and she is “tired of the same thing over and over” (15). Cho acknowledges that her mother’s life has become one of routine misery and loneliness, with only the voices in her head to keep her company. Cho considers that despite her grief over Koonja’s death, she is grateful that the vicious cycle has ended.

Cho recalls that when Koonja previously lived with Cho in Queens, New York, her mother was indifferent to the events of September 11, 2001. When Cho confronted her mother for not calling her brother, who worked near the World Trade Center, Koonja made clear that this type of incident was far from unique to her and that she endured similar war zones in her lifetime.

Both in Queens and in her new apartment, Koonja refuses most food. She is especially averse to the powdered milk her son and daughter-in-law bring her, declaring that it “tastes like war” (19). This is because following the Nogeun-ri massacre in Korea, American planes dropped not the rice that civilians craved, but powdered milk that gave them diarrhea.

There is a breakthrough in Koonja’s eating when Cho persuades her to teach her to cook Korean food. They develop a habit: Koonja gives Cho a list of ingredients and Cho prepares the meal. Prior to her death from myocardial infarction, Koonja reclaims her old personality through the cooking adventures with her daughter. She learns to enjoy food again and share details of her past.

Cho’s grandmother gave birth to at least four children between 1922 and 1941, with Cho’s mother being the youngest. The children were born when Korea was a Japanese colony and Koreans were divested of their property and language and forced into labor. For women and girls, this could take the form of sex slavery for the Imperial Army. In 1945, after the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they became the new oppressor. The US divided Korea into the capitalist South and communist North in an effort to contain communism. As a result, families were separated and many people went missing, including Cho’s brother who disappeared during the Korean Conflict. After the armistice of 1953, the United States and North Korea signed a treaty stating that families could reunify, but this promise went unfulfilled. Worse, by the 1960s, South Koreans had to act as though missing relatives suspected of being in the North were dead, because if the South Korean government suspected any Northern ties, they could be tried as enemies of the state.

Cho’s grandfather and her aunt Chunga both died of stomach cancer, a condition that was likely caused by malnutrition and the desperate postwar diet of insects and leftover hot dogs from American food stands. In one of their cooking sessions, Cho’s mother confesses that her sister Chunga had two children who disappeared. Disappearing children were a phenomenon in Korea, as children were thought to belong to the father, not the mother. Thus, many mixed-race children of Korean mothers and white American soldiers serving in Korea were repatriated to the United States. Syngman Rhee, South Korea’s first president, wanted to ethnically cleanse the country of the mixed-race children who were perceived as reminders of colonial humiliation; Syngman Rhee collaborated with American authorities to devise an extensive adoption program. Korean single mothers were persuaded into giving up their children with the myth that America was a country devoid of racism. Cho juxtaposes this belief with an incident from her own history in 1977, when a white girl chased her with a dog turd and called her a “dog eater,” a racist stereotype of Asian peoples.

Cho’s mother ended up in an American army camp somewhere between the ages of 15 and 21, when she left her home in Changnyeong to find work in Busan. Cho wonders whether Koonja went there intentionally to meet an American soldier, given her awareness that their girlfriends were treated to privileges like food and perfume. The exchange of sex for food was common amongst women who were so hungry that they had been eating out of trash cans. Still, many South Korean men who resented the American’s continued occupation of their country saw the women who became involved with Americans as traitors. At the camp, Koonja met Cho’s father and became pregnant with Cho’s older brother. She lived for years as a single mother as Cho’s father, who was older and already married in America, was absent for long stretches of time.

Cho flashes back to a moment in her own history in 1987 when a classmate asked her if her mother had been a war bride. Cho was confused as the Korean War ended in the 1950s, while her parents married in 1971. She did not realize that Korea was still at war.

Prior to 1971, Cho’s parents were in a long-distance relationship, and Cho’s mother raised their first child, now a six-year-old mix-raced boy in Korea, while enduring social scorn. Koonja had another pregnancy between Cho and her brother, but Koonja aborted this child, as it was likely the result of rape. Rapes of women who dated American GIs were common by Koreans who saw the violence “as a symbolic reclamation of Korean territory from the Americans” (40). This pregnancy also caused Cho’s father to beat Koonja until her eardrums broke. When Cho’s mother became pregnant with her, she hoped for a girl, especially one who would grow up American, as her “mother had gotten the notion that women could do great things in America” (40).

Growing up in the majority-white small town of Chehalis, Washington, in the 1970s and ’80s, Cho continually experienced racism. She, her mother, and her brother emigrated to live with her father when she was one-and-a-half and her brother was eight. To alleviate the pain of playground teasing, Cho emphasized her half-American side and learned to “make my mother disappear” (42). Her mother was complicit in the disappearance of the family’s Korean heritage as she spoke only English to her children. Cho’s failure to speak Korean from a young age meant that she could never fully integrate with other Koreans.

As Koonja knew she would never be accepted back in Korea, she invested her energy into becoming acceptable to white Americans. She did all the jobs that the locals rejected and went to Seattle to take a citizenship test. However, her presence in a small rural town in 1972, only seven years after the ban against “nonwhite” immigrants was lifted, was shocking to people in Chehalis, many of whom had never met an immigrant. Cho’s mother was only able to befriend other immigrants and an elderly woman called Ethel who was more open-minded. Ethel’s death in the mid-1980s coincided with the onset of Cho’s mother’s schizophrenia.

Cho had only one friend, a girl called Jenny whose parents had been to Seoul and hosted a family from Korea. While her classmates eventually got used to Cho, she was subject to microaggressions throughout her childhood. She and her mother were also threatened by a strange man who followed them, shouting racist insults.

In 1986, Cho was drugged with embalming fluid by a man she had a crush on and forced into performing oral sex. When she returned home, her mother called her “Soon-hee-ya” meaning my “most innocent girl,” not realizing what had happened (53). Years later, she understands that Koonja was preoccupied with Cho’s innocence because it was a quality that was denied to her personally.

Cho’s sexual trauma was magnified when a group of boys taunted her on the tennis court, saying, “it’s true what they say about [Asian] girls” (53). No one present, including Cho’s coach, reacted to this assault. When Cho returned home, she was so angry that she threatened to harm herself. Her mother told her to study hard and get out of Chehalis, as there was nothing for her there.

Cho cites T. M. Luhrmann’s study of schizophrenia across cultures to argue that the illness is social as well as biological. Social risk factors include being the only person of color in a white neighborhood. Cho takes this as a confirmation of her instinct that she knew her mother’s schizophrenia was not the inevitable result of genetics. She reflects that racism continues in Chehalis, a place where 65% of voters elected Donald Trump.