Tastes Like War: A Memoir

Cho flourished during her undergraduate years at Brown University, gathering a group of friends from diverse social backgrounds, ethnicities, and sexualities. She felt as though “we were powerful, beautiful underdogs, and together we would rise up” (157).

Meanwhile, her parents struggled with their respective health problems and their marriage. Over a few years, Koonja and Cho’s father separated, reunited, divorced, and then remarried. Throughout this time, Koonja continued her reclusive behavior, often sitting inside with the curtains drawn. Cho’s father mistakenly believed that Koonja’s behavior was to spite him, and that she could control her schizophrenia if she wished. When Cho visited her father during her parents’ separation, he gifted her cooking utensils. Cooking became a pastime that kept her grounded, gave her confidence, and connected her with others. She and her best friend Rafael, a queer man of Polish, Spanish, and Mexican descent, traversed their city in search of multiethnic culinary delights.

Cho’s parents could rarely afford to visit her at Brown. Once, Cho’s brother helped Koonja visit for Mother’s Day, and Koonja was delighted with the cleanliness of the hotel. Cho was eager to introduce her mother to her college friends, but was hurt when one of them called Koonja “weird.” Cho realized that others saw her mother with unkind, judgmental eyes.

During the period of divorce from her husband, Koonja lived in Oregon near her cousin Jinho. Cho expected that Koonja and Jinho would be in close contact, but Koonja became even more reclusive. As Western mental health terminology could not be easily translated into the Korean language, Cho’s Korean relatives in both the US and Korea struggled to comprehend what Koonja was going through. Cho tried to explain it to them with metaphors of Koonja’s spirit hurting.

Still, most of Cho’s tension during this period was with her father. Her preference for postcolonial literature over the Western canon he revered was the beginning of the racial tension between them. Her father held the racist belief that white people and institutions ought to prevail, and that Asian peoples were a “model minority” who could almost pass as white. He was also racist against Black people and held anti-gay bias. This manifested in his financial support of the 1992 presidential campaign of David Duke, an American white supremacist and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Cho’s father also sent her anti-gay messages upon discovering that she was queer. In contrast, Koonja told Cho that her sexuality would not affect how Koonja felt about her.

Cho tries to see her father as a product of his background and upbringing. Factors such as a Ku Klux Klan rally in Chehalis when he was five and the illegality of homosexuality in Washington State until 1976 may have contributed to his outlook. Still, Cho’s education in feminism and postcolonial history meant that she began to see the injustices her mother faced both at home and in the wider world through a different lens. Cho saw that her family structure mirrored global dynamics of inequality, with her father as oppressor.

In late 1993, Cho’s father left Koonja and their son brought her to a suburban neighborhood near his house in New Jersey. Although Cho’s sister-in-law was white, she embraced the Korean family tradition that it is the eldest son’s responsibility to care for sick parents, and that his wife supersedes the biological daughter in responsibility for her husband’s parents. Cho’s sister-in-law was vocal about Koonja’s mental illness, and Cho’s brother began to accept that his mother had schizophrenia. A new symptom was that Koonja would repeatedly chant “January seventh”; Cho assumed that this was a reference to her own birthday. Another repeated chant of Koonja’s, “September forty-five,” referred to September 1945, when the United States occupied the southern half of Korea (181). The biggest surprise for Cho was when her sister-in-law told her that Koonja used to be a sex worker. The truth was kept secret from Cho, but with her mother’s worsening symptoms, the family could no longer conceal it. Cho’s brother admitted that their father was Koonja’s client. Meanwhile, Cho’s father broke down and claimed to have rescued Koonja from sex work.

Cho recognizes that her family history intersects with the US policy of “comfort stations.” Following the habit of the Japanese Imperial Army, authorized brothels of Korean women and girls sexually serviced American soldiers. The South Korean government even sponsored sexual services for the US military. Cho recalls that prior to her mental illness, Koonja used her femininity and self-taught English language skills to survive in a situation where so many others perished. Following the realization that her mother was a sex worker, Cho compulsively imagined her mother at work. Cho conjectures that Koonja’s auditory hallucinations may have accompanied her during these experiences, “talking her through it until it was over” (186).

On January 7, 2009, the New York Times ran an article breaking the decades-long silence on American comfort stations in Korea. Women were treated abominably, undergoing forced medical treatment for sexually transmitted infections to keep the American soldiers safe. Cho wonders if her mother’s chant of January 7 (the article’s publication date) might have been a psychic expression of future solidarity with other oppressed women. Cho also remembers 1994 as the year that her mother began taking prescribed medication for schizophrenia. This aligned with the contemporary understanding of the disease as a result of biochemical dysfunction. However, the pills caused Koonja to experience horrible side effects, including the involuntary motion of face and limbs and increased mental discomfort.

At the end of the winter of 1994, Cho fell in love with Cesar, a salsa-band player whom she met at college. She lost herself in love for a while until her sister-in-law called to inform her about her mother’s suicide attempt. On reuniting with her mother, Cho begged her not to die and promised to complete a PhD to please Koonja.

Cho’s mother confessed that her suicide attempt was due to her feelings of worthlessness. As a result, Cho put off her doctoral dissertation and made cakes. She saw baking as a way to commemorate her mother and resist Koonja’s feelings of worthlessness. Cho considers that throughout different points in her life, Koonja must have received messages telling her that she had little value.

Since her move to America, Koonja distinguished between the kinds of eating that could be done in public and private. The eating of pungent Korean foods such as dried roasted squids had to be done in private, while she baked pies to ingratiate herself into American society. She was especially famous for her blackberry pie, and it was the thing people most remembered about her. Koonja gave Cho, who ate the pastry instead of the filling, the nickname “Crust Girl” (204).

After discovering Koonja’s history as a sex worker, Cho devoured texts on the subject of sex work. She begins to understand her mother’s injunction to “work with your mind, not your body” as a means of making Cho’s life as unlike her own as possible (204), and that the sex work is linked to the feelings of worthlessness that caused Koonja to self-harm. While the educated white women Cho interacts with are able to see sex work as a free choice, Cho thinks that it is more complicated for Korean women like her mother who used it to survive. When she publishes her first book, Cho receives criticism for portraying Korean women in comfort stations as having being sex workers by choice. Cho defends this, saying that the choice stemmed from having no other “good options” and that the women may have done it as a rejection of a colonialist patriarchal power structure that might otherwise have killed them (205). While she never explicitly mentions her mother, Cho feels Koonja is in the subtext of everything she writes. Later, Cho’s sister-in-law tells her that her Koonja was a cocktail waitress, not a sex worker. However, this does not make a difference to Cho, as the revelation already erased her more innocent memories of her mother.

Cho’s mother moved back in with her father after her first suicide attempt. This was disastrous, as neither knew how to take care of the other. Over Christmas in 1997, when the family went to her brother’s North Carolina home, Cho’s father performed an enema in the living room and did not make it to the bathroom in time. On learning this fact, Cho’s mother was nonchalant, stating that he acted this way all the time with her, leaving her to clean up his messes.