As If The Past Is An Answer

Ryan Gustafsson on Grace M. Cho

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‘In my lifetime I’ve had at least three mothers.’
—Grace M. Cho, Tastes like War

How do you begin to write a history both personal and radically inaccessible, one that traces a series of erasures? A hidden collective history, moreover, that haunts the communities to which one belongs. What account of the social does one need, to tell a story of survival? How to tell this story of the social, while preserving the singularity of a life—your mother’s and yours?

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Born in 1941 in Osaka during Japanese colonial rule, Grace M. Cho’s mother Koonja ‘returned’ at the age of four to Korea, a place she had never been. Likely the child of forced laborers from Gyeongsang province, Japanese was her first language. In September of that year, less than a month after liberation, the U.S. military occupation of Korea began. Koonja is four years old when the Korean War—the first military conflict of the so-called Cold War—breaks out in 1950, and she will lose half her family by the age of twenty. Years later, she will marry a U.S. officer 25 years her senior, and move with her two children to his hometown Chehalis, a white rural town in Washington—a place, as Cho writes in her memoir Tastes like War, ‘we were never meant to survive’. Koonja leaves Korea for the last time in 1976 and never returns.

Cho’s first book, Haunting the Korean Diaspora (2008), focuses on the figure and construction of the yanggongju (a derogatory term used to refer to Korean sex workers who worked in the U.S. military camptowns), and her mother’s subsequent erasure as a ‘war bride’ upon immigration to the United States. A disavowed and exiled figure continuous with comfort women, although rendered very differently in the South Korean imaginary, the yanggongju is ‘the vehicle for the migration of trauma’ of the Korean War and U.S-Korea relations across both generational and geographic borders. Her migration to the U.S. entails her disappearance—or what Cho refers to as her ‘entombment’—into the military bride, often cast as a ‘successfully’ assimilated Asian. The ghost that haunts the Korean diaspora (and in this haunting, constitutes it) resides in the silent/silenced interstices of U.S. domestic life: the family, arguably the most intimate, formative, decisive, and guarded of sites. Indeed, if the Forgotten War is the historical condition of possibility for Korean diaspora, Cho points out, its psychic condition is one of ‘enforced forgetting’. For, once ‘forgotten,’ the devastation of the Korean War is already ‘lost’ by virtue of its naming, compounding the devastation wrought by the conflict itself.

It is while researching and writing this book that Cho begins to cook for her mother—her ‘third’ mother, to be precise. There are three mothers, each recalling and historicizing the other two, memories of one overlapping and shifting into the other. The first mother is a charismatic mother, the mother of Cho’s childhood, who hosts elaborate parties to ease her children’s integration into Chehalis, an excellent cook and prolific forager who supplies the town with wild blackberries and mushrooms. The second mother is the mother who develops schizophrenia, whose horizon of possibilities becomes radically diminished, spending her days indoors, in tedious repetition, eating very little, sometimes refusing food. It is the third mother that Cho cooks for, the third mother who grants her permission to write, and teaches her how to cook, mostly Korean dishes she hadn’t tasted for decades. It is this mother whom Cho loses, the same year that Haunting the Korean Diaspora is published.

Thirteen years later, Cho’s latest book, Tastes like War (2021) is a memoir in fragments that serves as a kind of companion text to Haunting the Korean Diaspora, equally incisive as a form of social and political critique, equally insistent in its pursual of a history both personal and collective, irretrievable and irruptive. From haunting to taste. Yet isn’t taste already a mode of being haunted? Can one taste without disintegration?

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I first came across Cho’s work when researching histories of the Korean diaspora and methods for ‘unearthing’ these, as I was trying to understand Korean adoption in its connection with other migratory processes and logics of exclusion. I approached Haunting the Korean Diaspora primarily as a researcher, before quickly realizing any attempt at maintaining a ‘detached’ intellectual stance was to be undermined by my stake in her work—a stake that intensified as I read, a stake not actively sought so much as uncovered, grown in to. And so by the time I encountered Tastes like War I was, almost, able to be upfront: I read Cho as an adopted Korean, a diasporic Korean on unsteady ground, also attempting to trace a disavowed familial and larger collective history. And I ask: can one read, after all, without disintegration? Without becoming undone?

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I lived with my mouth closed.
—Mrs. Dennison, in an interview with Ji-Yeon Yuh

In Ji-Yeon Yuh’s study Beyond the Shadow of Camptown (2002), food and language were the two predominant ‘mediums’ through which Korean military brides in America were pressured to express their newly bestowed citizenship. Rather than experiencing the celebrated diversity that multiculturalism purports to deliver (in fact exposing its flatness as a function of power), these Korean women were left without language of their own. Striving to be American, Cho’s mother, a Korean with Japanese as her first language, ‘tried to wring the foreignness out of her tongue by speaking only English’. ① Grace M. Cho, Tastes like War (Feminist Press, 2021), 47. Tasked with reproducing the cultures of their husbands, most military brides deemed learning how to cook American food integral to their roles as wives and mothers, and hence as a necessity for preserving their families and marriages. Those who ate Korean food on a regular basis would often cook two sets of meals, serving one to their family and eating the other alone. Food, or more specifically, taste, throws into relief the isolating impacts of migration. There are, of course, losses sustained in leaving, but also losses associated with a slow and prolonged arrival – meted out over time. Taste communicates. It renders us more attuned to what one carries and leaves behind—sometimes leaving behind is a form of retention—in order to survive where one is. Reflecting differentiation and distinction, it is fundamentally social and historical. As Cho’s memoir demonstrates, taste is also political.

Koonja’s refusal of food was selective, subtle expressions of what Cho would later come to recognise as ‘tiny acts of rebellion against enormous structures of power’. ② Cho, Tastes like War, 20. During one of the periods when Koonja was barely eating, Cho probed her mother’s reluctance, concerned she wasn’t getting enough protein. Cho’s brother and sister-in-law had stocked Koonja’s kitchen with easy to prepare foods, such as packet ramen and tins of fruit cocktail (which she ate) and powdered milk (which she refused to touch). Powdered milk, an antidote to hunger; or, a U.S. relief good that during the war came to symbolise ‘American luxury and freedom,’ demonstrating that ‘benevolence is also a tool of domination’. ③ Grace M. Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 84. This logic reverberates across time and space, following Koonja to Chehalis, where ‘the rescued must continuously pay a psychic price for their purported salvation’. Taste indexes personhood, preference and sedimentation. When too, is taste not also touch, movement, friction? Dialogue. Self-preservation. Time. Koonja’s logic and her refusal is, from a certain perspective, unreasonable – and for that matter, all the more understandable. I can’t stand the taste of it. Tastes like war. ④ Cho, Tastes like War, 19.

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At the 1988 Seoul Olympics, kimchi was declared South Korea’s national food. Around the same time—in the lead-up to and during the Olympic Games—Korea’s overseas adoption program faced trenchant criticism by the foreign media. A ‘national custom’, ⑤ Kim Park Nelson, ‘Mapping Multiple Histories of Korean American Transnational Adoption’, U.S.–Korea Institute at SAIS Working Paper Series, Washington, DC, 2009, 5. a national shame. Overseas adoption rates would henceforth decline.

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The first time Cho saw her mother cry, Koonja was recounting how she was called in to school to help calm two inconsolable adopted Korean children who had recently arrived in Chehalis. Mrs Anderson, their adoptive mother, had been fermenting cabbage, she explained, and the children thought it was kimchi, but it was sauerkraut. Dap-dap-eu-rah, Koonja exclaimed. I’m suffering. Koonja would give them, along with numerous other Korean adoptees and women who arrived in Chehalis to join their new families, jars of homemade kimchi ‘as a balm for their dislocations’. ⑥ Cho, Tastes like War, 102. Upon immigration, Yuh writes, ‘every meal became a painful reminder of having left home.’ Cho wonders if Koonja’s tenderness toward those adoptees was a projection of her own loss, growing up in the midst of war. As her research progresses, Cho learns that her mother bore many similarities to the ‘prototypical Korean birthmother’: the camptown woman of the 1950s–60s. She wonders if Koonja had relinquished a child for overseas adoption, ‘the most unspeakable of all her secrets’. ⑦ Cho, Tastes like War, 100.

The Korean adoptee fleetingly appears, as a ghost, in Haunting the Korean Diaspora. The adoptee-as-ghost materializes in Heinz Insu Fenkl’s autobiographical novel, Memories of My Ghost Brother, which Cho discusses as an example of a diasporic Korean text marked by transgenerational haunting. In it, the ghost figure that haunts the narrator is revealed to be an adoptee—the family secret, the lost son, the older brother relinquished and sent for adoption to America as a condition of his mother’s marriage to Fenkl’s father, a German-American serviceman. When I first read Cho’s book, I found it curious that Korean adoption remained only barely perceptible, at the margins of the text. Yet, as Cho demonstrates with such acuity, what is unknown or left out is not nothing.

In Tastes like War we see the resurgence of the adoptee-as-ghost, the fugitive figure that traverses—perhaps?—diasporic Koreans’ family histories. Beginning at the ‘end’ of the unending Korean War, the early adoptions were of mixed-race children born to Korean women and U.S. or European military personnel. The institutionalisation of Korean overseas adoption in the post-war period saw annual adoption rates increase dramatically. By the 1970s and 80s, children of so-called ‘full’ Korean parentage—overwhelmingly born to single mothers—were being sent overseas, predominantly to the United States. Korean transnational adoption has resulted in what Jodi Kim calls a ‘militarized diaspora,’ and underscores the ways in which ‘militarization exceeds the temporal parameters of war, the spatial demarcations of military bases, the functional ends of military institutions, and the enlistment of military personnel’. ⑧ Jodi Kim, ‘“The Ending Is Not an Ending at All”: On the Militarized and Gendered Diasporas of Korean Transnational Adoption and the Korean War’, positions 23, no. 4 (Fall 2015): 809. The hallucination slides across time, just as it slides across the world. ⑨ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge, 2012), 355.

Like the military bride, the adoptee is perceived to assimilate easily into society in part because they are absorbed into the intimate space of the (American) family. In the narrative of the grateful immigrant, like the military bride, their losses—many of which they might not know they have lost—are further relegated by not being acknowledged as loss. Like Cho, the adoptee too lives with ‘what might have been,’ that most disorienting and wounding of dimensions. Like, but not the same. Linked, ‘through a militarized nexus’. ⑩ Kim, ‘The Ending Is Not an Ending at All’, 824. There is kinship in our differences. There is a kinship, Cho writes, of uncertainties: a diaspora ‘bound together precisely through what cannot be known’. ⑪ Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora, 40.

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‘There are endless ways in which to enter this story’.
—Grace M. Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora

Cho’s books are an experiment in method, an investigation that seems less interested in abiding by disciplinary norms than in exploring modes of inquiry that best serve the phenomenon she is trying to understand. Her first book is ‘an unravelling of the effects of trauma’, ⑫ Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora, 17. using autoethnography, dream work, performance, and experimental writing, and drawing on psychoanalysis, sociological theory, and fiction. Tracing the unravelling of grief, and the ways in which grief, in turn, unravels the self who must learn to live with and in the midst of it, Tastes like War also offers an additional set of methods: cooking, feeding Koonja’s cravings for Korean food from the 1950s and 1960s, becoming attuned to her mother’s auditory hallucinations. Each constitutes a study of ‘what cannot be known with certainty’, ⑬ Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora, 17. a lesson in listening. A reminder that illness and protracted disappearance can sometimes be a symptom—no, an indictment—of the social world, even while in exile. I continued to look for her in traces of every book I read and every meal I cooked. ⑭ Cho, Tastes like War, 5. And yet, in deploying this array of methods, Cho retains a singular insistence: to refuse to proceed as if her mother’s past were an answer and not, in itself, a question. ⑮ Cho, Tastes like War, 204. In neither book does she offer ‘findings’ or attempt a rewriting of history, familial or collective. Cho demonstrates a clarity of purpose and commitment to experimentation, all the more remarkable given the relentless demands of academia and the obstinance of many departments when it comes to broadening conceptions of what constitutes legitimate research methods, and what ‘counts’ as scholarship.

Cho offers a lesson in how to write alongside the void—in the company of the void, as Elisa Gabbert suggests is one of the hallmarks of poetry. In rendering difficult, if impossible, to ‘locate’ her mother in space and time, Tastes like War keeps her adrift. Throughout, I am reminded that it is not only adoptees who search for their mothers, and that ‘searching’ can too easily be enlisted to serve a fantasy in which there is a lost something that can be recuperated. I don’t need, or expect, to ‘see’ myself in Cho’s work, nor should I. There’s a particular solace, if I may call it that, in following how Cho grapples with the silences, invisibilities, and questions that propel her, and which tie her to others and world-destroying historical events in direct and indirect ways. To write, to cook, when there can be no return.

Storytelling, yes. But only if also to gesture toward what cannot be said and known, the fragmentation that besets attempts to fashion a linear and coherent narrative. Here: not simply the fragmentation that pre-exists the attempt to craft a story, but also the fragmentation one undergoes while straining to tell it. Storytelling, but to offer no solace, resolution, or reassurances, unless as unintended. To have the story befit the question, which is to keep both alive.

Don’t be ashamed to use sesame oil. Put in garlic, plenty of garlic. Now don’t be ashamed to use that either. ⑯ Cho, Tastes like War, 270.

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Works Cited

✷ Cho, Grace M. Haunting the Korean Diaspora. University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
———. Tastes like War. Feminist Press, 2021.
✷ Kim, Jodi. ‘“The Ending Is Not an Ending at All”: On the Militarized and Gendered Diasporas of Korean Transnational Adoption and the Korean War’. positions 23, no. 4 (Fall 2015).
✷ Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge, 2012.
✷ Nelson, Kim Park. ‘Mapping Multiple Histories of Korean American Transnational Adoption’. U.S.–Korea Institute at SAIS Working Paper Series, Washington, DC, 2009.

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Ryan Gustafsson is a writer and researcher living on unceded Wurundjeri country. Their essays have appeared in the International Journal of Cultural Studies, Sydney Review of Books, Island Magazine, and others. ryangustafsson.com

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