Tastes Like War: A Memoir

For Koonja, kimchi, a Korean fermented cabbage dish, had strong associations with survival. When she was a nine-year-old refugee from war, Koonja returned home alone after losing track of her family. She stayed alive for three seasons by eating only rice and the kimchi that her grandmother had buried in earthenware jars. Following her mother’s death, Cho went to the Korean store and bought kimchi as a way of holding on to Koonja’s lifeline.

While Koonja was attracted to the American way of life and the propaganda of abundance, she did not imagine that she would end up missing the food she associated with survival. As a Korean wife to an American, she learned to perfect American dishes but missed the ingredients necessary to cook Korean food, namely the right type of cabbage for kimchi. She would stock up on ingredients when she took her two children to Busan, and tried to get by with the produce at the Asian supermarket in Seattle.

While Cho’s father approved of Koonja’s endeavor to cook Korean food, in other mixed households, Korean wives had to give up their food heritage in favor of their husbands’, and “both body and spirit withered away” (94). Some women tried to approximate Korean flavors by improvising with American ingredients such as pickles and pepper flakes. Some women would eat Korean food in secret and host secret eating parties with other Korean wives.

Cho considers that while women like her mother faced scorn in Korea for marrying foreigners, they played an important role by enabling other immigrants to transition to life in 1980s America. Koonja “became the very guide she wished she’d had” for other Korean immigrants (95). Koonja made kimchi for recently adopted Korean kids after the trauma of tasting their adoptive mother’s sauerkraut, which resembled kimchi, but tastes very different. Koonja’s tenderness toward these children made an impression on Cho, who wondered if she empathized with them as another quasi-orphan. After her research, Cho also wonders whether her mother had another child apart from her and her brother that Koonja may have been forced to give up for adoption. Perhaps Koonja fed these orphans because she could not feed the hungry child she had given up.

Cho was the last person her mother made kimchi for, on the eve of her going to college on the other side of the country. Koonja was worried that despite the abundance of food in the cafeteria, American colleges would not know how to feed her Korean daughter. Koonja connected offering her daughter kimchi with enabling Cho to survive this next stage in her life. Later, when Cho got her own apartment, her mother agreed to give her the recipe for kimchi.

Cho realizes after her mother’s death that her first food memory is of her mother making and feeding her kimchi and telling her that they are both survivors who can endure anything.

In 1970s America, the dominant food trend was moving away from nature to processed food. This contrasted with Koonja’s experience in Korea, where wild areas such as forests provided nourishment when farmlands were destroyed in conflict. Koonja’s foraging exploits in America included the beaches of the Pacific Northwest, such as the Puget Sound where she searched for seaweed and fish. However, when she got in trouble with the authorities, she swapped the beach for the Chehalis forest. She foraged in the early morning, after her night shift at Green Hill juvenile detention center where she worked between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. Koonja had to work, as her husband, away at sea for long stretches of time, did not give her sufficient allowance.

Foraging enabled Koonja to gather ingredients that were not readily available at the supermarket, such as gosari, an ingredient in bibimbap. Her expeditions became lucrative when she began to forage blackberries, which were popular with Americans. She developed a blackberry obsession, filling her kitchen with them and selling them for $13 a gallon. New customers entered the house every day and she became “known as ‘the Blackberry Lady’ instead of ‘the Chinese Lady’”(112). She was so determined that she braved bears and armed, hostile white men on her expeditions, buying herself a .38 special to let them know she meant business.

While Koonja grew in vigor, her husband aged. Both he and Cho begged to accompany Koonja out foraging, but neither was as strong as she was. Cho learns that following one of these expeditions, her father’s heart stopped. Cho’s mother was angry at his brush with death and upset she missed a good day of foraging.

Cho’s mother exhibited a similar pattern in her obsession with foraging mushrooms, which required the additional skill of being able to recognize the poisonous ones from the edible. Koonja mastered this with an elaborate guide and sold her mushrooms to the distributor Madame Mushroom, who supplied specialty stores in the Pacific Northwest. Cho observes how her mother did this for six to seven years, even as she kept her job at the detention center. It was as though “she didn’t want to see the people around her ever be hungry again” (118). Cho acknowledges that her mother’s level of productivity was unusual, especially given the scant amount of sleep she got.

During the reclusive phase brought on by her mental illness, Koonja lost her interest in foraging. However, she was still able to identify edible plants that could be used in Korean foods from train windows. Once, seeing the price of chanterelle mushrooms at Whole Foods supermarket, Koonja lamented that she could have made so much money.