Tastes Like War: A Memoir

The structure of Cho’s memoir shows the different stages of her education about the American colonial imposition on Korea and Koreans. She begins the story in 1976 as a naïve child sucking a red-white-and-blue popsicle on the occasion of America’s 200th birthday. Too young to consider what this celebration of American values means, Cho who thinks “only about the icy-sweet chemical flavor on my tongue” is a de facto consumer of American myths, including the one that her white father “saved” the “lovely lotus” that was her mother from “third world Korea” (1). Cho’s perspective at this stage in the memoir reflects that of a person who knows little about the Korean War or America’s interventions in Korea as part of the aim to contain communism. Throughout her memoir, Cho tracks her increasing awareness of how colonialism and American imperialism have shaped her family and global dynamics.

During her childhood, Cho becomes aware of the racism of white Americans toward her and her mother, thus destroying the idea that America is a land of equal opportunity. She also catches glimpses of the exploitation inherent in colonialist dynamics, as she witnesses her white father violently beating her Korean mother and calling her derogatory names. While 10-year-old Cho registers the insult in her mother’s hurt, she later realizes that the racist epithet her father uses derives from the fact that her father grew up in an atmosphere of white supremacy. Although Cho’s father uses the white masculinity traditionally associated with authority under patriarchy to dominate her mother, Cho shows how he is also threatened by Koonja’s bravery and ingenuity. Cho emphasizes this dynamic by showing how the period of Koonja’s tireless foraging coincides with her father’s physical decline. This dynamic becomes a metaphor for global racial injustice and resistance movements that challenge and seek to dismantle white supremacy and colonialism.

Cho is only able to find a vocabulary and context for the injustices she witnesses in Chehalis when she moves East and studies postcolonial theory. Away from home, she studies the Korean War and the injustices those with power (men, white Americans) perpetrated on those they subjugated (women, the Korean people). She stops seeing her family as a discrete entity and instead notes that “the power dynamics in my family mirrored a larger dynamic of social inequality, and my father became the main object of my criticism” (175). This new notion is reinforced by events that take place during the period of Cho’s studies, when as her mother’s sickness progresses, her father insults and mistreats his wife and expresses open contempt for his daughter’s “rejection of white identity” in favor of a postcolonial one (172). Part of Cho’s reassessment of the myths she has been told incorporates a reevaluation of the Cold War. She considers that the term Cold War is a misnomer, because it implies a bloodless, intellectual conflict aimed at containing communism. However, given that this conflict between the US and USSR took place on Korean soil, and led to lives being lost and people, including Cho’s uncle, disappearing forever, it was anything but “cold” for civilians. The sense that her mother, a colonized subject, sacrificed more than her father is reflected in the fact that Koonja remained in Korea and endured poverty and prejudice for having a relationship and children with a white American man.

Around the turn of the year of 1994 Cho learns of her mother’s work as a sex worker in the American camps, and this complicates the story of her family’s colonial dynamics even further. The idea of sex work and her father as her mother’s client threatens to destroy the myth that he was Koonja’s romantic rescuer. Cho considers whether the sex work was voluntary and almost decides the question is irrelevant because, deprived of an education by poverty and the sexism inherent in Korean society at the time, her mother had few or no other options to ensure survival or the opportunity for a different life. However, the decision was not an easy one as it left Koonja vulnerable to the risks of pregnancy, venereal disease, and rape by Korean men who considered her a traitor. Additionally, the trauma of her experiences as a sex worker were evident in her rejection of any kind of physical work as a viable option for her daughter; Koonja wanted Cho to work with her mind rather than her body to raise her status and prevent her from exploitation.

Cho’s father is uneasy about his wife’s past and tells Cho “your mother did that as seldom as possible […] I got her out of there,” thus overwriting the perceived degradation of sex work with a love story (184). However, his behavior in later life replicates the dynamic of an entitled white client and a Korean woman he considers as inferior. Cho’s father even feels entitled to start a romance with his wife’s Korean American therapist Dr. Jeon, and he brings sex workers to their home without Koonja’s consent. The sense of his entitlement to pleasure and comfort, regardless of who he hurts and exploits, reproduces the colonial dynamics that enable white men to exploit the people and resources of other nations. The final injustice of this inequality is that Cho’s father’s behavior is accepted as being within the bounds of sanity by the American medical establishment, while her mother’s hallucinations are considered dangerous and as deviations from the norm. By contrasting her parents’ personalities, actions, and symptoms, Cho shows how both on a macro and domestic level, white patriarchy has acted against her mother’s interests.