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Feeding others was a way of making a living and learning to live among people who saw her as always and only a foreigner. It was at once a gesture of nurturance and an act of resistance. And in the repetition of these acts, she created her own worth.
I was afraid of my own mother, but even more terrifying was the prospect of losing her, as she became prisoner to the voices that told her to stop doing the things she used to do: Stop talking to strangers. Stop answering the phone. Stop going outside. Stop cooking. Stop eating. Stop moving. Stop living.
And I did in fact lose her to a kind of death—one where she withdrew from the social, a death in which society rendered her worthless and disposable. It was a stereotype that erased her personhood, and especially her motherhood. Because psychotics are not viewed as capable of loving or being loved.
The town to which we migrated was not a refuge but another place of imperial violence, where the rescued must continuously pay a psychic price for their purported salvation. The town in which she became American was the same place in which she became schizophrenic.
when we are loved we are afraid love will vanish when we are alone we are afraid love will never return and when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid
“I can’t stand the taste of it,” she said. “Tastes like war.” It was only the second time she ever brought up the war without my prompting.
It is not simply the “what” of what one eats that matters…. Most important, it is the many “whys” of eating—the differing imperatives of hunger, necessity, pleasure, nostalgia, and protest—that most determine its meaning.3
But the United States would continue to kill Koreans in order to save them from themselves.
Although South Korea profited greatly from US military presence, to the point that the government aggressively promoted the sex industry around the bases as a form of “foreign diplomacy,” the women workers were gradually stripped of their rights.
The only women Koreans despised more than single mothers were the women who “mixed flesh with foreigners,” because they were whores, and traitors too.
In her death, she was the sweetest of ghosts.
We were joined by our common legacy as militarized subjects, having been borne out of the same murderous conditions of US intervention and war, the same sexist and imperialist social policies that fractured families in Korea. We were all bound by the discourse that said that the American family/nation rescued us.
She offered kimchi as a balm for their dislocations because she understood that the everyday acts of eating and cooking preserved a connection to the people and places that one left behind.
To me, she was some butch forest goddess, earth mother, and breadwinner all wrapped in one, sort of like the woman from the perfume commercial who could bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan.
Survival is an act of resistance, but performing an act of resistance within an imperialistic order is not the same thing as “being a prostitute by choice.” Forced or free is a false dichotomy.
She escaped Korea only to find that American society devalued her, too—this gray country, this violent foster home … land where they stuff our throats with soil &accuse us of gluttony when we learn to swallow it.3
Visits with my mother were like culinary history lessons, encounters with Korea of the 1950s and 1960s. Everything we ate together during those last years of her life must have reminded her of her youth, but the cheeseburger stood out as the lone American dish in my old-school Korean repertoire.
