Tastes Like War: A Memoir

The untranslatable Korean word han derives from the Chinese character for the word and “refers to ‘unresolved resentment against injustice’” (147). It refers specifically to the sorrow and anger of Koreans following the brutal Japanese occupation and the wounds of American imperialism. According to Cho’s understanding, it not only refers to “a consciousness of ongoing trauma and a lack of resolution, but also the means to its own resolution” (147). Cho believes that confronting han and fathoming the multiple reason behind its tangled knots is the best way to resolve it, and this motivates her research to discover the truth about her mother. However, Cho finds that “with each new revelation” about the facts of her mother’s life that potentially led to her schizophrenia, “my han became more tangled up in hers, collected more emotional residue, and gave more force to my life’s decisions” (150). Here, Cho takes on her mother’s han, along with the feeling of anger against injustice that accompanies it. Cho suggests that the injustices her mother has suffered since moving to America have added to the han rather than erasing it. Cho uses the concept of han throughout the memoir to express a culturally specific notion of intergenerational trauma and to acknowledge the complex, interconnected contributing factors to continued trauma and trauma recovery.

The war between what are now North and South Korea broke out after the occupying Japanese army surrendered to Allied forces in 1945. After WWII, US Army officers Dean Ruck and Charles Bonesteel divided Korea into the Soviet-controlled North and American-controlled South. What is known as the Korean Conflict began when the North Korean army invaded South Korea. The war casualties were devastating, with 2 to 4 million people dying or disappearing and 70% of them being civilians. Even after the war, the US military remained stationed in South Korea. Young women like Cho’s mother flocked to army and naval bases to entertain the American troops for the money they needed to survive poverty and deprivation.

The Korean War is a recurrent motif in Cho’s memoir, and the memories of hunger and violence faced by her mother during this time inform her approach to food. For example, Koonja’s practice of refusing colonial convenience foods such as powdered milk, or eating from trash cans at various points of her illness, imitate what she had to do to survive during wartime.

The context of Cho’s memoir is postcolonial, as it examines and critiques the legacy of American imperialism in Korea and that of white, Western imperialism on American academia.

Cho explicitly begins her postcolonial studies as an undergraduate student in comparative literature at Brown and “through this new prism of the experiences of women, the colonized, and the oppressed, I began to see the injustices my mother faced” (174). As Cho moves to study the perspectives of the formerly oppressed, she moves closer to her mother’s point of view and away from her white father who favors classic European texts and is nostalgic about the days “when the sun never set on the British Empire” (174). Cho’s point of view and interrogation of history is consistently postcolonial throughout her memoir, and seeks to resist and redefine the racist, imperialist attitudes that Cho feels contributed to both her mother’s illness and broader social injustices.