장소의 물질성과 생성: 그레이스 M. 조(Grace M. Cho)의『전쟁 같은 맛』(Tastes Like War)의 음식을 중심으로

Tastes Like War, written by Grace M. Cho, is a memoir of Grace’s mother and a record of her real story. Grace’s mother, Gun Ja, was a war bride who fulfilled her dream of emigrating into America but suffered from schizophrenia in the later stages of her life. Based on Grace’s statement that the way Gun Ja could survive was to cook Korean food, and in light of such creation in Gun Ja’s wretched life, this paper claims that the material form of food represents creation and change in both lives.. That is, the Gun Ja’s foods are her new stories created through her remembering and reorganizing of old memories, and in turn, Grace’s foods are her new language created from her mother’s stories.To identify the clues of the creation in Gun Ja’s life, this paper tracks her changing stories and her creation of new stories, which occur while Gun Ja remembers the places buried in old events. The title of this book, Tastes Like War, makes us aware of Gun Ja’s foods and emphasizes the meaning. Because we perceive the world through our bodily experiences, and our perceptions represent the materiality of reality, this paper traces the creation in Gun Ja’s life through her foods. While our organic bodies are engraved with the various aspects of a place, these places become parts of our bodies as events. Therefore, an experienced place can act as a domain where the person exists. The place enveloped in the body becomes a materialized place that expands into the world. The different places that head towards the world and pull it closer are eventful and ongoing, so they are not limited or fixed to a single object. This implies that we can exist differently in the place in which an event occurs and re-experience that event in another place in different way. Just like Gun Ja and Grace began to find themselves in the memories of places where events occurred, this paper traces the creation in Gun Ja’s life through foods founded in the remnants of memory.