And through careful listening over these shared meals, Grace discovered not only the things that broke the brilliant, complicated woman who raised her - but also the things that kept her alive. In her mother’s final years, Grace learned to cook dishes from her parent’s childhood in order to invite the past into the present and to hold space for her mother’s multiple voices at the table.
Part food memoir, part sociological investigation, Tastes Like War is a hybrid text about a daughter’s search through intimate and global history for the roots of her mother’s schizophrenia. When Grace was 15, her dynamic mother experienced the onset of schizophrenia, a condition that would continue and evolve for the rest of her life. They were one of few immigrants in a xenophobic small town during the Cold War, where identity was politicized by everyday details - language, cultural references, memories, and food. Part memoir, part historiography of the enduring ravages of the American military presence in Korea, part sociological expose on many varietals of racism growing up in Chehalis, Washington, Cho’s book defies category, genre.
Cho’s autobiographical treatise on schizophrenia in Tastes Like War. Cho is an associate professor of sociology and anthropology at the CUNY College of Staten Island. The why question stands at the center of Grace M. Her writings have appeared in journals such as the New Inquiry, Poem Memoir Story, Contexts, Gastronomica. Cho grew up as the daughter of a White American merchant marine and the Korean bar hostess he met abroad. In Tastes Like War, a daughter reckons with her mothers schizophrenia. Cho is the author of Tastes Like War, a 2021 National Book Awards finalist, and Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War, which received a 2010 book award from the American Sociological Association.
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