Tastes Like War: A Memoir

“Funny to have a birthday party for a country, I think, yet I am far too young to consider what it means to be patriotic, or American, or Asian in America. I’m ignorant of the raging wars in Southeast Asia, the stalemated war in Korea, or the ways in which Asian migrations are intimately intertwined with American imperialism and the grossly misnamed ‘Cold War’ that slaughtered seven million innocents in the name of anti/communism.”

In 1976, Cho is only five years old and contemplating the surreal feat of a birthday party for a country instead of a person. Her state of innocence at the beginning of the narrative provides a contrast for what she and the reader will learn during the course of the book. Cho quickly introduces facts that may run counter to the average Western-educated reader’s knowledge: the war in Korea was not finished but “stalemated,” and the term Cold War, which implies no actual fighting, is a misnomer which discounts the millions of lives lost.

“In my lifetime I’ve had at least three mothers. The first was the mother of my childhood. I adored and admired her, my beautiful mama. A charismatic and savvy micropolitician, she fought tirelessly to gain acceptance in my father’s rural hometown and in so doing made life more livable for her children.”

Cho introduces the idea of her mother’s schizophrenia and the fragmentation of her personality according to the voices she hears when she states that she has had three mothers in the same woman. The idea of Koonja as a micropolitician indicates how every act of her life, no matter how mundane, is a negotiation against a racist hostile force that would deprive her.

“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.”

Cho resists the Western medical establishment’s idea that schizophrenia is a biochemical phenomenon by locating the onset of her mother’s disease in a specific American town and the social requirements of integration.