Tastes Like War: A Memoir

Tastes Like War: A Memoir (2021) is a 2021 National Book Awards finalist and winner of the 2022 Asian/Pacific Award in Literature. The author Grace M. Cho is an associate professor in the Sociology-Anthropology Department at the City University of New York, and her research centers on the experiences of the Korean American diaspora.

Tastes Like War: A Memoir is Cho’s second book and is inspired by Cho’s relationship with Koonja, her Korean-born mother who was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Readers have responded enthusiastically to the work, affirming that it sheds light on the previously hidden experiences of a diaspora traumatized by war, colonialism and racism. Cho’s exploration of intergenerational trauma is facilitated by her consideration of food through the lenses of nourishment, relationships, and cultural significance.

This guide references the First Feminist Press Kindle Edition of the book (2021). Please be advised that Tastes Like War contains discussions of racism, sexual violence, self-harm, anti-gay bias, and domestic violence. Throughout this guide instances of racial epithets original to the text have been omitted or replaced.

Plot Summary

Cho’s book begins as an inquiry into the social forces behind her mother Koonja’s schizophrenia diagnosis. Cho rejects the Western medical establishment’s view of the disease as a biological phenomenon. Instead, Cho takes the anthropologist and psychologist T. M. Luhrmann’s perspective that psychosis is more common amongst those who find themselves on “the wrong side of power” because of factors such as race or immigrant status (124).

The memoir follows Cho as she outgrows her childhood belief that her white, merchant-marine father rescued her Korean mother from war-torn Korea and gains a more nuanced understanding of the complex situation. She learns that American efforts to contain communism in Korea via bombing and colonial interference in the 1950s and ’60s contributed to the hardship and trauma faced by civilians such as her mother. During her time in Korea, Koonja endured hunger, abject poverty, and the disappearance of family members. Although Koonja desperately wanted an education, her family gave precedence to educating her brothers. As a result, Koonja’s best chance at survival and escape was to use her good looks and ability to learn English to serve as an entertainer and sex worker at the US army camps. While this earned her privileges such as quality food and luxuries, she also became an outcast from mainstream Korean society which regarded her as traitorous and immoral. Throughout the 1960s, Cho’s mother had a long-distance relationship with Cho’s father. She conceived two children by him before they married and moved to his US hometown of Chehalis, Washington shortly after Cho’s birth in 1971.

While Koonja cherished the idea that there was no racism in America, in majority-white, rural Chehalis she was made to feel permanently like a foreigner. Cho was bullied throughout her childhood for her Korean heritage. Still, Koonja used her culinary and foraging skills to ingratiate herself and attain educational privileges for her children, even as she consented to low-paid work such as working night shifts in a juvenile detention center.

The first outbreak of Koonja’s schizophrenia and the symptoms of reclusiveness and auditory hallucinations occurred in 1986. Cho, then 15, felt unable to get help for Koonja and accidentally ended up sending her to prison. As Cho excelled academically and earned acceptance at Brown University in Rhode Island, her parents’ marriage deteriorated. Cho, who was studying postcolonial theory, saw that the dynamic of white American subjugation of Koreans was at play in her household, where her depressed white father sadistically mistreated her Asian mother.

Meanwhile, Koonja felt she was at the mercy of hallucinated voices called Oakie, which compelled her to be reclusive and fearful. Koonja was shuttled between her marital home, her brother’s residence, and Cho’s own apartment. Cho found that while prescribed medication did not heal her mother, cooking the Korean meals Koonja enjoyed in her childhood subdued the voices and encouraged her mother to talk about herself and her past. When Cho embarked on a doctorate about the Korean diaspora, food and her mother’s experiences were as important to her research as academic texts.

Although Koonja died in 2008, Cho continues her legacy, both in writing her mother’s stories and cooking her favorite foods.