Tastes Like War: A Memoir

Grace M. Cho is the daughter of a white American farmer-turned-merchant-marine and a Korean woman, Koonja, whom he claims to have rescued while serving abroad in the Korean Conflict. Cho recalls growing up in Chehalis, Washington, with plural mothers. The mother of her childhood negotiated her cultural differences and strove to gain acceptance in her adopted white, working-class American town by cooking Korean food for her neighbors. As Cho writes, “feeding others was a way of making a living and learning to live among people who saw her as always and only a foreigner” (2).

In the mid-1980s, when Cho was an adolescent, her mother stopped being interested in food and experienced a state of psychosis. This version of her mother, influenced by voices that told her to stop eating and become a recluse, became unrecognizable from the mother Cho knew. Cho considers that in listening to voices, her mother “heeded the call of the xenophobes to ‘go back to where you came from,’ for her origins were not so easy to locate, and therefore the place she came from was a kind of no place” (4). Cho’s mother was ethnically Korean, although she was born in Japan and lived there under conditions of forced labor.