Booklist (starred review)Ī wrenching, powerful account of the long-term effects of the immigrant experience. Tastes Like War is a hybrid text about a. They were one of few immigrants in a xenophobic small town during the Cold War, where identity was politicized by everyday detailslanguage, cultural references, memories, and food. 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.Īn exquisite commemoration and a potent reclamation. Cho grew up as the daughter of a white American merchant marine and the Korean bar hostess he met abroad. 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 fifteen, 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. 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. 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. This evocative memoir of food and family history is “somehow both mouthwatering and heartbreaking… a potent personal history” (Shelf Awareness). Winner of the 2022 Asian/Pacific American Award in LiteratureĪ TIME and NPR Best Book of the Year in 2021

Biography & Autobiography, Sociology, Nonfictionįinalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction

Tastes Like War by Grace M. Cho