Tastes Like War, Grace M. Cho
Tastes Like War, Grace M. Cho
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Tastes Like War
A Memoir

Author: Grace M. Cho

Narrator: Cindy Kay

Unabridged: 9 hr 25 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/03/2021

Synopsis

Grace M. Cho grew up as the daughter of a white American merchant marine and the Korean bar hostess he met abroad. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

About Grace M. Cho

Grace M. Cho is the author of Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War, which received a 2010 book award from the American Sociological Association. Her writings have appeared in journals such as The New Inquiry, Poem Memoir Story, Contexts, Gastronomica, Feminist Studies, Qualitative Inquiry, and WSQ. She is associate professor of sociology and anthropology at the College of Staten Island, CUNY.

About Cindy Kay

Cindy Kay is a Chinese-Thai-American narrator and educator whose work has been described as listening to a "cozy best friend." She narrates fiction and nonfiction and has studied Spanish, Portuguese, Thai, and Japanese. Raised in the California Bay Area, she currently lives in the Rockies.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Thomas

What a fantastic memoir. In Tastes Like War, Grace Cho writes about her mother’s experience with schizophrenia through an in-depth sociocultural lens. One of my favorite parts of this memoir includes how Cho portrays her mother with such love and thoughtfulness. Her writing itself feels vivid and al......more

Goodreads review by Christine

This is an amazing memoir that I couldn't put down. The author richly and seamlessly blends memory and the present to attempt to piece together her mother's history. I loved the evocation of food as sensory memory. The book brings up a lot of difficult questions to grapple with regarding insiders, o......more

Goodreads review by Mridula

Extraordinary memoir. I appreciated Grace Cho's socio-political gaze at her mother's life. She applies a critical race-gender-age lens in unpacking the issue of schizophrenia and traces how violent colonial histories targeting women and girls can create the conditions that exacerbate mental illness.......more

Goodreads review by Susan

This is the most moving book I have read in many years. Ms. Cho's memoir is heartbreaking, courageous and beautiful. She pays great homage to her mother, and by extension, to all the hard working, silently suffering, sacrificial immigrant mothers in general. Reading this helped me in my grief over m......more

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