Tastes Like War

Grace M. Cho was raised as the daughter of a Korean bar hostess he met overseas and a white American merchant marine. During the Cold War, they were one of the few immigrants living in a small, racist town where language, cultural allusions, recollections, and cuisine all had a political role in defining one's identity. Grace's active mother developed schizophrenia at the age of fifteen. The illness would worsen and recur throughout Grace's life.

Tastes Like War is a hybrid text about a daughter's quest for the causes of her mother's schizophrenia through personal and global history, part food memoir, part sociological study. In order to bring the past into the present and provide space at the table for her mother's many voices, Grace learned to prepare foods from her parents' early years during her mother's dying years. And by attentive listening during these meals together, Grace learned what kept her alive as well as what broke the intelligent, complex lady who reared her.