Tastes Like War, A Memoir by Grace M. Cho

Grace Cho grew up in a small town in Washington State, the daughter of a white American merchant marine and the Korean bar hostess he met abroad. Cho immigrated to the United States as an infant and the family settled in the small town of Chehalis, Washington, where Cho and her mother, Koonja, were the only immigrants. Cho was often bullied for being Asian and her mother had difficulty integrating into the community. Koonja loved to forage for mushrooms and wild blackberries and soon, her blackberry pies were in high demand. Cho’s father was away from home for long periods of time and her brother left for college when she was eleven, so when her mother stopped foraging, and began to exhibit symptoms of mental illness, Cho had little support. By the time Cho was fifteen, her mother was convinced that Ronald Regan had tapped their phones, and that people were following her. Reading books from her school library, Cho believed that her mother had manifested paranoid schizophrenia, but when she tried to talk to her father and her brother about it, they didn’t believe her and accused her of lying about her mother’s symptoms.

It wasn’t until Cho was in college, that her mother was finally diagnosed with schizophrenia. By this time, her father and mother had divorced and remarried and separated again and rarely spoke to each other. Her brother and his wife brought her mother to live with them in an apartment over their garage. Koonja was afraid to go out and rarely answered her phone. She stopped eating. Cho asked her mother to teach her the traditional Korean dishes that were her favorite. During those hours of cooking and eating together, her mother told her stories about her early childhood, a sad and lonely and often terrifying existence, and one that contributed to the manifestation of her schizophrenia later in life.

Cho has made it her life’s work to research her mother’s condition and her Korean past. In this moving hybrid memoir, TASTES LIKE WAR, she blends scholarly research on schizophrenia, Korean history, and personal experiences into a richly layered narrative that gives greater understanding to the immigrant experience, intergenerational trauma, and mental illness.