Tastes Like War by Grace M. Cho

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tastes Like War by Grace M. Cho Sunhay You (bio) Tastes Like War, by Grace M. Cho. New York: Feminist Press, 2021, 296 pp. ISBN: 9781952177941. An “unintended sequel” to Haunting the Korean Diaspora, Grace Cho’s memoir, Tastes Like War, engages in a sociological mode of storytelling (6). Her voice is familiar, evoking the autoethnographic portions of her first book: an “experimental writing voice . . . intended to show the mixing up of fact and fiction, of self and other, so neither a discreet narrator nor a clear storyline is always [End Page 143] present” (203). True to her commitments to unraveling the limits of a discreet authorial subject, Cho weaves together Korean recipes, psychological texts, history, personal anecdotes, and dreams to uncover the tacit knowledge that lies in the wake of her mother’s schizophrenia. The memoir peels away at the insights of her first book, revealing another US imperial structure of shame and secrecy besides the military bride: mental disability. In the opening prologue, Cho claims that she was raised by at least three different mothers. The mother of her early childhood is a charismatic entrepreneur who sells foraged wild blackberries while supporting other racial minorities. Cho’s teenage years mark the onset of her mother’s schizophrenia, when she becomes a “prisoner to the voices that told her to stop doing the things she used to do” (3). In her thirties, Cho begins to observe her mother's vivacious qualities return while teaching Cho how to cook Korean food. The breaks in these three mothers organize the breaks between parts 2 to 4 of the memoir, the prologue and part 1 offering the sociological framework to her storytelling. As Cho cites throughout the first section, theories on the relationship between mental disability and structures of racial-sexual violence are relatively new. While research on schizophrenia from the 1970s and 80s explains the condition as “the result of a bad gene,” more recent studies suggest that schizophrenia is symptomatic of a social disease as much as a biological anomaly (4). Referring to T. M. Lurhmann’s 2016 study Our Most Troubling Madness: Studies in Schizophrenia, Cho explains that five of the six risk factors associated with schizophrenia apply to her mother: low socioeconomic status, childhood adversity, physical or sexual trauma, immigration, and “being a person of color in a white neighborhood” (56). Indeed, besides narratives of her mother’s passage to the United States as a military bride, many of Cho’s early recollections of her mother take place in Chehalis, Washington. She notes that the city is known for having hosted a regional meeting of approximately seventy thousand members of the KKK in 1924, a legacy of white supremacy that continues today. Cho’s mother grows especially paranoid about being a target of “the John Birch Society, a radical right-wing organization founded in 1958 and named after an American who had been killed by the Chinese at the end of World War II” (136). Through these details,Cho demonstrates how her mother’s experiences of racial-sexual violence undergird developments in her schizophrenic paranoia, which would later confine her to the home, the curtains drawn and cabinets closed on a dwindling supply of food. In part 3, Cho delves into the structural obstacles she faced as a teenager trying to help her mother in the absence of such a nuanced understanding of schizophrenia. A doctor at the local mental health center told her that if her mother was in danger of hurting someone, the police could force her mother [End Page 144] to seek treatment. Given her age and inability to convince her mother of her schizophrenia, Cho resorts to calling the police after aggravating one of her mother’s schizophrenic episodes. This event plants a seed of mistrust that casts a shadow over Cho’s future attempts to care for her mother. These careful and honest observations present a wide-spanning cognitive map of institutional structures, histories, and cultural forces that have impacted her mother's mental health as a military bride. Anecdotes about the healing power of food interrupt the more daunting stories of racial-sexual violence that give shape to her mother...