Tastes Like War by Grace M. Cho
“Feeding others allowed her to transcend her origins. It was a testament to her survival and her hope for the future.”
Tastes like War by Grace M. Cho (2021). Published by the Feminist Press.
I loved Crying in H Mart, and so when I saw the blurb for this book, I thought of it immediately. I think it’s inevitable to compare the two in the time I’m writing this post, in October of 2021, because of the fact that they came out in the same time span. One (Crying in H Mart) got more mainstream attention, as Zauner is a major player in the indie music scene, but Tastes Like War was on the shortlist for the National Book Award. Both deal with mother relationships, the lack of a father one at times, being mixed and Korean-American in the United States, and food as memory.
I don’t want this review to be a comparison of the two books, but I will close that thought chain with I liked Tastes with War more than Crying in H Mart. I was discussing this book with someone I knew online, and she described them as the micro versus the macro. And I wholeheartedly agree with her perspective.
There are major trigger warnings attached to this book, however, that must be spelled out. Our memoirist’s mother is a survivor of the Korean War, which is pivotal to her identity, and was a prostitute who has dealt with sexual abuse and the blatant aspects of American imperialism that was present in South Korea in the era immediately after the Korean War.
More on that later, however, since this is only the introduction to this post. I’ve written quite a bit already, so let’s open the discussion for this review up.
Content
Grace M. Cho, the author of this memoir, is a mixed Korean-American living in a small town in Northwestern America. Her mother was a prostitute back in South Korea at the American base, and her father, who was twenty years older than her mother, was a soldier stationed in Asia at the time. As we delve deeper into the memoir, we discover the roots of privilege within Cho’s white father, as he is from a small town known for its Ku Klux Klan presence.
Which, as a mixed child of this person, is horrifying when combined with the fact that that Cho was indeed bullied for the fact she wasn’t white enough, but her mother was rejected from Korean society because she had married an American soldier after being a prostitute. Her mother has so much trauma in her life—she lost the majority of her family by the time she was an adult due to the Korean War, has entered a completely different society where she is literally rejected from, and has a past as a sexual prostitute.
Food is a critical aspect of this novel, if not even the binding glue that keeps it together. Cho’s mother is a Korean woman who tried to assimilate into this very-white town, almost succeeding by the time that she leaves it, and she, like many others, misses the food that she had back in Korea. This leads to trips to Seattle to buy an entire store’s worth of napa cabbage in order to have enough kimchi until she could make the next visit, learning how to forage for mushrooms, blackberries, and seaweed to have the chance to get fresh supplies that often weren’t as sold in American grocery stores near them. Whenever new Korean individual make their way across this town, Cho’s mother is prepared to make them more comfortable.
This then leads us to another big part of Cho’s life: her mother’s schizophrenia. Cho guessed that her mother had it in the early eighties, but no one in that time period knew what to do, let alone acknowledge the issue. Her father and brother yelled at her, asking why she dared to ask such a sinful thing. And so it was left untouched, although Cho explicitly states that something was clearly wrong, until 1986, when her mother is officially diagnosed with the disease.
What I liked most about this memoir is that Cho clearly holds a PhD in sociology in the way that she analysis the lingering impacts of war and colonialism on her family. We have her father, born into a small KKK town in 1919, who clearly exemplifies the ideologies of the time. He is against her being potentially bisexual, and presents Asian women in a way that almost seems like a fetish to an outsider. He considers himself worldly because he was traveling the world during his lifetime, but if you look at how he did it, it was because he was in the military that was, essentially, colonizing and policing these territories. He nor her mother was educated, so when Cho gets into an Ivy League (Brown), it becomes a point of celebration.
But it’s the mother’s story that is more interesting. There’s an interesting thread, one in which it’s mentioned that traumatic incidents make or even trigger these kinds of mental illnesses. Rarely do we see narratives of women who have survived wars. It’s always about the men, our quote-on-quote boys and soldiers, and how they have suffered because of these events. And Cho’s mother is one of those girls. Only a young woman when the war started and ended, by 1962 the majority of her family was dead or missing. Then being a prostitute is traumatic in itself, then moving to a foreign country and being treated like an outsider adds another layer.
It’s a blend of food memoir, sociology, and personal history, which is a fascinating mix. I think it works well because Cho has smooth, fluid writing and is clear in her ideas and thoughts, and the fact that Cho dedicated her life to this. This is the basis of her work. She learned to cook these old-school Korean dishes in order to feed her struggling mother, did so much for her despite the regrets that she probably has. I really enjoyed this sad tale, thought it was tastefully done.
Overall Thoughts
It’s a well-done book, and I think that most people should probably read this in tandem with Crying in H Mart. It gives a lot of context that the other memoir lacks, but helps fill in the blanks if you don’t know anything about South Korea immediately after the Korean War. It also is more digestible because we have one woman, Cho’s mother, to embody the tragedy that occurred in the country at the time. This is a sad fact about tragedy—we often dissociate with it until we find out about someone who was involved in said tragedy. Then it becomes so much more human, because we have a person right there in front of us who has lost everything or someone in an event that should’ve never occurred. Think this book completely deserves the NBA nomination.
