Tastes Like War: A Memoir

Tastes Like War: A Memoir
ISBN-10
1952177952
ISBN-13
9781952177958
Category
Biography & Autobiography
Pages
293
Language
English
Published
2021-05-18
Publisher
Feminist Press at CUNY
Author
Grace M. Cho

Description

Finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction Winner of the 2022 Asian/Pacific American Award in Literature A TIME and NPR Best Book of the Year in 2021 This evocative memoir of food and family history is "somehow both mouthwatering and heartbreaking... [and] a potent personal history" (Shelf Awareness). 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. “An exquisite commemoration and a potent reclamation.” —Booklist (starred review) “A wrenching, powerful account of the long-term effects of the immigrant experience.” —Kirkus Reviews

Other editions

Similar books

  • Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War
    By Grace M. Cho

    Through intellectual vigor and personal recollection, Haunting the Korean Diaspora explores the repressed history of emotional and physical violence between the United States and Korea and the unexamined reverberations of sexual ...

  • Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War
    By Annia Ciezadlo

    The author discusses her marriage to a man from Beirut, the bond she forged with her Lebanese in-laws, and how she found love, good food, and a meaningful life, despite dividing her time between wartorn Iraq and Lebanon.

  • Tastes Like Cuba: An Exile's Hunger for Home
    By Eduardo Machado, Michael Domitrovich

    Filled with delicious recipes and powerful tales of family, loss, and self discovery, Tastes Like Cuba delivers the story of Eduardo’s rich and delectable life—reminding us that no matter where we go, there is no place that feels (and ...

  • Fifth Chinese Daughter
    By Jade Snow Wong

    This new edition includes the original illustrations by Kathryn Uhl and features an introduction by Leslie Bow, who critically examines the changing reception and enduring legacy of the book and offers insight into Wong’s life as an ...

  • My Brother
    By Jamaica Kincaid

    My Brother is an unblinking record of a life that ended too early, and it speaks volumes about the difficult truths at the heart of all families. My Brother is a 1997 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.

  • Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food
    By Lizzie Collingham

    World War II and the Battle for Food Lizzie Collingham ... 192 ; Johnston , Japanese Food Management , p . 128 . 33 Johnston , Japanese Food Management , p . 137 . 34 Kratoska , ' The impact of the Second World War ' , p . 9 .

  • Korean American: Food That Tastes Like Home
    By Eric Kim

    In this book of recipes and thoughtful insights, especially about his mother, Jean, Eric divulges not only what it means to be Korean American but how, through food and cooking, he found acceptance, strength, and the confidence to own his ...

  • Living by Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons
    By Evan A. Kutzler

    Edmund E. Ryan Diary, September [no day], 1864, PHSC. 32. John S. Ward to Louis Wigfall, “My Dear Sir,” April 21, 1862, Camp Chase, Ohio, Papers, Folder 10, VAHS. 33. Gower and Allen, Pen and Sword, 659. 34.

  • This Is How You Lose the Time War
    By Max Gladstone, Amal El-Mohtar

    There’s still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win. That’s how war works, right? Cowritten by two beloved and award-winning sci-fi writers, This Is How You Lose the Time War is an epic love story spanning time and space.

  • Comfort Woman
    By Nora Okja Keller

    One of my sisters ate only McDonald's Happy Meal cheese-burgers (no pickle), and the other survived for two years on a diet of processed-cheese sandwiches on white bread, Hostess Ding Dongs, and rice dunked in ketchup.