Grace M. Cho

This is a fascinating look at Cho's efforts to understand her mother, her mother's life and secrets, and her mother's adult-onset schizophrenia and its possible causes. This story moves from Washington to Korea and back, to the east coast. Cho and her brother and sister-in-law did their best to help their mother. But the unusualness of adult-onset schizophrenia caused Cho to look closer at her mother's life in Korea.

I found this book very interesting, as Cho's attitudes toward her mother and father and their communities shifted as she better understood each of them.

**Please see the review by Grace M Cho's brother under the pseudonym Daniel Cho ("Neville") on Goodreads. Grace Cho's brother, sister-in-law, and niece--who are all in the book--have fought strongly against it, claiming it to be full of lies (some of which can be proven with immigration records, birth certificates, and more).… (meer)

This book provides an interesting look at the aftermath of the Korean War. The author is the daughter of an American soldier stationed in Korea and a Korean woman who worked at the army base. The memoir deals primarily with the life of the author and her mother after they arrive in the small town to live with Grace's father. There is racism, and trying to fit in. I liked the way food was used to highlight cultural differences and expectations.

After Grace's mother becomes mentally ill (later diagnosed as schizophrenia), Grace begins to research what life was like for women during and immediately after the Korean war. She also tries to maintain a connections with her increasingly reclusive mother; and with her father who has left her mother. Again, food plays an important role in recalling memories and building bonds between mother and daughter.

I found the book interesting. There is a lot of jumping around in time periods, which was annoying and somewhat confusing at times. I was not aware of the controversy surrounding the authenticity of the story. Not great, but not bad either.… (meer)

Tastes Like War is a memoir written by the daughter of a Korean mother and American father. Growing up, Grace Cho had known her parents met when her father, a merchant marine, was stationed in Korea during the Korean War, and that her mother, a "war bride", was an exotic outsider in her father's economically depressed hometown in Washington State, but it wasn't until her mother changed so dramatically (and not until much later diagnosed with schizophrenia) that she started researching the condition of Korean women during the war and the long-buried trauma that was her mother's lifelong burden and probable cause of her mental illness and decline from vibrant, sexy suburban mother to the reclusive and paranoid person she she became.
I picked up Tastes Like War because it was selected as an OverDrive Big Library Read and it also fit the Massachusetts Center of the Book Reading Challenge for May -- nonfiction on a topic that is new to you. Even though I'm around the age of the author, I knew very little about the time of the Korean War. This memoir begins with Grace Cho's mother, who was an excellent cook but wanted her daughter to be a successful academic and discouraged her daughter's interest in cooking or any kind of manual labor, then branches out into numerous topics from a personal and sociological point of view -- how women of her mother's age were treated by the Korean government; how mental illness in women is diagnosed and treated; how preparing meals for her mother using recipes from her mother's Korean past releases her mother's long-buried emotions and stirs up memories.… (meer)