Tastes Like War

March 15, 2021
A Korean immigrant and sociology professor reevaluates her mother's past and their fraught relationship. When she was very young, Cho moved with her family from Korea to her father's small, conservative hometown in rural Washington with her half brother, her Korean mother, and her much older father, a merchant mariner who was at sea for half of the year. "In 1986, when I was fifteen," writes the author, [my mother] developed what psychiatrists call 'florid psychosis.' Florid. Such a beautiful image to describe the terror. A field of flowers from which my second mother bloomed." By the time she died, suddenly and mysteriously, in 2008, she was spending all her time in a "granny flat" in New Jersey in the house of Cho's brother and his wife. Every weekend, Cho, who was working on a doctoral dissertation and then a book about the Korean diaspora, traveled several hours to cook for her mother, an activity that "let me imagine her before she was my mother." In this probing, vividly written memoir, charged with the pain of losing "the person I loved most in the world," Cho moves fluidly around in time, touching on difficult as well as happy memories--e.g., her mother's former zest for foraging and baking dozens of blackberry pies. Using the tools she developed as a sociologist, as well as her own insights as a daughter, the author was able to shape an evocative portrait of her mother's past as "an adolescent in postwar South Korea under...the rising US military hegemony, who worked at a US naval base, selling drinks, and probably sex, to American military personnel." Though Cho refuses to settle on a specific explanation for her mother's illness, which creates some sense of an unresolved narrative, the author's re-creation of her family dynamic is haunting and filled with palpable emotion. A wrenching, powerful account of the long-term effects of the immigrant experience.

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Starred review from April 1, 2021
"In my lifetime, I've had at least three mothers," Cho writes. After surviving the Korean War, Cho's mother worked as a bar girl at a U.S. naval base during the U.S. occupation of South Korea. In 1971, she married Cho's father, a U.S. merchant mariner 22 years her senior and emigrated to his isolating, predominantly white hometown of Chehalis, Washington. Their tumultuous union engendered two marriages, multiple suicide attempts, and two divorces. As her first mother during Cho's childhood, Koonja was a social chameleon, a glamorous hostess who introduced the rural working-class community to Korean food. By the time Cho was 15, Koonja was hearing voices as an as-yet-undiagnosed schizophrenic who would devolve into a total shut-in. Her third mother emerged during Cho's thirties, one who cautiously shared fragments from her past, especially through precious, memory-inducing foods, until she died unexpectedly in 2008. Since then, Cho has been writing this book as "equal parts therapy and eulogy" as she laid bare her achingly symbiotic relationship with her enigmatic mother. Nearly two decades since Koonja's mysterious death, Cho "write[s] her back into existence, to let her legacy live on the page, and in so doing, trace [Cho's] own." The spectacular result is both an exquisite commemoration and a potent reclamation.

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Starred review from November 22, 2021
In this searing memoir, Cho (Haunting the Korean Diaspora) charts her Korean mother’s descent into schizophrenia while unpacking the ramifications of racism in America. In grappling with the disease that “erased her personhood,” but somehow always felt avoidable to Cho, she voraciously researched schizophrenia and found that her “mother’s case tick off five out of six boxes,” associated with its development: “social adversity... low socioeconomic status, physical or sexual trauma.... immigration and being a person of color in a white neighborhood.” Through meditative prose, Cho attempts to write her mother “back into existence,” illustrating how her mother’s circumstances growing up amid the horrors of the Korean War, marrying Cho’s American father in 1971, and landing in a small, overwhelmingly white (and prejudiced) town in Washington State all but created the perfect storm for her unraveling. By chronicling the stories of her “three mothers”—the “charismatic” mother of her 1970s childhood, who foraged for food in the woods; the one of her adolescence, who developed “florid psychosis,” and delusions about Ronald Reagan; and the mother who slowly let her adult daughter in, with food and cooking as the conduit—Cho hauntingly captures the fragility of life in its most painful and beautiful moments. This heartfelt and nuanced tribute is remarkable.