Tastes Like War by Grace M. Cho [in Booklist]
*STARRED REVIEW
“In my lifetime, I’ve had at least three mothers,” Grace M. 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.
Review: “Fiction,” Booklist, April 1, 2021
Readers: Adult
Published: 2021
Discussion