Grace Cho: "Tastes Like War"

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 mother’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.

About the Speakers

Grace M. Cho is the author of Tastes Like War (Feminist Press, 2021), a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award in nonfiction and the winner of the 2022 Asian Pacific American Literature Award in adult nonfiction. Her first book, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), received a 2010 book award from the American Sociological Association. Her writings have appeared in journals such as Catapult, The New Inquiry, Poem Memoir Story, Contexts, Gastronomica, Feminist Studies, Women's Studies Quarterly, and Qualitative Inquiry. She is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the College of Staten Island, CUNY.

Hosu Kim is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, and affiliated faculty of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the College of Staten Island and Critical Social Psychology program at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Her first book, Birth Mothers and Transnational Adoption Practice in South Korea: Virtual Mothering, published by Palgrave-Macmillan in 2016. It examines South Korea’s transnational adoption practice with a focus on the material, affective, and discursive processes of becoming birth mothers. She is currently exploring material processes and cultural practices of social repair at the sites of state and imperial violence in South Korea and Staten Island. Her research interests include transpacific critique of Asian/Asian America, disability studies and critical university studies. Her work appears in Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies, Qualitative Inquiry, Adoption & Culture, Body and Society among many others.

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