Tastes Like War by Grace Cho

This is my second memoir written by a mixed race Korean woman about her upbringing in a profoundly racist town and her relationship with a now dead mother. This one has an anchor in the Korean War, which is a layer of trauma that bleeds into the current generation. It is also a food memoir of sorts, a catalog of what she and her family cooked and ate and refused to eat. Food is a way for the author to measure her mother’s life, from a youth dismantled by the Korean War to her stint as a waitress and a sex worker at a bar that catered to US servicemen; from her marriage to Cho’s father to her emigration to small-town Washington state to and her long decline as a result of schizophrenia. “In my lifetime I’ve had at least three mothers,” Cho writes: healthy, sick, and sicker still." The understanding and experience of mental illness is told from a lay perspective, but interesting and instructive.