Tastes Like War: A Memoir

Cho (1971-) is the book’s author and first-person narrator. She is the second child of a Korean mother and a white American father, the author of two books, and an associate professor of sociology and anthropology at the City University of New York. Cho moved from Korea to Chehalis, Washington, in the United States when she was only a year old.

As a child, Cho excels academically and is eager to please her mother, who transferred her own wishes for a superior education to Cho. In accordance with her mother’s wishes, Cho represses her Korean cultural and linguistic background and does her best to assimilate into American culture. Cho’s awareness of racism begins when she is excluded, bullied, and stereotyped as a sexually permissive at school. This causes her to long for a bigger and more diverse town than Chehalis, where she can flourish and be accepted. Cho becomes the scholar her mother hope she would be, attending Brown and Harvard Universities and completing a doctoral program at the City University of New York. Through her academic work, Cho discovers the contexts surrounding her mother’s story and illness. Cho’s research rejects social taboo to better understand the complex dynamics of sex work in American army camps in Korea.