Tastes Like War: A Memoir

by Grace M. Cho

“You need to clean your pots, Grace, or else people will think you don’t have ambition.”

Baking, for my mother, was a way to become American. Baking was a way to forget.

“Work with your mind, not your body!” she would urge whenever I expressed an interest in physical labor, like the first time I took a job in a restaurant kitchen.

was sympathetic to these points of view and agreed that women could find power in their sexuality, that using it for profit or livelihood should be legitimated.

When sex work is sponsored by the state to service a foreign military (the most powerful military in the world), when the relationship between the two countries is profoundly unequal, then the working conditions are already rooted in a place of coercion.

Survival is an act of resistance, but performing an act of resistance within an imperialistic order is not the same thing as “being a prostitute by choice.” Forced or free is a false dichotomy.

realization that no matter how many pies she baked, no matter how good they were, she could not resurrect the sense of accomplishment that she had once garnered from her pies. Baking had turned into a worthless pursuit.

Americans spoke of “war,” as in, “They want to take me to war with them,” or their “suicide voice” asking, “Why don’t you end your life?” By contrast, those in India instructed their hearers to do domestic chores—cook, clean, eat, bathe, to “go to the kitchen, prepare food.”3

I went through my own process of psychic decolonization during those years of cooking for her. The meals we shared nurtured me through the emotionally taxing work that I was doing in graduate school.

All we could really count on was now, and if I knew that, why didn’t I turn around and stay the night? In the coming weeks, I would torture myself with this question, then try to extinguish it by telling myself that it wouldn’t have made a difference.