Tastes Like War: A Memoir

by Grace M. Cho

And I did in fact lose her to a kind of death—one where she withdrew from the social, a death in which society rendered her worthless and disposable. It was a stereotype that erased her personhood, and especially her motherhood. Because psychotics are not viewed as capable of loving or being loved.

She offered kimchi as a balm for their dislocations because she understood that the everyday acts of eating and cooking preserved a connection to the people and places that one left behind. By inserting herself into the scene of induction, my mother also gave presence to the Korean kinship ties that had been lost or erased. And thus, in another, more subtle way, she ruptured the discourse that the American family/nation was our savior, to whom we owed everything.

The very thing that he had worked so hard for—my first-class education—was also the thing that created a gulf between us so wide and deep that we could never again stand on common ground.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite. —JOY HARJO, “Perhaps the World Ends Here”