Tastes Like War Quotes

“There was my personal debt of knowing that her singular motivation had always been to give her children a life of opportunity, but there were also societal debts—American society’s debt to the immigrants who make their food, clean their toilets, raise their children; Korean society’s debt to the droves of young women who put their bodies and sexual labor on the front lines of national security, to whom no one would ever speak the words “thank you for your service.”1 In neither case were the debtees treated with gratitude. Instead, the debtors would make them into the cause of society’s ills, the very things that needed to be eradicated.”
― Grace M. Cho, Tastes Like War: A Memoir

“How many times had women who told the truth been muzzled with the label of madness?”
― Grace M. Cho, Tastes Like War: A Memoir

“Ironically, years after publishing my first book, I’d receive an email criticizing me for portraying Korean camptown women as having been prostitutes “by choice.” The person had come to this conclusion because I hadn’t simply portrayed them as “forced.” In my reply, I countered that I would never use that term—“by choice”—because the idea of choice was far too troubled in the context I was writing about. 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. It was true that many of the women who were sex workers for the US military were not tricked or trafficked, but neither did they have other good options. I had written that, despite how limited one’s choices are, there is always possibility for resistance. Maybe some of the women had embraced their roles as “bad girls”—a “fuck you” to patriarchal expectations of wifedom and motherhood—or maybe some had seized an opportunity to get closer to America. Working in the camptowns was the most likely path there for young Korean women in the 1960s. Even sex work for sheer survival is a way of defying a power structure that might otherwise leave you for dead. 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.”
― Grace M. Cho, Tastes Like War: A Memoir

“The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.”
― Grace M. Cho, Tastes Like War: A Memoir

“She escaped Korea only to find that American society devalued her, too—this gray country, this violent foster home … land where they stuff our throats with soil &accuse us of gluttony when we learn to swallow it.3”
― Grace M. Cho, Tastes Like War: A Memoir

“Again and again, I’d return to the words of Adul de Leon, a sex worker activist from the Philippines: “[American feminists] spend all their time arguing about whether or not prostitution can be a free choice. We women from Third World countries got really bored with their fighting. Our issues around prostitution are different.”1 Having the “right to choose not to be a prostitute” was more urgent.”
― Grace M. Cho, Tastes Like War: A Memoir

“To me, she was some butch forest goddess, earth mother, and breadwinner all wrapped in one,”
― Grace M. Cho, Tastes Like War: A Memoir

“Above all, I am thankful to my mother for teaching me the value of an unconventional mind.”
― Grace M. Cho, Tastes Like War: A Memoir

“So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.”
― Grace M. Cho, Tastes Like War: A Memoir

“And thus, in another, more subtle way, she ruptured the discourse that the American family/nation was our savior, to whom we owed everything.”
― Grace M. Cho, Tastes Like War: A Memoir

“I’m sorry about your mother, Professor.” “Thank you. It was really sudden. I don’t know what it means, but part of me thinks that she was trying to let me go. I spent so many years taking care of her, and I wonder if this was her way of giving me permission to go ahead and live my own life.”
― Grace M. Cho, Tastes Like War: A Memoir

“I had grown so accustomed to my father’s absences from my life that the finality of this one wouldn’t fully register for months to come. Because his death had been drawn out over decades of heart disease and hospitals and constant low-grade misery, decades of him talking about and planning for his own demise. “This is for when I expire,” he used to say. Because his mortality had loomed over me my whole life. I had grown numb to the idea of him dying, and perhaps the numbness was also borne out of our years of conflict and estrangement, his neglect of my mother, and my growing consciousness about social injustice and the way he symbolized the power that my mother didn’t have. With all of that, what was my grieving supposed to look like?”
― Grace M. Cho, Tastes Like War: A Memoir

“my father became the main object of my criticism. 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.”
― Grace M. Cho, Tastes Like War: A Memoir

“Three of them had always been associated with poor mental health outcomes: social adversity during childhood, low socioeconomic status, and physical or sexual trauma. But the other two are less obvious from the outside: immigration and being a person of color in a white neighborhood.”
― Grace M. Cho, Tastes Like War: A Memoir

“Because psychotics are not viewed as capable of loving or being loved.”
― Grace M. Cho, Tastes Like War: A Memoir

“Feeding others was a way of making a living and learning to live among people who saw her as always and only a foreigner. It was at once a gesture of nurturance and an act of resistance. And in the repetition of these acts, she created her own worth.”
― Grace M. Cho, Tastes Like War: A Memoir

“She grabbed my hand and looked into my eyes. “Now I realize they are wrong. You really do love me.”
― Grace M. Cho, Tastes Like War: A Memoir

“Oh. You are not one of those, are you?” But a moment later she patted my thigh. “Of course I still love you. Hmph! What kind of person don’t love their own children?”
― Grace M. Cho, Tastes Like War: A Memoir

“When the air returned to my lungs, I threw it at him and screamed with the entire force of my body, “Who do you think you’re talking to? I’m your Asian daughter!” My father stared and stuttered. “But—but—what are you talking about? You—you’re not Black.” “I’m not white either!”
― Grace M. Cho, Tastes Like War: A Memoir

“My father had been attributing her erratic behavior to menopause, but he probably held an antiquated view that “madness” associated with “the change of life” was not madness at all—not a serious affliction to be taken seriously—but a women’s malady.4”
― Grace M. Cho, Tastes Like War: A Memoir

“I would leave it to him to figure out the lie. The truth was just too complicated.”
― Grace M. Cho, Tastes Like War: A Memoir

“—AUDRE LORDE, “A Litany for Survival”*”
― Grace M. Cho, Tastes Like War: A Memoir

“It took the writing of not only that book, but also an unintended sequel [The Red Parts], for me to undo this knot, and hand its strands to the wind.”
― Grace M. Cho, Tastes Like War: A Memoir

“I had enjoyed every freedom in the world, but I reminded myself that my interest in incarceration was rooted in the experience of caring for my mother, who, under slightly different circumstances, could also have been institutionalized in a “correctional facility.”
― Grace M. Cho, Tastes Like War: A Memoir

“Without my mother, I started to feel like no one cared that I was a professor.”
― Grace M. Cho, Tastes Like War: A Memoir