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"Grace M. Cho grew up in a small, rural American town as the daughter of a white American merchant marine and the Korean bar hostess he met abroad. When Grace was fifteen, her Korean mother experienced the onset of schizophrenia, a condition that would continue for the rest of her life. Part food memoir, part sociological investigation, TASTES LIKE WAR is a hybrid text about a daughter's search through intimate and global history to understand herself and the cultural roots of her mother's condition"--

This piece is an experimental autoethnographic text that juxtaposes the author's childhood experiences of growing up as a mixed-race Korean immigrant in a xenophobic small town in the United States with her mother's dreams of migrating from Korea to America. The story of the family is contextualized within the history of the Korean War and postcolonial Korea and is based on several conversations the author had with her mother and aunt, in addition to her research on the Korean War and its aftermath. It reveals the many physical and symbolic disappearances in both the author's family and Korean diaspora.

Sociologist Grace M. Cho investigates the origins of a Korean dish called budae jjigae ("military base stew") and reveals its layered meanings for Korean American diasporic identity.

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Acknowledgments -- Foreword: What Affects Are Good For -- Introduction -- The Parched Tongue -- Techno-Cinema: Image Matters in the Affective Unfoldings of Analog Cinema and New Media -- Slowness: Notes toward an Economy of Différancial Rates of Being -- Myocellular Transduction: When My Cells Trained My Body-Mind -- Women's Work and the Ambivalent Gift of Entropy -- Voices from the Teum: Synesthetic Trauma and the Ghosts of the Korean Diaspora -- In Calcutta, Sex Workers Organize -- More Than a Job: Meaning, Affect, and Training Health Care Workers -- Haunting Orpheus: Problems of Space and Time in the Desert -- Always on Display: Affective Production in the Modeling Industry -- The Wire -- Losses and Returns: The Soldier in Trauma -- Bibliography -- Contributors -- Index