Date/Time
Date(s) - 02/16/2023
1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
Location
Southeast Steuben County Library
Categories
You’re invited to an insightful chat with award-winning author Grace M. Cho as she discusses her memoir, Tastes Like War.
Grace M. Cho grew up as the daughter of a white American merchant marine and the Korean bar hostess he met abroad. They were one of few immigrants in a xenophobic small town during the Cold War, where identity was politicized by everyday details—language, cultural references, memories, and food. When Grace was fifteen, her dynamic mother experienced the onset of schizophrenia, a condition that would continue and evolve 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 for the roots of her mother’s schizophrenia. In her mother’s final years, Grace learned to cook dishes from her mother’s childhood in order to invite the past into the present, and to hold space for her mother’s multiple voices at the table. And through careful listening over these shared meals, Grace discovered not only the things that broke the brilliant, complicated woman who raised her—but also the things that kept her alive.
You can register for this free talk here.
This is one a new series of free, live-streamed author talks made possible through the Library’s partnership with Library Speakers Consortium (LSC). You can learn more about upcoming presentations on our LSC microsite, as well as watch recordings of presentations that you were unable to attend live.
About the author: Grace M. Cho is Associate Professor of Sociology at the College of Staten Island. Her work crosses disciplinary boundaries and seeks to engage popular audiences. Her first book, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy and the Forgotten War (University of Minnesota, 2008) which combined fiction, performance, autoethnography and sociological research. It won a 2010 book award from the American Sociological Association for its innovative methodology. Her second book, Tastes Like War, was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the winner of the 2022 Asian Pacific American Literature Award for Adult Nonfiction.