ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

In her memoir Tastes Like War (2021), Grace M. Cho revisits her mother’s life through food—a mother who died alone in the United States after living with schizophrenia. This food ranges from creatures her mother had to consume for survival, such as spiders and grasshoppers, during Japanese colonial rule and the Korean War, to discarded food waste from nearby U.S. military bases. Food also encompasses the acts her mother undertook after migrating to the United States with her white husband: cooking for her family, achieving economic independence from her husband, and engaging in all forms of gathering, cooking, processing, distributing, and selling driven by her hopes for the success of her children. Reflecting on her mother’s death from schizophrenia, Grace argues that, at least for the two of them, food is never merely a source of energy or nutrition for the body. For this mother and daughter, food is a tangible material through which they revisit the violent traces that empire, race, and gender have inscribed on their bodies, while simultaneously resisting these structures and constituting their own subjectivities. This article examines how food, centered on the mother’s experiences, both represents the entanglements of history, ideology, and race and reveals the emergence of the mother’s subjectivity. It also interprets food—through Grace’s experiences—as a site of healing that helps her understand her mother’s schizophrenia and mend the ruptured relationship between them. In this memoir, food is defined not as something flattened into the Korean dishes the mother once consumed, but as a material that enables Asian American women’s experiences of oppression and resistance, wounding and healing.

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