Grace M. Cho

Grace M. Cho is a sociologist and author whose memoir Tastes Like War, published in 2021, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography and was widely praised for its innovative blend of memoir, food writing, cultural theory, and Korean history. Cho is a professor of sociology at the College of Staten Island, CUNY, and her academic work explores the intersections of race, colonialism, trauma, and memory.

Her scholarly book Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (2008) examined the ways that the silence surrounding the Korean War and U.S. military prostitution in South Korea haunts the Korean American community through the concept of “hauntology.” This scholarly foundation informs the approach she brings to her memoir work, where rigorous theoretical frameworks serve the emotional truth of lived experience.

Tastes Like War is an account of Cho’s mother — a Korean woman who immigrated to the United States, married a white American man, and eventually developed schizophrenia — told through the lens of food. Each chapter moves between recipes, family memories, Korean history, and Cho’s attempts to understand her mother’s illness, her own mixed-race identity, and the colonial history that shaped both. The book is a formal innovation: it reads as memoir, critical theory, cookbook, and elegy simultaneously.

Cho has received fellowships and grants supporting her research and creative work. She is recognized as a significant figure in both Asian American studies and the contemporary memoir tradition, and her willingness to combine personal narrative with political and theoretical analysis has influenced a generation of writers working at similar intersections.