Tastes Like War Quotes
"Food was her first line of defense against a deep and abiding fear of the Other that permeated the collective unconscious of the white working-class community in which we landed."
"Feeding others was a way of making a living and learning to live among people who saw her as always and only a foreigner."
"She possessed the gift of being a social chameleon, at turns a glamorous and alluring party hostess who introduced our rural American neighbors to the exotic flavors of Korea."
"She was a Korean born in imperial Japan under conditions of forced labor, who returned to a divided, occupied, and wartorn Korea and was later exiled for her transgression of sleeping with my American father."
"Her shrinking pantry was perhaps the first sign, the prelude to a mental agitation that would turn our garden fallow and our cupboards empty for years to come."
"I am tired of the same thing over and over. I wish things would change."
"My socially dead mother sat on the couch for years on end with the curtains closed, completely cut off from the outside world."
"Grace, you can be anything in the world. And you. Want. To be. A cook?"
"It seemed to me that she performed a magical feat each time she picked up a knife."
"Everyone used to tell me what pretty voice I have. I could be professional, you know."
"Her greatest wish was not to be a singer, but an educated person."
"My mother didn’t say a word. She just fixed her gaze on the wall, her eyes full of fury."
"My success could be her vindication, that my education could be her second chance."
"I searched for more opportunities to show off my newfound zoological knowledge."
"I studied hard, and as a result, I restored my mother’s faith that I had a brilliant future in academia."
"I learned that telling your mother you wanted to be a cook was such devastating news that it could make the trees in the backyard tremble at the sound of her outrage."
"By the age of thirty-three, I had spent eighteen years witnessing her struggles with schizophrenia."
"The entirety of my adult life had been shaped by my mother’s mental agony and my desire to make her want to live."
"More seasons passed and the number of years she stayed indoors surpassed the number of years she lived unfettered."
"In the Northeast, conifers were sparse, but there were lots of elms, whose death gave life to some of the most delicate mushrooms."
"People who are humiliated and abused and bullied are more likely to fall ill."
"The story of being on the wrong side of power."
"The smell of decay wafts in the late summer breeze."
"The sun will not come out for weeks at a time, and my mother will find new ways to spend her time indoors."
"Whatever you choose to call it, it took me a whole year to see that it was consuming her."
"Her illness wasn’t obvious at first because it was overshadowed by my father’s, which was recognizable in a way that mental illness never is."
"God isn’t a man in the sky. God is the sky. And the clouds, and the trees, and you and me."
"I can barely fathom how deep my father’s passion must have been for him to not see what he had done to me."
"My heart splintered when he hurled his accusation at me."
"It’s the horror of Green Hill, but it is also the strident anti-immigrant rhetoric that says This is an invasion, and it is NOT a "human right," the damaging Cold War that my mother faced on both sides of the Pacific."
"At fifteen, I didn’t know to question his age or experience."
"The belief in psychiatry was that the longer one waits to start treatment, the poorer the outcome."
"My father had been born a white male in America in 1919, just four years after Woodrow Wilson screened The Birth of a Nation in the White House."
"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."
"The United States is the worst place in the world to have a serious mental illness."
"I felt a sense of great accomplishment and relief that I had finally found a community, and not only was I a part of it, I was the "glue," according to Rafael."
"The fictions that had barely held my family together came bursting apart and threatened to break me along with them."
"In every memory I have of my mother’s first months on the East Coast, I am cold."
"Grace, your mom is doing this thing. This panicking thing."
"What is she talking about? My skin turned hot, barely able to contain the feelings of confusion bubbling beneath it."
"Even then I knew that she would kill me before she let me be a prostitute."
"My memory flickered with scenes of Halloween 1984 when Jenny and I had made a last-minute decision to go trick-or-treating."
"Her face was round and symmetrical with deep dimples and perfectly straight teeth, her complexion an even sandy brown."
"I can’t remember if the first drug my mother took was Haldol or Mellaril."
"The race issue has been like a stave driven into the American system of values."
"The public perception of schizophrenia was that it was a disease of violent aggression."
"The voices of the mentally ill are equivalent to the miner’s canary."
"What difference does it make if you’re in the car or in the store? You’re still outside."
"I haven’t had that for years … Why you go to so much trouble? Don’t cook all that."
"Mom, just think that the next time I see you, it’ll be spring."