In the new memoir, Tastes Like War, Cho chronicles her efforts to reconnect with her mother as an adult. She details the hardships Koonja faced as a child both during the Korean War and later, in a shattered Korean economy. Cho says that after the war, her mother was likely a sex worker catering to American personnel stationed in Korea. Her traumas, Cho believes, may have contributed to her mental illness.
“I have more questions about it than I do answers because there’s so much that I don’t know,” she says of her mother’s past. “Growing up, she never told me what she did in Korea. I often asked her, but she would not answer me. She would just sort of stare at the wall and act as if I wasn’t speaking to her.” {listen}