WATCH: Memoir, Trauma, and Healing for the Korean Diaspora with Grace M. Cho and Iris Yi Youn Kim
In our third Intergenerational Healing and Learning gathering, author and professor Grace M. Cho and journalist and writer Iris Yi Youn Kim presented their work and discussed how memoir can act as a vessel for unpacking and healing intergenerational trauma, especially for members of the Korean diaspora. In her interview with MOLD, Grace explained that many in the Korean diaspora live under the conditions of “enforced forgetting.” In gathering, we seek to remember and reclaim our histories.
Grace M. Cho’s work sits at the crossroads of creative nonfiction and interdisciplinary scholarship, exploring the ways in which residues of state violence and historical trauma permeate the intimate spaces of the here and now. As a sociologist, she approaches storytelling as an opportunity to broaden the lens through which readers see personal experience. In her memoir, Tastes Like War, Cho chronicles her mother’s struggle with schizophrenia and how her mother’s traumas from the war may have contributed to her mental illness. Iris is currently a 2024 NBCU Academy Storyteller. She was part of the 30 Under 30 Cohort that attended the 2023 Korea Peace Action national mobilization, and is currently working on a collection of essays about the reverberations of immigration and assimilation within Korean American communities.
Grace M. Cho is the author of Tastes Like War (Feminist Press, 2021), a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award in nonfiction and the winner of the 2022 Asian Pacific American Literature Award in adult nonfiction. Her first book, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), received a 2010 book award from the American Sociological Association. Her writings have appeared in The Nation, Catapult, The New Inquiry, Poem Memoir Story, Contexts, Gastronomica, Feminist Studies, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. She is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the College of Staten Island, CUNY.
Iris (Yi Youn) Kim is a 2024 NBCU Academy Storyteller. She is also a 2022 PEN Emerging Voices Fellow, a 2022 USC Center for Public Diplomacy U.S.-South Korea Creative NextGen Fellow, and a 2023 Gold House Journalism Futures Accelerator Participant. Her work was anthologized in Woodhall Press’ “Nonwhite and Woman” in September 2022. Iris was part of the 30 Under 30 Cohort that attended the 2023 Korea Peace Action national mobilization. She is currently working on a collection of essays about the reverberations of immigration and assimilation within Korean American communities.