Grace M. Cho emigrated to the U.S. as a baby, with her Korean mother and her father, a white American who served in the Merchant Marines. They settled in a small, rural town in Washington state, where they were among the only immigrants in the community. "Children used to tease me and bully me for being Asian," Cho says. "I also started to notice that these kinds of things also happened to my mother, sometimes in ways that were even more dramatic than what I had experienced." In those early years, Cho's mother, Koonja, turned to the kitchen as a way to cope. She cooked elaborate meals for their white neighbors and for Cho's teachers, and she began foraging the nearby forests for wild mushrooms and blackberries. But when Cho was a teenager, Koonja suddenly stopped foraging — which Cho found surprising, since that had been one of her mother's favorite activities. Cho also noticed that her mother began talking to herself. "It sounded like she was arguing with somebody who wasn't in the