Food and nation, or consuming ethnicity, or some other interesting title

[oyceter]

jonquil had an interesting comment on my giant rambling post on cooking Chinese food (among many other things) and on being Chinese, which made me start wondering just why it is that I take offense to suggestions to cook American food. And my knee-jerk reaction is taking offense, which is sort of strange once I sit down and think about it, given that I eat pretty much every kind of food and enjoy going out and hunting for new foods to eat. I think if people were to suggest things like a great recipe for pad thai or for palak paneer or for hummus, I would be much more amenable.

I tend to associate food with home (most people do, yes? or just me?), and I associate home with Taiwan. I also associate Chinese food with being Chinese. Maybe I am saying things that are completely obvious to everyone, but I only started really thinking this out today, so it's still interesting to me to watch the paths my brain takes. Probably more importantly, I associate American food with being American, which is a big part of my mixed reaction.

So for anyone who had no idea: I was born in the States and lived here until I was eight, which is when my family picked up and moved to Taiwan (where my parents were born and raised). Contrary to now, I hated Taiwan the first few years I lived there. It was hot, it was humid, and everyone spoke a language I sucked at (Mandarin Chinese, though now I think it is shifting more to Taiwanese, which I don't even have a rudimentary understanding of). And everyone ate really weird food. I don't actually remember that much of what I ate back in Colorado, but I'm pretty sure we didn't go out to eat in Chinese restaurants all that often, given that there weren't all that many back then. In Taiwan, my parents were probably overjoyed to finally be able to eat good Chinese food again, and we went out to Chinese restaurants a lot. Also, there just weren't as many western restaurants back then, much less American goodies like Doritos or Oreos. Anyhow, there was much culture shock on my part, and food was very closely associated with this. One of my very first memories of Taiwan is being taken to a traditional marketplace in which various vendors had hunks of raw meat lying out, whole chickens and ducks, fish and etc. It was very dirty, very noisy, and very strange. The one thing I remember most was the stand that sold frogs (for eating), and half peeking to grimace at the frog vendor taking out live frogs and chopping them in half for consumption. Needless to say, I was a very grossed-out kid.

My parents tried to get me to eat slightly more traditional Chinese food in Taiwan -- frog legs (my mom lied and told me it was chicken), raw clams, jellyfish, etc. My mom would always ask me to just take one bite, and if I didn't like it, I wouldn't have to eat it. If she ever did manage to get me to take a bite, I would almost certainly say I didn't like it if only for the principle of the matter. There were specific foods I liked, especially spring rolls and hu fun (flat rice noodles), but usually I would throw screaming fits about going to eat at Chinese restaurants again and again and again. I wanted to be an American girl, not a Chinese girl who had to eat weird food, and as a reflection of that, I wanted to eat things like mashed potatoes and pizza and macaroni and cheese.

After a few years in Taiwan, I started becoming more and more used to it and liking it more. But I think the general feeling that America was a superior country was a fairly common one in my school (bilingual, set up just for people like me, whose parents had moved back from abroad with their possibly non-Chinese-speaking kids). Shopping in America was better, the politics and government were better, and it was all in all a better place to live, so lots of people said. Plus, Doritos. And while this was going on, I was starting to get more and more attached to Taiwan, and so there was this awkward position of trying to defend it while not really being a part of it -- much as though I love my school, it was definitely a bubble of expat kids. So food and language and culture all got tangled up in my mind into one large messy ball of ethnicity and nationality.

I gradually started getting more adventurous in my eating habits, but the really big change happened when I went to summer school in tenth grade and ate American cafeteria food for three weeks. Around halfway through, I had taken to regaling my (probably long-suffering) mom with long lists of all the food I wanted to eat once I got out of summer school -- spring rolls, shrimp, fried noodles, soup, even plain white rice. After that, I started trying more food at a more rapid pace. By the time I graduated from high school, I was still a fairly picky eater compared to my classmates (I wouldn't touch pig-blood rice cakes, for example), and I did know this. It was somehow equated in my mind with racial/cultural authenticity, along with language skills. I've always been made fun of for my strongly accented Chinese, and I think I may have started daring myself to eat more and more to make up for that feeling of constant inadequacy.

I've always known what I ate was different from what most people ate at home in the States, but all the information I had about that was mostly gleaned from cafeteria food, restaurants, and popular culture. I never really realized it until I came to the States for college. My family usually spent summer vacations around California or Ohio every year, so I was still mostly familiar with the feel of the place, but it was still incredibly shocking being deposited in New Jersey, really away from home for the first time. I remember looking at all the faces around me and laughing to myself at Princeton's diversity group talk -- not because I thought Princeton was un-diverse, as a lot of the freshmen were saying, but because my high school had been so incredibly homogenous. We had all been roughly around the same social class, with very similar background experiences. Not only that, but our parents all had very similar experiences as well, most having moved to the States for grad school and back to Taiwan around the nineties. And, of course, there was pretty much zero racial diversity in my high school, except instead of being all white, we were all Asian. Being around so many people from so many different social situations was very startling, even though Princeton really isn't the most diverse place ever (to understate it).

I've always been very suscept to homesickness, and for years in Taiwan I had been developing this sort of Taiwan-pride attitude to counter much of the "America is the best place on earth" attitude that many other people at my school had. Nowadays, overt statements of American superiority still inspire a knee-jerk reaction of "Is not!" in me, even though the same statements on Canada or the UK or China or something probably would not (ok, China probably would, but for entirely different reasons). So it was very strange having to adapt to the environment, and I very much felt like a fish out of water. Aside from the international kids, whom I met during pre-orientation but wasn't good at keeping in touch with, there were very few people there who had had the same kind of wrenching experience of living in another country, of shifting loyalties. I was very surprised when I found out some guys down the hall didn't own a passport. I can't imagine not owning a passport. And much of this difference was emphasized most by food.

That's probably not surprising, given that when my family goes to a foreign country and gets a little homesick, the first thing we do is look for a Chinese restaurant. For one, the owners are usually Chinese, and there's that implicit shared experience of being just a bit out of place. And eating the food I've eaten since being a kid has a sense of easy familiarity, of expectedness, like re-reading a favorite book. I lost fifteen pounds my freshman year, partly because I was depressed and partly because the cafeteria food actually made me physically nauseous for several months. It took me a good while to get used to a diet of mostly American food, and I'm still not quite. I can eat it for long stretches at a time, but every so often, I need to eat something vaguely Asian. This was unfortunately pretty difficult in college, given the severe lack of good Chinese restaurants around the area. So in a funny reverse, instead of longing for Chips Ahoy and mac and cheese like I used to when I was a kid in Taiwan, I started daydreaming about my mom's cooking.

And there was also culture shock to deal with. I had expected that most people there wouldn't eat like I did, but it still managed to surprise me. After the first scary food experiences of Taiwan, I figured that most people would be a little freaked out by chickens (or fish or shrimp) with the heads still on, along with frog legs and assorted inner organs and the like, just like I had been. But there were foods that I had completely taken for granted, like rice noodles and mung bean noodles and red bean paste, things that I've eaten for my entire life and never thought of as strange -- when I talked about those to people or brought them back with me from Taiwan, I got these weird looks and comments that they had never seen those things before. That was the big shocker. I tried feeding red bean paste pastries and green bean cakes to the guys down the hall, because they've always been a favorite of mine since childhood, and was completely surprised when they took a few bites and spit it back out. All these things I had taken for granted were suddenly exoticized and foreign in a way they had never been before.

Similarly, all the familiar American foods that I had read about in books, like meatloaf and brussel sprouts and spinach (I will never understand why spinach is a reviled kid's vegetable), were strange and exotic to me, despite their nominal familiarity. In a way, it felt like my world was being turned inside out -- everything normal to me was foreign to everyone else, and everything they took for granted was new and foreign to me. It was stranger still because I was so used to being identified as "American" or as an ABC back in Taiwan, and I was much more familiar with American culture than with Taiwan's (book-wise, mostly, because as stated before, my Chinese sucks and reading Chinese was painful. Also, I've never been good at following popular culture in any country). So suddenly I was this foreign person in America, while before I had always been tagged as an American person in Taiwan. Nothing fit.

So I started self-identifying as Chinese more and thinking of "from Taiwan" as a label, and I took a strange sort of pride in that. And having been made fun of so many times back in Taiwan for not knowing Chinese well enough, for not really paying attention in Chinese history classes and the like, I started digging my feet in and attempting to deliberately connect myself with Taiwan. Of course, no one was urging me to be more American directly, but there were always these little subtle things on how I should know more about American pop culture, that perpetually annoying face of disbelief that accompanied questions like, "You've never seen (popular movie)?!" After several weeks of that, I started really wanting to kick people and say, "Guess what? I spent half of my life in another country! Not everything is centered around your experience!" Usually people were pretty good and didn't do it too often, but after many accumulated comments, I always wanted to take it out on the next unfortunate innocent who asked. I think after being thought of as foreign for long enough, people either try to eradicate signs of foreignness and attempt to fit in, or do the equivalent of thumbing their nose and flaunt the foreignness. I did the first bit in Taiwan and the second bit in America. And part of that thumbing of the nose included eating what was generally thought of as weird things. The more foreign, the better.

A very long story to explain why I will try Persian eagerly but still balk at learning American recipes. And another thought -- maybe cooking feels too personal, somehow. Going out to eat in restaurants is fun and experiemental, but cooking feels like one is bringing some bit of culture back home and making it your own. Er, or maybe that's just me. But it's heavily associated with my mom and with learning from my mom in my head. It feels like it should be a sort of tradition, like learning how to make your mom's famous meatballs or something. Also, I feel guilty for some reason for not knowing how to really cook Chinese food. I know it would be incredibly easy to learn how to cook more western-style food, given the fact that I am already addicted to the Food Network and how much more widely available western-style cookbooks are. But learning it feels almost like a betrayal in some ways, yet another way I am becoming more and more Americanized (when I was already pretty not-Chinese to begin with). It gets harder and harder each year I live here to remember my Chinese, to remember to celebrate certain holidays, and learning to cook western food before learning to cook Chinese feels like yet another step down that path. Of course, this is all entirely hypocritical, given that if there were an American living in Taiwan among the same sort of situation refusing to learn to cook Chinese, I would feel like they were very unopen to change.

In conclusion, I am very confused.