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.

Comments

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

*g* You realize, of course, that pretty much all "american food" is imported or adapated from somewhere else?

I'm just saying.

[oyceter]

LOL. I used to mind-boggle myself wondering what the Italians did before the importation of the tomato.

Though I suppose one could also argue that the importation and adaptation has formed its own unique mix and that despite the disparate backgrounds, most people would probably think "American" or "Western-style" when confronted with hamburgers or mac and cheese.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Ours is a fusion cuisine....

My family's mostly immigrants, so I have stuff from both sides. I also make Asian-inspired food, some franchified stuff, and Tex-Mex.

I figure if I cook it, it's American!

[katie-m.livejournal.com]

Really interesting post--thanks for writing it.

RE the pop culture stuff... if you lived in the US until you were eight, and then lived bilingually after that, do you speak accentless English? Because I know I'd be more likely to forget to make internal "oh, right, duh, from another country" allowances for someone who sounds American.

[oyceter]

if you lived in the US until you were eight, and then lived bilingually after that, do you speak accentless English? Because I know I'd be more likely to forget to make internal "oh, right, duh, from another country" allowances for someone who sounds American

You know, I have no idea! I've had people say that they can't tell I'm from somewhere else, and I've had people say that while I don't have a typical Chinese accent, that I have this sort of strange or not-quite-normal cadence when I speak. I also pronounce a lot of things strangely because I learned them via books instead of via hearing. I think I phrase things differently? Not quite sure. Is my LJ sort of "accented"?

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

I get it.

When I was cooking Thai and Szechuan and Indonesian, I was being rebellious and adventurous and daring. I wasn't going to eat what they thought I should eat.

When somebody tells you to be American, it feels like they're trying to bland you down. It's conforming, not stretching your boundaries.

I bet you a million billion dollars there's somebody in the Bay Area who teaches basic Chinese cooking to recent immigrants who never learned at home.

[oyceter]

Something like that? It's a bit hard to tell at times, because it's a giant muddled mess in my head trying to figure out what is foreign and exotic and what is normal. You'd think after having to write half a dozen college essays on this I would have figured something out ;).

I really should try to dig up a teacher. Or bug my mom for her recipes some time, in writing, so I don't forget like I usually do when she tries to tell me over the phone.

[rahael.livejournal.com]

This, and the previus thread Oyceter links to is hugely interesting.

I'm also an immigrant living in the West who primarily cooked only the food of my motherland before branching out into the exotic of French and English cooking. It was 6 years of only ever ever cooking subcontinental food before I tried other stuff. I think it was partly defiance too - the gesture of signifying my identity, of home, of establishing the normality of a food that other people only regard as a cheap meal to eat when you are very very drunk.

It's amazing how much Indian food has grown in culinary stature the last five years - when I first arrived in this country, the idea that food from the subcontinent could be refined or subtle, something other than junk food was quite prevalant.

Plus there was also the expressions of disgust from English people I sometimes got when they saw me eating rice and curry. It made eating a gesture of the immigrant family unit and solidarity, something you did away from English eyes (especially if you didn't eat with a knife and fork.)

[kchew.livejournal.com]

I started eating "non-Western" food when I was in my late teens, and have never looked back. My Japanese mother-in-law keeps trying to find things that I won't eat: I'll eat natto (fermented soy beans, stink but taste good), sea urchin, and all sorts of good stuff.

There are some limits: I draw the line at chicken feet and frogs legs. I just kept thinking of the cartoon where the little frogs are leaving the restaurant in little wheelchairs...can't do it.

I am intrigued by what people consider to be comfort food. We have a lot of Japanese students stay here, and there are certain things that they really really miss. So, I try to find some of it (fresh eggs, for example, for raw egg on rice for breakfast), and I like to try out some of it myself. Comfort food tells you a lot about a culture.

[oyceter]

I, er, have discovered a hidden fondness for frog legs. Though I am now wincing at the image of frogs in chairs. My sister loves chicken feet, but I won't touch them because biting through the joints really grosses me out.

My very favorite comfort food here is meatloaf. My friends at college thought I was absolutely nuts when I first had meatloaf: "Meatloaf! Wow, I'm eating meatloaf! Like all those kids in the camp books, except it tastes good! Wow! Meatloaf! In a pan! How weird!" I really really really want to go and try Southern comfort food sometime. Grits (and hominy? Or are they the same thing?), especially, because I keep reading about it.

[fannishly.livejournal.com]

Green bean cakes are my absolute *favorite*. I too have tried to feed them to roommates who didn't like them, although they were too polite to actually spit it out. :)

Hm, it's interesting to hear you say that most students at the Hsinchu school were expats -- most kids at TAS were much more integrated into the local culture. You'd think it would be the other way around.

Then again, not that many local sixteen-year-old girls went around wearing Prada.

[oyceter]

Yeah! I love green bean cakes! I was so sad when the guys down the hall thought they were the grossest things they had ever eaten.

The expat-ness may have been a part of how the school was set up... I don't remember the rules for getting into TAS, but to "qualify" for the Bilingual Dept., a parent had to be in tech, or a professor or a diplomat or something. And to have been abroad. Also, it probably didn't help that we had a bit of a rivalry with the other departments of the school, who were normal public school kids. One of my friends who transferred to TAS said the same thing! She said she learned lots more Chinese there than in the Bilingual Dept., ironically.

Then again, not that many local sixteen-year-old girls went around wearing Prada.

Hee! So very true.

[msagara.livejournal.com]

Confused is understandable, though. I think it's tough to constantly try to re-evaluate the ground on which you though you were standing a month or a year ago.

I was born in Canada, raised in Canada, and have, in fact, never lived anywhere else (visiting doesn't count). But a lot of our family food, while I was a child, was Japanese. We had white rice at every meal. It was one of those things that just happened. I remember the first time I went to a friend's appartment after they'd moved out of their parent's home -- they didn't have a rice cooker.

I don't even speak Japanese; I can read and speak French far better.

But. Food is interesting, that way.

Mind you -- red beans? Urgh. I never liked them. My sister adores them; my mother and father as well. Go figure <g>.

I used to find it uncomfortable -- before, you know, I was old and curmudgeonly -- when people expected me to be exotic. They'd always, always ask, for instance, if I spoke Japanese. Or even try to speak to me in one of the asian tongues (it's the all looking alike thing). And I hated to go to Chinatown because a) smell and b) all of the shopkeepers would speak Chinese to me, and when I couldn't actually answer, I would be treated like a pariah because I was, in fact, entirely Westernized.

But Japanese speaking parents who had lived in interment camps never spoke Japanese at home; they encouraged their children to speak English and fit in.

So this is interesting, all of it.

[oyceter]

I had a similar rice-cooker revelation -- it had just never occurred to me that there were people who didn't own a rice cooker. Or have soy sauce permanently in the fridge.

My parents tried speaking to me in Chinese when we lived in the States (and shucked me off to Chinese school on Saturdays, which I hated), but when we moved to Taiwan, they started speaking English at home so I wouldn't "forget." I always wonder if my Chinese would be ten times better if they had kept speaking it at home. Of course, I would talk to my sister all the time in English though. I also always wonder how I would be if my family had just stayed in America.

It's funny because here, a lot of the aunties whose kids grew up in the States will often talk to my mom in English when I'm around because they assume I don't understand Chinese. My mom always has to explain that while I respond in English, I can listen to and understand spoken Chinese.

fascinating post!

[livinglaurel.livejournal.com]

Red bean paste pastries, MMMMMMMMmmmmmmmm.

Not much more to add than that, sadly. Except this -- my mother's Hungarian, so there was that extra "exoticism" to some recipes that wasn't like "regular American food" -- and my parents prided themselves on going out to gourmet restaurants and eating stuff like chocolate-covered ants, raw oysters, jugged hare, and so on. I grew up in NM, so I got used to SW Mexican food -- green chiles! -- and was a little nonplussed when I visited my husband's Midwest relatives and they ate things like, well, Hamburger Helper. And canned green beans. And instant mashed potatoes. And three weeks of cafeteria food, yikes.

IIRC it was Lin Yutang who said "What is patriotism but the love of food we ate in our childhood?"

Re: fascinating post!

[oyceter]

My parents are this strange combination of adventurous and non-adventurous eaters. My dad in particular likes to think he's a gourmet or something (I personally blame him for my food obsession ^_~) and he usually tries the weirder things on the menu, like bone marrow and sea salt (which was actually pretty good). But both of them tend to not like anything too strongly flavored, so they weren't big fans of Indian food or Greek or etc. And after a while, they just want something like Chinese home-cooking.

Re: the quote... not sure, but that makes a lot of sense, identity confusion included.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

That's a great essay.

The food we eat as children has very strong emotional connotations of one kind or another. I avoid Indian food in the US as much as possible, first because it brought back too many unpleasant memories, and later because it never tasted authentic-- what's served in restaurants here isn't what's served there, the spices aren't fresh or aren't the ones I'm used to, the fruit isn't the same fruit, the vegetables aren't the same vegetables, the water tastes different-- and even if it's good, it never seems right.

I have a lot of similar issues over cultural authenticity. I grew up an American girl in India, and by the time I returned I'd missed all the pop culture and was a foreigner here too. I'm Jewish by blood but I've never been to temple, wasn't raised in the culture, and don't speak Yiddish or Hebrew; I grew up in India but I'm not Indian; and I know more Japanese than any of my Japanese-American friends. I can't imagine ever fitting in anywhere but Los Angeles or New York City.

And yet that lack of authenticity in any one culture is a very authentically 21st century experience. In some ways you and I and Yoon, say, belong as much to the same culture as we do our multiple and incomplete individual ones. We're like Jamie in The Homeward Bounders, who doesn't fit in anywhere and so can fit in everywhere. We're Generation Who Are We, Again?

Oh, and sweet red beans? I love them. Also those jellied black sesame roll-ups that you get in dim sum places.

[oyceter]

Thanks, glad you liked it.

Having just discovered Indian food in the past few years, I'm rather jealous of you right now ;). I'm probably not going to be able to have real Indian food for a while.

Homeward Bounders. I like that. I just got a book from Amazon called Third Culture Kids, which I heard about via Yuneicorn. Some of it's too anecdotal for me, but I never really thought of grouping together all these kids from disparate cultures who've all been misplaced or re-cultured or something, but it makes complete sense. I used to call myself a permanent expatriate when asked where I felt I belonged most. Part of me still wants to go home to Taiwan, and another part realizes I'll never be perfectly comfortable there, especially thanks to the language difference.

In my senior year of high school, after writing all those stupid "I am culturally unique blahdeblahblah" essays, I thought I had it sort of figured out, and then I landed in America and everything changed again. Then I got sort of used to that. Now I'm dating the boy, who is white, and there's a whole 'nother kettle of issues and compromise and figuring things out. I guess right now the big constant is confusion!

[veejane.livejournal.com]

One of my favorite restaurant ideas is not-haute fusion cuisine. There are all these restaurants now, that are called "Brazilian-Chinese" because, 80 years ago, a Chinese family immigrated to Brazil and opened a restaurant, and now their grandchildren, who have developed a particularly Brazilian viewpoint of Chinese food, move to New York and open a restaurant.

This can occasionally be unfortunate, witness Glatt kosher Chinese places, which in my experience is all of the gummy flavorlessness of Ashkenazi Jewish food and all of the greasy insubstantiality of Chinese food, and none of the good parts of either.

Still, edamame and tomatoes? Nummy together.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Mmmm...red bean cakes. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Oh, yes, there was more to that post. [heh] This was all very interesting, and makse a lot of sense.

feklar and I, both Southerners, have a couple of times gone out to eat at Mrs. Tootsie's Soul Food and it definitely had the feel of total comfort food for the soul--mashed sweet potatoes, fried chicken or catfish, macaroni and cheese, fried okra....

[oyceter]

Doesn't actually have much to do with anything, but I just watched a Good Eats episode on mashed sweet potatoes yesterday!

I have serious food cravings now for them.

Soul food (from what little I know) reminds me a lot of Taiwan street food -- we used to go out for salted & peppered & spiced fried chicken and spiced and fried green beans and stand outside department stores eating them with toothpicks. Mmm.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

Food is like the family language -- things you learned at home, that mix and match various outside influences in a way that says This Is Me. I don't think there's a way to totally recapture one's childhood sense of food in what one makes oneself, as an adult; but it's possible to derive an ongoing sense of one's own home-foods throughout the lifetime.

My granddad is in his 80s, and had a childhood without proper refrigeration of perishables. (They had ice delivered, and put in a box, which is why fridges are called iceboxes, but that's not exactly foolproof refrigeration.) When I cooked for him, he always preferred food out of cans -- even over fresh, a lot of times. It was totally unconscious on his part -- he just has a little equation in his head where good = canned. Bleah.

This was also the man for whom I made meatloaf for the first time, and I tinkered around with it to make it interesting: carrot shavings, celery, ground pork mixed in with the beef, apple. I served it to him, and he said, "Wonderful. That was very good. But it wasn't meatloaf. Meatloaf by definition is boring."

You can't win!

[oyceter]

LOL! That's really interesting! (and your recipe sounds very good)

My mom said that the last time she went to see her parents, she cooked them meatballs (for which she is apparently fairly well known), and was rather insulted when my grandfather tasted slowly and said, "Hrmm, not as good as you usually make them." Poor mom.

[avrelia.livejournal.com]

I loved this post, and all the comments, and I had a strong urge to add something on most of them. (then I decided to spare your LJ from my flood of “wow!”)

But, really, what touches us deeply than food? In Russian, the word that means “stomach” meant “life” in old Russian. I am not sure whether it was the same word in old Russian, or it’s just changed its meaning.

Anyway, back to me and my food (which is very appropriate, since I am awfully hungry.) I have never thought of Russian cuisine until I moved to Canada. I was just cooking from whatever is at home, or I would buy something and then think what to do about it – using various cookbooks.

Yet here two things came to my attention: I cannot cook here the way I used to – the products are different, and when I have to go to big length to find the right kind of buckwheat, I think: “Do I really want it that much?”

Another thing was that sometimes I wanted to cook something very Russian, and I wasn’t sure just how Russian my cooking was, and what constitutes a truly Russian cooking.

So, basically, I still cook from whatever I buy at the supermarket, but I use new ingredients (like a lot of soy sauce and rice noodles,) and I miss the food I can buy in Russia… mmm, dairy… mmm, forest mushrooms… mmm, bread that doesn’t taste like cotton…

[oyceter]

Thank you! Glad you're commenting, and no worries about floods of "wow" ;).

Yeah.. one of my big problems here is not knowing what to buy, or even if I know what to get, I don't know what to call it in English. Luckily there are a good deal of Asian supermarkets around here.