On an individual level, we grow up eating the food of our cultures. It becomes a part of who each of us are. Many of us associate food from our childhood with warm feelings and good memories and it ties us to our families, holding a special and personal value for us. Food from our family often becomes the comfort food we seek as adults in times of frustration and stress. (Chau, B. Le, What Food Tells Us About Culture)
I grew up eating both Chinese and American food. And I love both cuisines. I guess this reflects my Asian American heritage. These days, I find comfort in eating Chinese food because Chinese food reminds me of my stress free childhood where I remember fondly my mother spending hours in the kitchen preparing me lunch and dinner. At the time, she used to use a huge Chinese cookbook to help her cook. My mother did not consider herself a great cook, because she needed a cookbook. She used to think that if she were a master cook, she would not need that cookbook. What she never realized was how delicious her meals were and how later on when I grew up, how much I would cherish the memories of me watching her cook in the kitchen. She never knew that when she had her back turned I would 'sample' her dishes by sticking my thumb into the dish or I would even lick the dish without her ever knowing it. My childhood Chinese kitchen were filled with the pungent odors of both ginger and scallions.
Yet, when I was with my American friends, I wanted to fit in. When I was with my American friends, I endeavored to eat mainly American fast foods like hamburgers and hotdogs, french fries and other junk food. When I was a kid, I actually did not like the Chinese food my mother cooked because Americans considered Chinese food 'exotic' and I thought my mother's cooking was 'boring' since I ate the same food every day. I remember at the time hankering for American foods or Italian cuisine. I used to plead with my parents not to go to the same Chinese restaurant every weekend, but instead to go to the 50's hamburger joint which I considered American cuisine. In a way, I was ashamed of my Chinese heritage because Chinese language, food, customs were seen as foreign and 'un-American'. I wanted to totally assimilate into American culture by speaking only English all the time, wearing Levi's blue jeans and eating American cuisine.
Young Yun Kim (2001, 2005 suggests that adaptation is a process of stress, adjustment, and growth. As individuals experience the stress of not fitting in with the environ- ment, the natural response is to seek to adjust. (Nakayama, 365)
When my mother would cook her Chinese foods while my American friends came to visit, I felt awkward since I knew my American friends did not have kitchens filled with ginger and scallions. It seems many second generation Asian Americans like myself experienced some shame or embarassment growing up Asian and different from the other kids. Oliver Wang, in his article, "We are what we eat: Asian Americans and Food' expresses his awkwardness growing up eating Asian food at school lunch:
Maybe an ambivalence towards the food of our immigrant parents was part of a proxy battle we waged as a second-generation trying to carve out our identity turf. I feel like every Asian American memoir that came from a ‘70s or ‘80s baby like myself included at least one requisite passage where an author expresses embarrassment over lunch boxes filled with kimchi or natto or curry that invited stares or jeers from non-Asian peers. We yearned for hot dogs and hamburgers, milk shakes and chili fries: proper American fare to sooth assimilation anxieties. But inevitably, the author eventually learns to re-embrace her or his culinary traditions (almost always via some dish their grandmother prepared). The moral: learning to love our food was learning to love ourselves, learning to love heritage..
My reconciliation with Asian cuisine wasn’t quite as dramatic. Take a little homesickness and add in the utter mediocrity that was Berkeley’s Chinese food options in 1990s. But the real catalyst came when I began to recognize food as pleasure, as community, as a way to tell stories of where we came from and where we could go.
Ironically, years later when I talked to my American friends, they would tell me how envious they were that my mother would cook such delicious foods while their mothers cooked 'boring' American foods like tuna casserole or meatloaf. They told me they pleaded with their families to go to Chinese restaurants because they wanted to eat what I ate every day for dinner. Growing up, I had no idea my American friends were envious of my 'foreign' Chinese cuisine! Had I known, I would have had my mother serve them up a plate. Instead, I was too concerned about 'acting' or 'being' American and wanting to eat only American foods with my American friends.
On a larger scale, food is an important part of culture. Traditional cuisine is passed down from one generation to the next. It also operates as an expression of cultural identity. Immigrants bring the food of their countries with them wherever they go and cooking traditional food is a way of preserving their culture when they move to new places. Eating Chinese food reminds me of the pride I have in my Chinese heritage and Chinese food is a part of my cultural identity. My Asian half will eat the tofu while my American half will eat the hamburger--although I have never tried a tofu hamburger!
As an Asian American, I have always felt the conflict of being Asian and American at the same time and wanting to fit in as much as I could. I resented having an Asian face that forever marked me as an outsider. But now, I am proud of my Asian heritage and love to eat Chinese food and like my mother, I don't consider myself a master cook in Chinese cuisine. I love my American junk food side by side with my Chinese food. And that's what I am, Asian and American at heart!
We should embrace our heritage through our culture’s food but we should also become more informed about other cultures by trying their foods. It’s important to remember that each dish has a special place in the culture to which it belongs, and is special to those who prepare it. Food is a portal into culture, and it should be treated as such. (Chau, B, Le What Food Tells us About Culture)
Nakayama Intercultural Communication in Context 5th Edition
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