On assimilation and identity through food
Who you are is the product of where you live and what you eat
One of the defining features of my childhood were family gatherings. There were always parties for one reason or another. From weddings to baptisms to holidays, I was there for all of it, usually wearing a dress that I didn’t particularly care for (bright and poufy with frilly lace) plus shoes that made my feet hot. I had to smile and be polite to adults. “Gia, bac,” I’d say—the equivalent of “Yes, sir,” in Vietnamese, or “Gia, co”—the equivalent of “Yes, ma’am.” Addressing my elders with respect became the cornerstone of my existence, as I was usually shoved in front of a group of adults of varying ages and statuses and asked endearing questions like, “How do you like school?” or “What is your favorite subject?” or something centered around church and religion.
Most of the time, I simply nodded and waited for the said adult to finish their talk. Then I’d trot off into a corner and just watch. I loved observing how people in my family interacted with one another, and with others from the village. I noticed how laughter was exchanged after jokes (usually from my dad), how people touched one another gently on the shoulder or arm, words used to congratulate people on their wedding or new baby or whatever it was. In short, there was camaraderie. Connections were built through these constant exchanges of words, of language, of conversations in person, of simply being there.
In retrospect, this was something I took for granted, even if I didn’t know it then. Because face-to-face interaction was so crucial and commonplace, I didn’t think twice about the possibility that someday, these opportunities for gathering would be eradicated by a pandemic. Who would?
It’s no surprise that for almost two years, we’ve all relied heavily on technology. From meetings on Zoom to Google chat to Slack channels to Facebook to Twitter to Reddit and Netflix and everything in between, we’ve been glued to our screens, away from one another. While much can be said about the benefits of technology—convenience being one of them, more can be said about the divide it has created in our society.
I grew up in a time when there were hardly any technology. Not even telephones. Instead of calling each other to ask, “Can I come over later?” we simply showed up unannounced, and like any good host, you were supposed to welcome that person (usually it’s a family member or a friend or a neighbor) into your home and (attempt to) have a conversation with them. That was the way we bonded, and how rituals were born.
This week, I’ve been thinking about how our sense of identity is shaped by who we spend time with and what we do with them, when I discovered the story of the retiree who became an accidental YouTube star. But the story isn’t about how this Chinese man created some cooking videos that a million of people liked on YouTube. It’s a story about a father and his son, two very stubborn men who had different ideologies and ways of living and how that fractured their relationship, and how ultimately the one thing that brought them together was food.
For years, Kevin Pang, host of the Hunger Pangs series on America’s Test Kitchen, had a tumultuous relationship with his father. Their family immigrated from Hong Kong to Canada and later Seattle, where he grew up with two separate identities. He wanted to be more American, and his father wanted to preserve their Chinese identity. The two butted heads and for years, they were distant, until Kevin got a job as a food writer. Suddenly, he had to learn everything there was to learn about food and cooking. And where did he turn for help? His father, of course.
Food became a centerpiece in their relationship. Together, the two bonded over discussions of dim sum and crispy orange beef. “Like a lot of Asian families I know, we’re not the most expressive with our emotions,” Kevin says. “Rather than linger on about our feelings, we tend to transfer those difficult things onto something else, like food. Food was our emotional proxy. We’ve shared more bowls of noodles than we said the word ‘sorry’ to each other.”
Similarly, NYT food writer Priya Krishna and her mom Ritu co-wrote a cookbook together called Indian-ish: Recipes and Antics from a Modern American Family. Writing a cookbook together meant commitment and connection, which required getting together with her mom and other members of her family in ways she hadn’t before. You could say that it became a catalyst for change, for she realized that her Indian identity and her American identity were simply two sides of the same coin.
Growing up in America as a southeast Asian (or immigrant, for that matter) is a complicated experience. You don’t know which way to turn, which identity to embrace fully. “As a kid, without realizing it, I was remarkably good at compartmentalizing my Indian identity and my American identity and at sort of code switching when I was at home versus at school,” Priya says. “So of course, when I was an Indian in an Indian grocery store, I was an Indian kid who loved aloo tikki and bhel puri and aloo paratha and all of these things. But, like, as soon as I landed at school or was at my friend's house, I was very good at sort of presenting in a way that I felt would be acceptable to that audience that I was with.”
Kevin and Priya’s story is amalgam of my own story. Like Kevin, I also butted heads with my own mom. And like Priya, I also compartmentalized my own Vietnamese identity. In school, I had two separate sets of friends. One was my Russian friend named Olga who was essentially my best friend. Having grown up in America, she was more American than Russian. We shared many experiences and talks and memories together. On the other side, I had my “Vietnamese” group of friends—four of them, in fact, whom I’d hang out with whenever I wasn’t with Olga. Somehow, we never came together and hung out in the same circle. One of my friends, Hanh, did occasionally hang out with us, but for the most part, I hopped between two sets of friends and two sets of identities.
As for my friend Olga, I feel like she did the same thing. Because I was her “Asian friend,” I felt like she never really truly felt comfortable introducing me to her Russian side at home. I rarely went to her house, and when I did, I realized they weren’t exactly the most cordial people. It’s not that they were mean—not at all, but they weren’t exactly like the type of people I’d been exposed to all my life, people who, when you arrive at their house, answered the door with the question, “Have you eaten yet?” and regardless of what your answer is, would push you into the kitchen anyway and make you sit down at their dining room table and put a plate of food or a bowl of soup in front of you and make you eat. It’s how they show hospitality and their appreciation. That was what I was used to. So when I arrived at my friend’s house and didn’t get the same kind of treatment, I thought it was particularly odd. Did they not have any food? Did they not care whether or not I was hungry? Did they not have any idea of what hospitality is?
These were questions that I asked myself during my high school years. Needless to say, I didn’t go over to her house very much. Instead, we hung out after school and occasionally skipped school altogether and we’d go to parks and walk around neighborhoods and admire the homes with expansive, manicured lawns on these wide beautiful streets with appropriate lighting in Portland and ponder about life and talk about our woes, most of which involved boys.
The act of getting together and sitting around a table in a physical setting is how we form long lasting bonds, and ultimately shape our identities. “The table gathers and separates and creates a setting for conversation, for fellowship. That’s been so fundamental to human experience,” says writer and scholar L.M. Sacasas on a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show. Furthermore, he continues, “There was a kind of labor involved in putting that meal together, and that labor itself had an important role to play in the dynamics of the relationship that are outsourced when we change the practice by finding technological shortcuts around it to get to the same end, but through different means.”
Rituals like going to church and gatherings and borrowing things from one another serve a purpose. Ali Montag, a writer from Austin, wrote, “Those commitments, practiced day after day, season after season, decade after decade, created binding relationships with other people, a sense of civic engagement, and a sense of individual personal responsibility.”
An object in permanence, the table is what brings us together for conversation, the kitchen its backbone. Without the physical-ness of being together, how do we form bonds again? These are still unanswered questions for many of us, but perhaps the day will come when the walls of restrictions come down and we can all gather together again—to cook, to eat, to bond, and to grieve.
Hoang - your writing is beautiful. Thank you.