Can food represent one’s culture? A better and more straight forward question, are we what we eat? To a certain extent, yes, I’d say. Picking foods that represent my Chinese cuisine, I’d write down tofu, ginger, different kinds of chili peppers, beef, pork, fish, and lamb. For flavoring we use sesame oil, chili powders, soy sauce, vinegar, and rice wine. But many non-Chinese cuisines also consume those ingredients, if I recall correctly. Then what makes Chinese cuisine so Chinese? Is it because the cooks are Chinese? Not necessarily. Nowadays people who cook Chinese food on cooking shows aren’t usually Chinese. They add their own taste into the food, fuse it up, turn it into something else. Everyone has a different approach to making a beef stir-fry so what we eat today is not what Chinese people ate a hundred years ago, I bet.
And what does being Asian really mean these days? Movies like Lost in Translation, Tokyo Drift, Tomorrow Never Dies, Mission Impossible III have taken place in Japan and China, showing the modernist high rises and the electric lights that spark the vibrant night life in Tokyo and Shanghai. But with so much exposure of Asia, people still seem to perceive anything Asian must have Chinese/ Japanese characters, or something from that “culture.” But what’s really that culture? I can’t recall seeing lanterns with Chinese or Japanese scribbles in any of those movies, or anyone wearing qipao and kimono on a daily basis. It makes me wonder why people always come up with those elements when they think of Asian culture. And there isn’t really such a thing as a unified Asian culture, but rather many Asian cultures that possess different values from one another.
I was watching a cooking show on Food Network today with my sister. It was pouring, thus ruined our little plan to go to Starbucks for some coffee. While I was making some chai, Sandra Lee’s “Semi-Homemade Cooking” came on. I’d seen the show a few times, including once when she made Chinese food in her red qipao and set her table with items swarmed in Chinese characters that didn’t make any sense when put together. Today she introduced her show her very own “Indochina Brunch.” Thanks to Comcast, my sister pressed the information button and let me copy the description down.
“Indochina Brunch” An Asian-inspired brunch, includes steamed dumplings, Szechwan beef stir-fry, andspicy mango-chile sorbet. Also: an “Indochini” cocktail. (Food Network 2007)
Not a big fan of fusion food myself, coming from a Chinese immigrant family, but I’m definitely not against fusion. It’s inevitable nowadays, and many times fusion foods taste quite amazing if you refrain from criticizing its authenticity. Fusion doesn’t just happen between East and West. Centuries ago Koreans took the Chinese ja jang myun and made their own version of it, and I absolutely love it. The problem I had with the description and the show is not the food itself, but rather the context. Indochina describes the French colonies of what we know as Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia today. Although there’s Chinese influences in those cultures because China was a colonizer once, none of them is Chinese and I can imagine how they offended they’d be if they’re called Chinese. Furthermore, Indochina is a product of imperialism, a way to categorize these countries between China and India. It’s not a term Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians would use, but a term employed by colonizers who’d come to Southeast Asia to exploit the resources and labors.
A self-proclaimed life-stylist, Lee’s show also teaches you how to make a beautiful table set that’d reflect or enhance the food that day. Today, she hung lanterns with large Chinese characters like “Luck” and used fabrics and plates that she thought would reflect Asian culture. Similar to the episode of Chinese cuisine, it makes me wonder if this is the only way she perceives Asian culture– Chinese, and everything Asian needs a Chinese character to be authentic. I can’t say what she did wasn’t Chinese, but the Chinese culture I know, as a Chinese person, is more than just Chinese characters and calligraphy. The danger of representation very often is its aspect of essentialism, condensing a culture to a few elements. And very often Chinese food becomes the representation of Chinese culture. When I was volunteering at the 29th Asian American International Film Festival, a man came to a screening and told me he really appreciated events like this because “This is the only place you can see real Asian people outside of restaurants.” I tried to tell him it’s New York City, and Asian people are walking on the streets everywhere, real Asians like me, my sister, my father, and many of my friends. We do things other people do, too, going to movies at AMC on 42nd Street, visiting the Met, sitting in the Yankee Stadium cheering for Jeter and A-Rod. But he dismissed me completely and proceeded to watch the film. To him, someone who enjoys Asian films or Asian American films, we’re still an exotic, mythical people whose natural habitat is Chinatown, making wontons and chop suey. Right, that’s really authentic.
Can we, real Asians and Asian Americans, ever escape the fate of being “represented”? That our cultures cannot simply be consumed through food and items bearing our languages? These questions bother me, but I’m not going to stop enjoying Chinese food because I don’t want it to be the only thing representative of my culture. Meanwhile, what’s my own culture anyway?
