a story of a sandwich.

February 25, 2017

so many of us are reaching out, hoping someone out there will grab our hands and remind us we are not as alone as we fear. (gay, bad feminist, "feel me. see me. hear me. reach me.", 3)

it’s saturday now, you say, where is the thursday post? as it goes, i am in san francisco this week, and, last weekend, i was hit with some bad health news, so i, again, fell prey to poor planning. which is a long-winded way to say that there is no thursday post this week.

that said, though — on tuesday, i landed in san francisco, and my cousin and i went to hear roxane gay speak. it’s always a huge pleasure to hear her; she’s funny, well-spoken, and gracious; and she doesn’t take shit, which was well-demonstrated when a white man brought up milo whatever-his-name-is and asked in that male privilege way how simon & schuster [finally] pulling his book wasn’t an act of censorship.

(for more of gay’s thoughts on that, read her tumblr post here.)

she said many things that were wise and hilarious and thoughtful, and one thing that stuck with me was something she said about symbols. she was asked specifically about pussy hats (the asker of the question had hated them), and gay responded first by saying that she didn’t get them, had thought they meant pussy like vagina and just did not see how the hats looked like vaginas until she was standing in line and saw one from behind and was like, ohhhh, pussy like cat!

she went on to say that symbols are fine, and symbols can be good in that, sometimes, we need them, but it’s important to move past them. it is not enough to wear a symbol, to embrace it without moving into action, into awareness and knowledge. symbols are not inherently bad, but neither are they good, and they are not enough.

that made me think how one of the things to do post election was to wear a safety pin on your clothing to show that you were an ally to marginalized people, and, at the time, i remember thinking that, okay, yeah, fine, maybe the gesture is nice but huh, what, why? (also, who has safety pins just sitting around? can you buy individual safety pins? or do you buy them in a pack and distribute them to friends? and, again, huh, what, why?)

i don’t disregard the meaning behind a gesture, and i appreciated the attempt post-election to make some kind of visible show of support to help mitigate some of the fear that had, overnight, taken over us in new, heightened ways. i appreciated that there was a gesture being made to show us that they, these safety pin-wearers, didn’t need to be feared, but, at the same time, i did wonder if the gesture was more for them than for us, for them to show the world what side they were on.

maybe that’s cynical of me, but maybe here is where my personal experience intersects with all this because the truth is that i don’t give anyone a whole lot of credit for embracing a symbol. in the end, it doesn’t mean that much, and it doesn’t reduce the threats being made on our bodies, our rights, our lives. also, i might be conflating things too much here, but i don’t give anyone credit for his/her intentions. i’m not interested in the intentions behind someone’s actions; i’m interested in those actions and their consequences because the truth is that it doesn’t really matter what anyone’s intentions were when her/his actions cause or contribute to tremendous damage.

we all have history. you can think you're over your history. you can think the past is the past. and then something happens, often innocuous, that shows you how far you are from over it. the past is always with you. some people want to be protected from this truth. ("the illusion of safety/the safety of illusion," 150)

i often wonder where i’d be today had i not suffered over ten years of intentional, routine body shaming.

i wonder if i might have fallen in love and gotten married. (i wonder if i’d have trapped myself in that heteronormative world, having assumed straightness for three decades.) i wonder if i might have graduated college the first time around, gone on to a doctorate program, have an established career. i wonder if i might have had the boldness to take my writing seriously and been published by now. i wonder if i’d be skinny or if i’d look the same or if i’d still have gone on to hate my body and hate myself.

i wonder most about where i’d be in regards to food — would i have gone to culinary school like i wanted once? would i have pursued photography and bought a camera and made a space for myself in food photography or food styling? would i have ventured into food writing? how much time would i have saved had i not felt so ashamed and uncomfortable for so many fucking years for loving food and wanting to know how to cook it and to photograph it and to share it?

i’m not one to spend a lot of time on the what ifs; i think it’s a waste of time to indulge in hypotheticals because it doesn’t matter what could have been when life has progressed the way it has. however, we do have to engage in a fair amount of reflection on past actions, whether as committed by ourselves or by others in our lives, in order to look into the future and change accordingly, to better ourselves and to be better people to those around us.

sometimes, that takes us to uncomfortable places. sometimes, it takes us to places of anger, and i admit that this is something that continues to make me angry: that we will tear down the people we are supposed to love, that we will defend it as being something we did because of love, and that we will never fully understand the extent of the damage we have caused and live, oblivious, to the lives that we have wrecked.

there’s a lot more i want to say about food, about bodies, about shame, and there’s also a lot more i want to say about anger and rage and resentment. there’s a lot i want to say about hopelessness and this general sense of futility, that it doesn’t matter how hard i try to heal or piece myself back together because there is always rock bottom beneath rock bottom, and there is always another blow waiting to fall.

i’m not quite ready to get into it right now, though, this most recent blow that struck me where it just really fucking hurts. i’ve been having a hard time processing it, which means i’ve been at a loss for words, because i’m currently dealing with a whole lot of fury and bitterness slithering constantly just under my skin. i admit that i’m pissed off these days, that i think that none of this is fair, and i admit that i’m letting myself have these little mental temper tantrums because it’s the only way i know how to cope in the immediate present.

one of the things i’ve been learning is not to be afraid of my feelings or of expressing my feelings. saying this is how i feel is not a confession of weakness; it’s a statement of humanity; and it’s a way of saying that here is something that is informing how i am approaching something or someone or some shitty situation. it is a way of saying that i am just a person, and i hurt and flail and cry and laugh and feel because that is what we do as human beings — we feel, we process, we act.

and, so, maybe, here is a story of a sandwich: that tartine is a bakery that i have been wanting to visit for years, that they’ve recently opened a new location with food options, that this is their fried egg and porchetta sandwich. i first saw it on instagram, and i’ve thought about it since because i love food and i live to eat and this sandwich was something for me to look forward to, for me to hope for as i adjusted, poorly, to being back in california.

this sandwich fits into the greater story of me because i have survived this far because of food, because i deal with stress and anxiety and help manage my depression through food. i make pasta; i bake bread; i make pastries. i eat. i lose myself in food, melt inside in happiness at the way a croissant shatters in that perfect way when your fingers press into it to tear it apart, the way an egg yolk bursts open and oozes down a sandwich. i smile from the bliss of a mouthful of juicy porchetta, crispy skin, egg yolk, and arugula. i love the way my fingers are buttery and smeared with chocolate after a croissant has been eaten, so much so that my fingers leave track marks on napkins, faint grease stains on everything i touch.

and it makes me furious that, now that i have finally reached a point where i don’t feel guilty or ashamed of this love, now that i have finally embraced my love for food and banished any self-consciousness in expressing it, the bomb hidden in my genetics has detonated, and my body is taking all this love, turning it into poison, and using it to destroy itself.

bad feminism seems like the only way i can both embrace myself as a feminist and be myself, and so i write. i chatter away on twitter about everything that makes me angry and all the small things that bring me joy. i write blog posts about the meals i cook as i try to take better care of myself, and with each new entry, i realize that i’m undestroying myself after years of allowing myself to stay damaged. the more i write, the more i put myself out into the world as a bad feminist but, i hope, a good woman — i am being open about who i am and who i was and where i have faltered and who i would like to become.
no matter what issues i have with feminism, i am a feminist. i cannot and will not deny the importance and absolute necessity of feminism. like most people, i’m full of contradictions, but i also don’t want to be treated like shit for being a woman.
i am a bad feminist. i would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all. (“bad feminist: take two,” 318)

[thursday recs] a case for reading.

February 16, 2017

i believe that literature flows somewhere behind order and definition. amidst all that remains unsolved. perhaps literature is about throwing into disarray what has been defined and putting it into order to make it flow anew for those in the back of history, the weak, the hesitant. about making a mess of things, all over again. is this, in the end, an attempt at order as well? is it now my time to look back? (shin kyung-sook, the girl who wrote loneliness, 58)

this week, i started reading tiger pelt (leaf-land press, 2016) by annabelle kim, and it’s a historical fiction set in mid-20th century korea. it follows multiple characters, one of whom is a young girl, who is kidnapped and pressed into service by the japanese during world war ii, and, as i read her section, i very much wanted to throw up, to put the book down and walk away.

basically, what the japanese did during world war ii was to recruit girls from korea, china, the phillippines, all over southeast asia, telling them that they would be working in factories and providing valuable contributions to imperial japan and its war effort. instead, the girls were forced into sex slavery, raped multiple times every night by soldiers, each of whom was given a set number of minutes — and, if the girls weren’t being tricked into signing up, they were being taken and abducted.

hildi kang gets into this in her book, under the black umbrella (cornell university press, 2001), a collection of oral histories from koreans who lived during the japanese occupation of korea, a time during which japan made the korean language illegal, forced koreans to take japanese names and worship at shinto temples, and tried simultaneously to cannibalize koreans by playing on their similarities and to keep koreans as the colonized other. in some ways, it is an interesting relationship to study now, decades removed, though the horrors of what imperial japan did to korea (and the rest of asia) aren't softened much at all, especially when you read an account like the one this woman, kim p. [anonymous], gives in under the black umbrella:

the men lined up outside the barracks doors where the women were, and took their turn. the girl just lay there inside. each man had a given amount of time, about seven minutes. if he wasn’t out in time, the next man went right in and yanked him out. each door had a long line of men waiting their turns. […]
the woman, on the wall near her head, used chalk or a pencil to make a mark for each soldier she served. she thought she would be paid that way, but it turned out they were not paid anything at all. (kim p. [anonymous], 135)

japan has continued to deny that this happened, claiming that the women were volunteers and taking some very deliberate actions in attempts to whitewash its history of this horrendous black mark, from trying to remove statues erected in remembrance of comfort women to trying to convince american textbook publisher mcgraw hill to revise text about comfort women in its history textbooks. these women and their supporters continue to show up every wednesday in protest in front of the japanese embassy in seoul.

the point of this post isn’t to get into japan’s war crimes, though, but this: as i was reading tiger pelt, i thought, this is why we need stories. we need stories that twist us up inside. we need stories that remind us of the horrors that humanity is capable of committing. we need stories that remember what happened, what a country and its people suffered, how that country and its people survived.

we need these stories as much as we need the stories that affirm the goodness, the generosity of humanity, because we need to remember that we all have monsters inside of us, that we are all capable of violence and grotesque behavior. we need to remember this because, if we allow ourselves to forget or pretend that we are above this ugliness and slide into indifference or apathy or a sense of moral superiority, we are more susceptible to making a farce of human brutality and, in a weird twist, letting it slide.

this post is kind of a cheat because i’m only 40-some pages into tiger pelt, so this isn’t an actual review of the book. it's also admittedly kind of poorly planned (these photographs, what?) because i actually had another author i wanted to recommend today (and had already shot the accompanying photos), but i unfortunately didn’t finish reading her book because i’ve been spending my week working on a personal essay and another blog post, which means i didn’t get to read as much as i’d have liked.

this is honestly something that’s been weighing on me these recent weeks, though, and starting tiger pelt simply triggered something in me. also, considering our cheeto president who does not read, i just really wanted to throw this out there: read. just read. read broadly. read intelligently. read intentionally.

read something that makes you uncomfortable, that makes you squirm and want to vomit because it twists you up and horrifies and outrages you. read something that challenges your worldview. read something that comes from another country, another culture, another language.

maybe you’ll find that this reading brings you back to your already existing worldview, your faith, your convictions, but the point isn’t to force yourself to change. the point is to consider. it is to take yourself out of your bubble (and we all exist in some kind of bubble) and ask yourself why you believe what you believe, why you think the way you do, why you see people the way you do.

the point is to question, to open yourself up, and to try to understand and love people in better ways.

(this post has not been sponsored by blue bottle. i simply went to blue bottle in downtown LA today and loved it. i also loved that the books on these shelves are for sale, and all proceeds go to the library foundation of los angeles.)

[thursday recs] look in the mirror; like what you see?

February 9, 2017

it’s hard to make a bad skillet of cornbread. just don’t add sugar. (120)

it’d be simple to call victuals (clarkson potter, 2016) a cookbook because, yes, there are recipes, and, yes, there are instructions as to how to cook said recipes, but i love the subtitle and find it more apt a descriptor: “an appalachian journey, with recipes.”

ronni lundy, the writer, grew up in appalachia, and victuals is a tribute to the “present-day people and places across the southern appalachain mountains” (16). lundy set off on an epic road trip to write the book, traveling over four thousand miles, driving through and around kentucky, west virigina, southern ohio, northern georgia, tennessee, virginia, and north carolina to bring us all these stories — stories from her own childhood and youth, from chefs and food people who have roots in appalachia, from people who live and work in the region, dedicated to cooking its food and preserving its history and traditions.

and, of course, there are recipes and beautiful — seriously, exceptionally beautiful — photography.

victuals hits at that intersection that i absolutely love — literary writing/journalism and food and culture. the chapters open with long-form pieces that focus on different components important to appalachian food and culture, and they’re rich with history and also steeped in the present. one of the things i appreciated most is how lundy doesn’t shy away from the uglier aspects of history; she readily acknowledges the role of slaves and indentured servants and doesn’t try to gloss over it or pretend it didn’t exist (79-81).

she also brings in the present, highlights the work that people are doing to preserve the food of appalachia as well as to reclaim land that has been completely stripped by big coal. she does all this without getting preachy, by focusing on the stories of the people doing the work on the ground, by helping us get to know them, who they are, why they’re doing the work they do. fundamentally, lundy understands that people, that stories, are a crucial part of any culture, including food, just as she understands that food does not exist in a void — these practices, these flavors and products and dishes all have origins somewhere.

how does victuals fit into this series, though? this series that is meant to highlight books by authors who are immigrants, POC, LGBTQ, women, etcetera? isn’t ronni lundy a white, american-born, american-bred woman?

yes, she is, and, yes, that is the underlying premise of this series, but the greater purpose behind this is to open up the world a little, whether for me or for someone out there who might have chanced upon this page, and victuals personally challenged me a lot.

last december, i posted this quote from becky chambers’ a closed and common circuit (hodder and stoughton, 2016):

’and here, AIs are just … tools. they’re the things that make travel pods go. they’re what answer your questions at the library. they’re what greet you at hotels and shuttle ports when you’re travelling. i’ve never thought of them as anything but that.
‘okay,’ sidra said. none of that was an out-of-the-ordinary sentiment, but it itched all the same.
‘but then you … you came into my shop. you wanted ink.i’ve thought about what you said before you left. you came to me, you said, because you didn’t fit within your body. and that … that is something more than a tool would say. and when you said it, you looked … angry. upset. i hurt you, didn’t i?’
‘yes,’ sidra said.
tak rocked her head in guilty acknowledgement. ‘you get hurt. you read essays and watch vids. i’m sure there are huge differences between you and me, but i mean … there are huge differences between me and a harmagian. we’re all different. i’ve been doing a lot of thinking since you left, and a lot of reading, and —‘ she exhaled again, short and frustrated. ‘what i’m trying to say is i — i think maybe i underestimated you. i misunderstood, at least.’
[…]
sidra processed, processed, processed. […] ‘this … re-evaluation of yours. does it extend to other AIs? or do you merely see me differently because i’m in a body?’
tak exhaled. ‘we’re being honest here, right?’
‘i can’t be anything but.’
‘okay, well — wait, seriously?’
‘seriously.’
‘right. okay. i guess i have to be honest too, then, if we’re gonna keep this fair.’ tak knitted her long silver fingers together and stared at them. ‘i’m not sure i would’ve gone down this road if you weren’t in a body, no. i … don’t think it would’ve occurred to me to think differently.’
sidra nodded. ‘i understand. it bothers me, but i do understand.’
‘yeah. it kind of bothers me, too. i’m not sure i like what any of this says about me.’ (chambers, 189-90)

this passage has sat with me since, and it’s a quote i kept thinking about as i read victuals. i’m just as guilty as anyone else of living in a bubble, having preconceptions of groups of people, and not wanting to look myself in the mirror because i know i won’t like what i see.

i readily admit that, when i think of the south and middle america, which are geographical terms i use very loosely to mean anywhere south of DC and west of philadelphia, my immediate reaction is to raise my guard. i automatically get wary and suspicious, and i start feeling uncomfortable. this isn’t a reaction limited to the south and middle america, though; it’s also my instinctual reaction when i think of christians, suburban white americans in general, korean-koreans.

victuals made me examine that part of myself, made me continue asking myself about these biases of mine. i thought a lot about this as i was driving across the country last month, as i made my way through the south, and i’d like to say that a lot of it has to do with being a woman of color and being queer and having faced discrimination simply for being who i am.

while i won’t say that all my apprehensions are totally unwarranted given that, yes, this country did put the cheeto administration in place, knowing it to be racist, misogynistic, and anti-LGBTQ, i don’t think it’s fair to use my queer WOC-ness as an excuse for my own biases, and it goes without saying that i don’t like this part of myself. i don’t like that i’ll let my fear color my perception of people, of places.

at the same time, though, knowing this, i refuse to let my fear define my perception of people, of places, and neither will i let it stop me from going into spaces that make me uncomfortable and let them show me how wrong i’ve been. sometimes, though, of course that’s easier said than done, partly because fear is fear and partly because it’s never a nice feeling to come face-to-face with my own prejudices and ugliness. i mean, no one enjoys that; no one wants to be called a racist or a bigot or a misogynist; but this is why toni morrison said that, to her, goodness is more interesting than evil — it takes work to be good. it’s a struggle to be good. as much as hatred and bigotry are learned things, we also must learn to be good, to be better people, and that, oftentimes, hurts.

i feel like, post-election, there’s been a fair amount of criticism directed at liberals, kind of like a “ha, fuck you! you in your liberal bubbles, totally clueless about the rest of the world! we showed you!” there’s also been a call to empathy, that liberals should be reaching out to conservatives — or maybe that’s making a much too clear-cut distinction, like it’s solely a liberals vs. conservatives thing or like it’s solely geographical. i don’t know.

regardless, there’s been a call to liberals to be more empathetic, to try to understand where cheeto voters came from, what might have compelled them to vote that way, how the rest of the country outside of our liberal cities is faring. a small part of me thinks, well, yes, maybe we should try to understand, in the way that i think we generally need to keep our minds and hearts open, but the other, greater part of me thinks that’s a pretty piss-poor attempt to rationalize racism, misogyny, and bigotry, to reinforce the continued straight white male-centered power structure.

here’s the thing: empathy is a two-way street. you don’t get to call for empathy and understanding without first extending it to someone else, and this whole fucking country could stand to tap into more empathy and understanding. republicans could stand to tap into their basic humanity and try to see women as independent, sentient, thinking human beings deserving of equal rights and the legal right to make decisions about their own bodies. christians could stand to tap into love for LGBTQ people, muslims, non-christians, instead of crying about religious freedom so they can continue to discriminate against people at will. queer POC like myself could venture out of our bubbles and try to see the america outside our cities.

that’s the thing, though — you can’t expect just one group to carry all the weight of being empathetic and open-minded. it doesn’t work that way. it’s not fair to place that just on liberals, like it’s necessary for us to be open-minded and accepting of people and ideologies that try to do us harm and take away our rights and treat us like second-class people, when those people and ideologies do nothing to try to see outside their narrow bubbles. it takes both sides to bring about change and growth, just like it takes at least two people to have a conversation.

and, you know, this is something i love about food, its ability to bring people together and create a space where maybe people can put aside their differences and just enjoy a meal. it’s not to say that food has this magical superpower or that this is always what happens — people fight plenty over dinner tables — but, when i think of food, i do think of that, its giving, generous nature that invites people in and agrees that, no matter where we come from, who we are, we all eat, we all taste, we all need and want and hunger. fundamentally, despite our surface variations, we are not all that different from each other.

one afternoon she [amelia kirby] looked up to see seated at adjacent bar stools an openly gay local artist and one of the staunchest conservative strip miners in town. “they were each just here [at summit city] to grab lunch, but they were sitting there and you know how we are in the mountains, we like to be friendly. so they started to talk, and not just talk, but it turned out to be an hour-long conversation in which they exchanged ideas civilly, even though they each were coming from different perspectives. and they left, laughing pretty easy, and i thought, ‘wow. it’s working!’” (116)

in short, bill [best] teaches that american culture has evolved to largely value the acquisition of things: cars, tech devices, supper from the latest chef to make headlines. appalachian culture instead places a higher value on connections. beans are a perfect example of that as we value them not only for taste and nutrition, but also for less tangible reasons. we pass seeds from generation to generation, sharing their names and stories to connect us to our origins. we plant our preferred pole beans in the corn so the former may use the latter’s stalks to twine up, a connection of crops. the bean plant replenishes nitrogen sapped from the soil, connecting us to the earth. we see the thick strings down the sides of the beans we prefer not as a nuisance, but as an opportunity to gather on the porch willing hands of all ages, the older women teaching children how to pull the zipper gently down one side, then the other. as we work, we share gossip and memories connecting us to our family, our community, and our history. bill notes that being intangible, such treasures of a culture of connection are virtually invisible to the citizens of a culture of acquisition and so mountain culture gets cast, at best, as quaint and anachronistic; at worst, ridiculous or perverse. bill urges us to look past such assumptions, to dig deeper for the truth. he also grows some mean beans. (141)

“aspirational eating” is a term used in the study of foodways that, in its most simplified explanation, means that we eat the foods of those we aspire to be. the theory suggests that the movement that began in the region in the mid-20th century toward convenience foods and commercial products, toward pop-tarts for breakfast instead of homemade biscuits and mamaw’s jelly, is not simply about availability, convenience, inexpensive price, or taste preference, but is also largely fueled because people from this part of the country, who so often are portrayed as “other,” aspire to be instead “the same.” like those they’ve seen selling foods on billboards and tv.
[…]
i thought about my mother, who i remember working tirelessly most days of her life, cooking, cleaning, washing clothes and hanging them on the line, washing pots and pans in an old porcelain sink. what did grocery canned goods mean to her? she relished the home-canned goods that we were gifted, adjusted the store-bought ones to suit her rigorous standards of taste. i thought that she loved her aunt’s jams as much for the memory of place and people they evoked. but what meaning might those commercial jams and vegetables have also held? did those grocery jars and tins represent a different life? perhaps an easier one; perhaps one she desired?
was that aspirational eating? (211-3)

[thursday recs] for all refugees, everywhere.

February 2, 2017

in a country where possessions counted for everything, we had no belongings except our stories. (“black-eyed women,” 7)

continuing on from last week, here is recommendation number two! for context, please check out this post!

the refugees (grove, 2017) is viet thanh nguyen’s follow-up to his pulitzer prize-winning debut novel, the sympathizer (grove, 2015), and it’s a collection of 8 stories written over 2 decades. they’re all stories about refugees, told in the present (or, at least, in contemporary times, years removed from the war), most of these characters now resettled in different cities in america, some returning to vietnam as an adult after fleeing as children.

it would be easy to attach the label of “refugee narrative” onto these stories, a label that i find hugely problematic, this general idea of a “[blank] narrative” as it is applied to minority stories. you might walk into the collection thinking that you’re getting stories that focus on war, the act of fleeing, but you don’t — these are stories of people who carry this trauma and have learned to live with it, to carry it, in different ways.

most of my criticism of nguyen has to do with his prose, i think — and i say "i think" because i'm not quite sure if that's what makes me tilt my head. i can't honestly say that i find his prose all that moving in one way or another; it doesn't sweep me off my feet or wow me with brilliance or cleverness or particular adroitness; but neither does it offend or irritate me with its plainness. i also find that he hits all the right notes in his stories but doesn't always deliver the full emotional oomph i'm hoping for, and a lot of his endings feel abrupt, not necessarily rushed, just a little clunky and awkwardly arrived upon.

and yet.

i love what nguyen tries to do with his fiction. i love the way he thinks things through. for instance, here's a confession — i might have dropped the sympathizer last year, but i loved how he thought through that narrative voice, thought about what he was trying to do with his novel, not only narratively but also within the context of asian-american literature and how it is often perceived and read by the general literary audience. i love the way he approaches his fiction.

what i liked most about these stories is that nguyen doesn’t try to make heroes or saints out of his characters. he also doesn’t reduce them to capital-R-Refugees, by which i mean that nguyen presents his characters as human beings who carry this trauma, this loss, and are defined by it in ways but not in entirety. they may be refugees, or they may be the children of refugees, but their experience, their history, is not the whole sum of who they are.

in the four months since he’d fled saigon, he’d been asked for his story again and again, by sailors, marines, and social workers, their questions becoming all too predictable. what was it like? how do you feel? isn’t it all so sad? sometimes he told the curious that what had happened was a long story, which only impelled them to ask for a shorter version. (“the other man,” 26)

i think that, sometimes, it gets lost that refugees are people who are fleeing from something, who are seeking sanctuary from something horrific that is out of their control. there sometimes seems to be a blurring of “immigrant” and “refugee,” like the two are similar enough to be seen as the same, simply because both immigrants and refugees are coming from one country into another.

it’s important to remember that immigrants and refugees are not the same. there is agency and choice in immigrating. there is no better option for a refugee than to seek refuge elsewhere.

it’s also important to remember that refugees don’t simply come into another country and forget the violence or the journey that brought them there. they live with that, with every decision they had to make, with every loss they suffered, ever loved one they lost, every wrong they endured, and they come into these strange places and learn new languages and ways of life, sometimes (often times) in spaces that regard them suspiciously and/or condescendingly — and they survive.

i liked that nguyen shows us this, that these characters, these refugees, have survived. they get to america, and they adapt. they find each other and create vietnamese communities around the country. they take jobs they’re overqualified for; they make their living selling fake luxury goods; and they get involved with their bosses and lose their jobs. they’re haunted by the literal ghosts of their pasts, and there will always be that before and after, just like there will always be the saigon before the war, before they became refugees, and the saigon that exists now with its different street names, with its new name altogether.

and they are just as much a part of america as anyone else.

favorite stories:

"the other man"
"the americans"
"someone else besides you"

thank you, grove, for sending me the book. this does not impact my thoughts, nor does it influence my decision to include as part of this series.

later, his arm thrown over marcus’s body, facing his back, liem wasn’t surprised to discover how little he remembered. his habit of forgetting was too deeply ingrained, as if he passed his life perpetually walking backward through a desert, sweeping away his footprints, leaving him with only scattered recollections of rough lips pressed against his, and the comfort of a man’s muscular weight. (“the other man,” 42)

she wondered if he remembered their escape from vung tau on a rickety fishing trawler, overloaded with his five siblings and sixty strangers, three years after the war’s end. after the fourth day at sea, he and the rest of the children, bleached by the sun, were crying for water, even though there was none to offer but the sea’s. nevertheless, she had washed their faces and combed their hair every morning, using salt water and spit. she was teaching them that decorum mattered even now, and that their mother’s fear wasn’t so strong that it could prevent her from loving them. (“i’d love you to want me,” 107)

he remembered her infancy, when michiko insisted on sleeping with claire in between them, he so worried about rolling over in his sleep onto claire that he lay awake restless until he could worry no more, whereupon he climbed down to the floor and slept on the carpet. not so many years later, when claire was walking but barely potty-trained, and still sleeping in their bed, she would wake up, slip off the edge and land on his chest, and when he opened one eye, demand to be taken to the bathroom. the trip alone in the dark was too frightening. he would sigh, get up, and lead her down the hall, step by careful step, her hand wrapped around one of his fingers. (“the americans,” 148-9)

#immigrantfood

February 1, 2017

so, this weekend. this week-and-a-half. oh, dear lord.

i’ve been spending ridiculous amounts of time these last few days consuming news and struggling with not sinking into total despair and trying to find ways i can fight back — or, at least, contribute a voice to things.

i admit that it’s been easy to slide into despair and hopelessness, though, and i’ve been tempted simply to unplug from everything and curl up in a cave and block out the world, especially because none of this is helping with the ongoing downward trajectory of my mental state. every day is a constant struggle to stay afloat personally, unrelated to politics and the goings-on of the world, and it doesn’t help that i’m also pretty much completely isolated in california because i’m currently staying at my parents’, don’t have a car, am still financially unstable, and have no close friends in the area.

it’s no surprise, then, that i’ve been using technology as my support — text messages, kakao talk, twitter, instagram, this space — and, when david chang started using the hashtag “immigrantfood” over the weekend, it stuck with me.

as someone who loves food and spends most of her time thinking about it, i’ve come to embrace the hashtag fully. however, while i start aggressively using it, i wanted to lay out clearly what the hashtag means for me and what i want to convey through its use. i mentioned this briefly on instagram but thought i would also expand on it here, put it down on record.

the hashtag means two things specifically:

ONE. diversity does not only make this country great; it also makes it delicious. food is one of the great gifts immigrants and refugees bring to this country because food isn’t simply sustenance or something to eat — it’s a means through which to get to know people, to understand where they come from, to realize that they are not the Other.

i will never downplay or underestimate the significance of the 밥상 (bahp-sang, food table).

TWO. you do not get to take our food but reject us, our bodies/selves, our histories, our cultures. food comes hand-in-hand with culture because it is informed by culture and, in turn, informs culture, not only what we eat, but how we eat, with whom, in what ways. additionally, food is shaped by history, by wars, by scarcity and suffering and survival, just like it is shaped by wealth and privilege and abundance, and food is created by bodies, from the bodies that sow the fields and raise the animals to the bodies that take these products and cook them and offer the meals that we eat, whether at home, our own and others’, or in restaurants and eateries around the country.

food does not exist in a vacuum, and it does not come from nothing, and it cannot be detached from its origins. further, before you think that i’m making too much out of something so basic, think about this: food is also political. it is social.

it is used as a means of power when it is withheld and/or used as bribes or incentives, a means through which those in power control those below them. it is used to discriminate against people, to make Others of them, by saying that there is one way to eat, one way that is superior to others — “ethnic” (aka non-white) food is often looked down upon as smelly and uncultivated because it is different, served differently, consumed differently, and those who eat it are, consequently, seen as dirty, unrefined, less-than-human.

it is easily appropriated when people (usually white) go storming into spaces that are not theirs, marveling at the “exotic” things of other worlds and latching onto the food, all while exercising zero respect and awareness of the world and people around them.

and this is what i mean when i use this hashtag — that food is not just food, that it can be as much a tool or weapon as it is identity, sustenance, and love. that food comes attached to people, to culture, to history, and, as such, it should be respected. that you cannot go barging into another culture without any sensitivity and simply take and take and take, that that time of colonialism and imperialism has (or should have) passed, that that mentality and attitude are unacceptable and despicable.

that food is one of the myriad amazing things that immigrants and refugees bring to this country, that this country and its food would not be what they are today without these contributions, and, as such, you cannot simply take our food and reject us.

i know; i eat a lot of asian food (and tacos); but “asian food,” in itself, is a giant umbrella that covers a whole lot of different food from different countries and cultures and peoples. one of my goals for the year is to get out of my comfort zone, to eat more from other countries and cuisines, to extend my palate and, in connection, my understanding of places and people i know little of now.

another goal is to learn more about korean food and to share more about it. there is a book i’m dying to write about korea and its culture and food and society — it’s been percolating in my brain for a few years now, but it’s really solidified as a concept in the past few months. i know how it would look visually and aesthetically; i know the stories i’d want to tell; and i know how i’d lay it out and organize it.

at present, though, that is the extent of where i can take my korea food book, especially as one of my biggest questions these days is whether or not i will be able to write again in the ways i was once able, and, so, this is also a small way of seeing if there is any possibility for hope — hope that i will be whole again, that i will find my way home again, that i will survive this, all of this, and write again.