Beet-Pickled Eggs
What a semester of American food taught me about my Asian-American identity
This semester, I learned to eat couscous and beet-pickled eggs; how to chit-chat with neighbors and how to make use of the front porch. And in the week after final exams when I finally had time to socialize, I learned how to baby talk from Julia (who often came into the kitchen with Nadia the cat in her arms, exclaiming, “are you so small, kitten-mittens?”), and how to be generous from Miss Abby (who gleefully introduced me to a few people as the freshman on her third floor that she was going to adopt).
I hadn’t noticed it before, but now it seems always like we are picking up other people’s habits and making them our own. This sort of social mimicry, I am sure, belongs to a brand of biological phenomena which is observed in other animals too; it makes evolutionary sense as a survival tool. But even as a sociologically-backed fact, this revelation raises questions about our understanding of the role of lived experience in defining family and culture.
Julia asked me over dinner one night, as we sat between her parents — one who buttered her pizza slice with mashed avocado, and the other who topped his pizza slice with shredded Kraft cheddar — if hers was “the whitest family” I knew. Her father interjected with a politically charged comment which I will not repeat.
I laughed. I wasn’t too sure about that, and I don’t think I am ready to write about the nuances of race and culture and how they relate.
But throughout the semester I spent living with them, I came to question myself and my understanding of what it means to be American — and, in my case, Asian-American.
I grew up in the greater San Francisco bay area, in an enclave of predominantly Chinese and Indian immigrant families with parents who worked tech jobs and second-generation kids whose lives revolved around busting their asses to get into UCs and Ivies.
As children, we laughed cynically at the playground adage which translated the letter grading scale into Asian standards: “A for acceptable, B for bad; C for can’t have dinner, D for don’t come home; and F for finding a new family,” sometimes sharing in the suffering of the half-truth.
When I got my first less-than-favorable marks in a significant course at university, it was Miss Abby who had said — also over a pizza dinner — that yes, I could always do better, but that I had tried and that was worthy of acknowledgement too.
Was this “the everyone-gets-a-trophy” mentality my father had often warned me about when I had my tantrums about not having expressly proud parents? I don’t know. I don’t even know if I believed her. But the reassurance was comforting, if a little bit scary due to its novelty.
In between pizza dinners, Miss Abby and I fell into the routine of daily check-ins at dinner and evening walks with Fitz the dog, a sort of Tuesdays with Morrie experience where I came to understand that cultural identity was as much about what you ate as it was about what you believed.
Once we had a discussion about soup, such as chili, which Miss Abby remarked was a great source of physical and emotional comfort. I recounted to Miss Abby my mother’s tale of surprise and disgust in her first years as an American, wherein she discovered that savory chili was not sweet like red bean soup, then wondered afterwards if what I was experiencing was culture shock too.
Is it as simple as a lack of encounters with the things certain groups of people do and enjoy? If I begin to partake in some of these indulgences, will I become a “banana” — “yellow on the outside and white on the inside” — in the derogatory way my middle school friends referred to our less academically-inclined classmates who experimented with Kardashian makeup?
Probably not. Culture shock and cultural appropriation refer to the overriding of cultural habits and intents; what I have experienced is a fusion of inherited and adopted cultures, something which may be better described as cultural confusion: confusion which arises from my inability to distinguish between lack of personal experience, and exposure to inherent cultural differences, which have jointly contributed to the shift and change in my values, beliefs, and diet.
Anyway, maybe not knowing is not a bad thing. What is happening to me happens to everyone in college, or so I’ve been told. It’s called personal growth, and that’s good, I think.
