The Struggles of Writing About Chinese Food as a Chinese Person Clarissa Wei
Some "Highlights":
food is, indeed, extremely political.
When I look at the repertoire of work that White chefs and restaurateurs have built on ethnic cuisine, it feels in a way, dehumanizing. White people are able to establish outrageously successful careers for being experts and authorities on the stuff that racialized folks do every day simply by existing. But of course, people of colour will rarely, if ever, be called experts on how to simply be themselves. It's as if racialized folks and their ways of life are objects to be observed—study material, of sorts—rather than entire countries, cultures, and individual complex lives.
Chinese food was never fascinating for me; it is simply a part of who I am. My family would make annual pilgrimages back to Asia and growing up, the fluorescent streets of Tainan in southern Taiwan, rich with some of the best food in the world, were as much of a fixture in my life as the blistering hot pavement of Los Angeles flush with drive-thru burger joints. After school, my mom would take me to McDonalds for a Kid's Meal and for dinner, she'd cook us three-cups chicken (chicken legs slow-braised with one part rice wine, one part soy sauce, one part sesame oil), a steamed whole fish, a motley assortment of stir-fried vegetables, and pair it all with a cauldron of steaming hot white rice.
For show-and-tell, all I had to do was tell people what I ate for dinner last night and be met with wide-eyed gasps from my teachers and from my peers, a chorus of "ewwwws." I quickly became the weird kid who adored boiled pig intestines and fermented tofu.
Our food is still largely looked on upon from the sidelines as a mysterious cuisine of antiquity. Only certain dishes like noodles, dumplings, kebabs, and rice bowls have been normalized. The majority is still largely stigmatized because, bluntly put, white people have not decided they like it yet.
I tell people I love the texture of jellyfish head and still get weird looks. I pop bamboo shoots like candy and people stare at me like I'm eating bark (which, for the record, Chinese people do eat, but in medicinal stews).
People will complain incessantly on Yelp if a bowl of Chinese noodles goes over $10. However, the sheer labor and brute skill that goes into a bowl of hand-pulled noodles
beef noodle soup school in the north of China. There, every single day, one must pull dough at least 100 times a day. The type of noodles varies by location. There are knife-shaved, hand-pulled, and hand-torn noodles. There are belt noodles, thin noodles, short noodles, noodles made with rice, with arrowroot, with wheat, with potato starch.is absolutely mind-blowing. Pasta pales in comparison. I know this because
I went to a
Imagine if a hipster white chef started making pasta and enhanced it with salt bushes in the Mojave desert. He'd receive a roaring, standing applause and a string of awards. Chinese people have been doing the equivalent of that for centuries.
History has a way of erasing our role in our own food.
In California, when Chinese farmers first arrived to the swampy shores of the Sacramento Valley in the 1850s, the story is that
they looked at the land and cried. Eventually, with the help of the Japanese, they were able to convert the area to a productive piece of land.
Land prices increased four-fold. Property values soared, and soon bankers and land companies rushed in. Rice became one of the most profitable agricultural industries of the state—the new gold.
But a backlash arose as more established Americans began to vilify the Asian settlers who had created this industry and, in their opinions, could steal jobs that were rightfully theirs. By 1913, this ongoing discrimination caused California's Alien Land Law to be passed, barring most Asian immigrants from starting their own farms by prohibiting non-citizens from owning property. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Indian tenant farmers were forced to lease land from white landowners, yet still produced most of the rice at that time.
Today, the California rice industry is $5 billion business and Chinese people have, to no one's surprise, largely been erased from its history.
So yes. Food is political for us; it always has been. It is time we give Chinese people the recognition they deserve.
Start by letting us tell our own stories.
