Thoughts inspired by Foodways lecture

Last night I attended the first of the Southern Foodways Alliance’s new Viking Lecture Series. Monique Truong and Bich Minh Nyugen read from their recently published books, A Book of Salt and Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, respectively. Though one is a novel and the other a memoir, food is a central to both, and the readings and subsequent discussion were really fascinating. Of course, as with any discussion about food, it immediately made me want to share my story (or one of my many stories). That’s one of the best things about talking, writing, and making food, I think: everyone gets to share. There’s no one on the planet who doesn’t eat, and who hasn’t, at least once in their lives, enjoyed a meal. Both of the books were about immigrants, and their experience of food, both within their old and new cultures. Which leads me to this:

When I lived in London, I was fortunate enough to have friends from a vast range of backgrounds, and I heard more crazy, involved origin stories than I had ever encountered before in my life. Everyone had a story to tell, a culture to share, and a particular view on that culture to express. Our discussions and sharing of our respective cultures often involved food. One particular friend, Kieran, is Korean-American. I became friends with Kieran and his girlfriend Emi through their flatmate Dania. Emi is Japanese-American, while Dania is Lebanese-American. We would often introduce ourselves, or be introduced, by our ethnicities. Another friend, Emily, who is a white girl from Connecticut, Dania once introduced by saying, “Oh, she isn’t anything. She’s American-American.” I still can’t quite figure out how to parse that statement, but it’s one of my favorite quotes from the whole year. I was never in danger of suffering that particular intro; I was always described as Southern.

Kieran was born in Korea but adopted as a baby by his white American parents, who actually have a Polish surname. His sister(s?) are also adopted, and also Korean. If I remember his stories correctly, his parents did their best to expose their children to Korean culture. Kieran, who was in London to study international politics, was maybe the most knowledgeable human being on that particular topic I have ever met. He was particularly interested in Korean-American relations, no surprise, though he could tell you about Middle Eastern, African, European, South American, and Central and East Asian politics as well. He was also interested in Korean culture, and learning the language, and cooking the food. He made fried rice for us one time, with an egg cracked over the top, and I offered him some of my Aunt Judy’s Korean recipes.

My Aunt Judy is from South Korea; my mother’s brother, my Uncle Jim, met her while he was there in the Peace Corps. I think. He might have met her when he came back to the States afterwards. I’d have to ask my mom, but either way, Uncle Jim went to South Korea in the Peace Corps, and at some point, he married Aunt Judy, and they are still married today. Aunt Judy cooks lots of Korean food for all of us, or at least as close an approximation of Korean as one can cook in the U.S., I suppose. The Lampru family Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners consist of the usual turkey, roast, sweet potato casserole, green bean-mushroom-fried onion casserole, mashed potatoes, gravy, etc, but also kimchi, sticky rice, Korean barbeque, and something I only know how to pronounce but in my head is spelled yakimandu. Which are basically eggrolls. One Christmas vacation I stayed at Aunt Judy and Uncle Jim’s house over in Powder Springs, Georgia (a suburb of Atlanta) and learned how to make these dishes. As Aunt Judy walked me through the steps, I scrawled them down on a series of yellow legal pad sheets. The cooking was an all-day process; we drove to the Mexican/Asian/Middle Eastern grocery store to stock up on things like Korean radishes and chili-garlic sauce, spent hours chopping and mashing vegetables, tofu, and ground beef, and then finished up crouched over the fryer, dropping individual eggrolls in, one by one, and fishing them out while avoiding hot oil splashes. The next day, I took home a huge Ziplock bag of yakimandu and a handful of desperately scribbled sheets of paper. I have yet to attempt Aunt Judy’s recipes again, for various reasons. I don’t own a fryer, I can’t find Korean radishes, I’m terrible at packing the eggrolls tightly enough, and the amount of sugar in the Korean barbeque made me wary of ever eating it again. I do get to eat her cooking on holidays, though, and I’m looking forward to that again this year.

What amuses me most about this story, though, is the way in which culture is transmitted. Somewhere in New York City, possibly stuck underneath Emi and Emily’s couch, or maybe in his parents; house in Pennsylvania, Kieran, a Korean-American adopted into a white, kinda Polish family, still has the notes given to him by me, a white, Southern girl with no knowledge of Korean culture, other than those few sheets of recipes made over and over again by my Korean aunt, with the full support and encouragement of the rest of my white family.

I don’t mean to suggest that our acceptance of her food equals our acceptance of her into our family. I never grew up thinking that she wasn’t, but as I’ve grown older, I have been told that it was difficult in the beginning, especially for my grandparents. Neither they nor my parents and their siblings were raised in a world that looked kindly on a mixed marriage or mixed-race children, and my mother has mentioned on several occasions how difficult it was for my cousins when they were growing up. This may or may not be true; my mother has also been known to make some fairly racist statements as well, and she may be overemphasizing this in order to make a subsequent point, which was why she didn’t ever want me to date a black man. And of course I’m the one relating this to you, and my opinions on race and ethnicity are well outside mainstream understanding and quite the opposite of my mother’s.

Food isn’t an automatic stand-in for assimilation, or a direct metaphor for cultural acceptance. One of last night’s speakers, Monique Truong, commented that it is odd to think that, in the United States, our food is often made by illegal immigrants. We are willing to allow them into one of the most intimate processes we experienced as human beings, the process of taking food into our bodies, nourishing ourselves, but we are unwilling to grant them a long list of other privileges that many of us enjoy as Americans, like citizenship or health care. We devalue their labor as we exoticize their creations. Is food a gateway to acceptance, or it is merely another form of cultural imperialism?