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My Turnby Marie Lo |
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From The Asian Reporter, V19, #21 (June 2, 2009), page 6.
Family dinners
On the day we drove up to visit my parents, they had delicious plates of goodness waiting for us: crispy chow mein noodles under tender beef and sautéed greens, deep-fried garlicky spareribs coated with a honey sauce, and one of my favorite dishes — long stalks of gai-lan, Chinese broccoli.
In the two days we have been in Vancouver, B.C., I have been spoiled with golden water chestnut cakes whose crunch is suspended in a warm gelatinous sweetness, steamed chicken dipped in a sauce of scallions, garlic, and ginger, and piping bowls of spicy seafood soup with mung bean noodles and calamari rings. I also banqueted on a sumptuous vegetarian meal that made me wonder why I wasn’t vegetarian.
In my family, food is the idiom of love.
My father is a reserved man with a nervous laugh. He is in constant motion, preferring television over movies because with television he can get up during commercials. He speaks to us through food, carefully noting who likes to eat what and then disappearing to the store to surprise each of us with the things we love.
Growing up, my mother was the disciplinarian. In recent years, a jokester side has emerged and she constantly teases her granddaughter with little pokes and tickles. She is a visionary and recycler, able to see new forms in discarded things. Her meals are often a combination of something new and something from the meal before. And every time we get sick, she soothes us with her special stews.
To say we spend a lot of our time eating is an understatement. What we find sometimes difficult to say to each other we express through a home-cooked dish or a treat from the supermarket.
Our private language of food, however, does not always translate outside. I know how easily such emphasis on food can slip into what writer and cultural critic Frank Chin calls "food pornography." Food pornography is the exoticization of ethnic food for the consumption of a white audience in order to gain entry into white culture. Food pornography can explain the contradictions between the hostility toward immigrants and the popularity of ethnic foods; it reduces ethnic and racial difference to a gastronomical one, rendering difference to a sign of our cultural diversity without acknowledging its racial complexity.
Hand in hand with the food pornographer is the cultural ambassador or the cultural tour guide. Sometimes going to an Asian restaurant with non-Asian friends makes me anxious. I am expected to order the food as if by virtue of being Chinese, I know all the other Asian cuisines. Not only am I not a very good cultural tour guide for Asian food in general, I’m pretty lousy at being one for Chinese food.
The problem is I don’t know how to read Chinese menus. Many of the dishes I have grown up with are nameless to me. I know their tastes and textures, but I don’t possess the Mandarin to describe them. The descriptions in English never seem to accurately capture what it is I am craving. Am I looking for steamed chicken? Or is it soy sauce chicken? (This is why I love dim sum. I can just point!)
I could sneak a Chinese menu home, ask my parents to translate, and then memorize the dishes. I could easily figure all this out. But this is a willful ignorance on my part. The truth is I don’t want words for these dishes yet. I’m not ready to share these dishes with others. I want these dishes to remain the only ones I get to eat when I come home, when I am around family.
I want to savor the unspoken love and tenderness that my parents gift me.