You Are(n’t) What You Eat: Food, Culture, and Family from a Second-Generation Immigrant’s Perspective – Samantha Lau

You Are(n’t) What You Eat: Food, Culture, and Family from a SecondGeneration Immigrant’s Perspective

SAMANTHA LAU

Setting aside the more pressing consequences of the persistent global pandemic we find ourselves in these days, I’d like for a moment to reflect on one of the things I miss most about the world outside of my house and its walkable radius: yum cha. For those who aren’t familiar with the concept of yum cha, it is, in my humble opinion, the supreme Chinese dining experience, often described as Chinese brunch. At Imperial Kingdom, my family’s go-to restaurant – so crowned after years of trying and testing competitors in our surrounding suburbs – there are only two timeslots, 11am and 1pm, which fall perfectly into the brunch time range.

I grew up going to yum cha very frequently, which explains why I miss it so much whenever I’m deprived of it for a long period of time, such as now when I’m back home in Melbourne but in lockdown. When I was younger, extended family gatherings would always be a choice between dinner out at a Chinese restaurant or 11am weekend yum cha. And if the decision ended up being dinner that month, my parents, sister, and I would end up hitting Imperial Kingdom by ourselves despite the inconvenience of having to share three-piece dishes among four people.

With this kind of frequent exposure to yum cha, I am pretty confident in claiming I know almost all the dishes. I can identify when Imperial Kingdom is trialling a new dish, and I know when they’ve gotten rid of an old one (RIP, chan bao with the crackly top); I even know the secret items they won’t put on their menu. I’m well aware of the food customs, too: serve others before you serve yourself, be on the constant lookout for others’ teacups so you can quickly fill them before they’re drained, and, if there’s one piece of food left on a plate, make sure to insist that someone else finish it, and if they try

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pushing it onto you, keep insisting until they give up. Also, fight to pay the bill, furiously. This may involve pretending to go to the toilet.

The point is, I’m pretty sure I have yum cha worked out – and, for a secondgeneration immigrant who doesn’t have many, if any, aspects of her ChineseMalaysian heritage ‘worked out,’ this confidence is a big deal. When I’m at yum cha, I feel a rare connection to the culture of my parents – what I term my ‘heritage culture’. I’d even go so far to say I feel fluent in it. But then, inevitably, one of the servers will come by with their trolley and ask me what I want, and things begin to fall apart. I can understand their question, I can see the dishes I want, and even perhaps remember their names, but I can never remember how to quickly and politely indicate in Cantonese – a dialect I should know – that I want that plate or that steamer. Which then reminds me that, even though I know all of the secret menu items, I wouldn’t know how to order any of them. Nor would I be able to confidently book a table over the phone. Of course, I could just use English, but it’s in these moments that I’m hit with the reality that it’s not a choice: I have to use English, unlike almost everyone else in the restaurant speaking Cantonese. And so, the illusion of being fluent, of fitting into my heritage culture, is shattered.

This situation is partly a sob story about my cultural anxieties as a ChineseMalaysian-Australian (yes, I know, it’s a mouthful), but it’s also a situation which highlights the complex relationship between food and heritage culture for a second-generation immigrant like me. Having grown up without other significant cultural touchstones like dress, religion, music, shows, and language, I have spent most of my life trying to use food as a way to gain access to my Chinese-Malaysian culture – and I am by no means alone in this endeavour. Though there exists little literature on this topic, through interviews with second-generation immigrants of various nationalities and ethnic backgrounds, researchers have suggested that “food maintains its central role as a tool for connecting with or rediscovering heritage identities” (Weller and Turkon 70), and that even for those who “have never visited ‘the homeland,’ food can serve as a ‘root and/or route’ of culture” (Paul 6). This sentiment is echoed by personal essays such as

Alicia Wittmeyer’s The New York Times piece, “I Admire Vegetarians. It’s a Choice I Won’t Ever Make,” in which, as a Chinese-Malaysian-American who is “realistically, not that Malaysian,” she calls food “an important link in a connection that can sometimes feel tenuous.” Other reflection pieces like Eater’s “The Rise (and Stall) of the Boba Generation” highlight how secondgeneration immigrants have capitalised on this notion that food serves as an important connector to heritage culture: in the piece, author Jenny Zhang describes how Asian Americans have sought out and adopted “tokens of Asian-American popular culture – rice, dumplings, pho, soy sauce, Korean barbecue” alongside the famous bubble tea beverage, in order “to signify and perform a shared idea of identity” – namely, an Asian one.

Amongst Wittmeyer’s reflections is the claim that food is “the most accessible of cultural touchstones.” If this claim is true, then, coupled with food’s supposed ability to connect me to my heritage culture, it’s no surprise that I may have become overly dependent on cultural foods, such as those found at yum cha, to create and sustain a feeling of connection to my Chinese-Malaysian background. Indeed, Wittmeyer’s reticence towards adopting a vegetarian diet because she fears alienation from her culture and its meat-eating traditions itself illustrates how heavily reliant on food an individual lacking other cultural touchstones might become in order to feel connected to their heritage culture. Zhang similarly broaches this topic in an interview with a 23-year-old university student of Italian, Lao and Vietnamese descent, who says that “to prove my Asianness, I need to adopt the mainstream Asian culture that people know as Asian: drinking bubble tea, eating certain foods, using chopsticks;” in this student’s case, despite her awareness of the perhaps problematic perception of food and its consumption as being measures of cultural membership, she nevertheless continues to submit to this expectation.

Like the student in Zhang’s piece, I have often tried to use food as “an identity-validating symbol” (Weller and Turkon 70), a proving ground for my Chinese-Malaysianness. If I can consume, learn about, and produce enough cultural food, then perhaps I can rightfully claim my spot in the ChineseMalaysian community – or so my thought process goes. Of course, there are

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several problems with this line of thinking. The first is that a false equation of food with culture can itself be damaging to the heritage culture to which I’m trying to connect in the first place. To quash my cultural insecurities, I overcompensate by overplaying my love for traditional cultural foods which are less widely eaten or accepted in Australia – including but not limited to chicken feet, pig trotters and intestines, and fermented Chinese cheese. Just like Michelle Zauner, who off-handedly references a “sad Asian-fusion joint” in her essay on Korean food and missing her late Korean mother “Crying in H Mart”, I scorn high-end fusion food restaurants in favour of the small Chinese joints in my city, whose low price points, relaxed approach to hygiene, and no-nonsense service I fondly use as measures for ‘authenticity’ in an attempt to position myself as gatekeeper for what does and does not constitute ‘true’ Chinese-Malaysian culture.

In her extensive analysis of food symbols in Asian American literature, Sau-ling Cynthia Wong articulates exactly why such behaviours can be problematic. Taking author and playwright Frank Chin’s The Year of the Dragon, one of the first plays written by an Asian American to receive mainstream acclaim in the United States, Wong defines Chin’s concept of “food pornography” as “making a living by exploiting the ‘exotic’ aspects of one’s ethnic foodways,” which “in cultural terms…translates to reifying perceived cultural differences and exaggerating one’s otherness in order to gain a foothold in a white-dominated social system” (55). Wong goes further, explaining that “food pornography appears to be a promotion, rather than a vitiation or devaluation, of one’s ethnic identity” (55). Wong’s analysis of Chin’s commentary on ‘food pornography’ is very much based on its deployment out of financial necessity, given that Chin’s protagonist abandons his dream of becoming a writer for the more profitable and secure job of a Chinatown tour guide, at which he excels by “pandering to the worst fantasies of gawking tourists, feeding them appropriate doses of ‘foreignness’” (59). Chin’s protagonist and I may differ in our motivations for performing ‘otherness’ – he, to make a living, and I, to assert belonging to an ‘other’ culture – but the result is the same: we both end up perpetuating stereotypes which ultimately pigeonhole ourselves and others within our own culture.

It is not only this realisation which has encouraged me to challenge the extent to which I depend on food to connect me to my heritage culture; through my yum cha example, I’ve also illustrated that food cannot make me feel sufficiently Chinese-Malaysian – at least not by itself. The fact that my feelings of inadequacy at yum cha are triggered by situations in which I am unable to communicate fluently in Cantonese suggest the importance of language, either more than or in conjunction with food, in creating a connection between me and my heritage culture. Again, I am not alone in holding this belief; in Wittmeyer’s essay, she directly correlates her lack of proficiency in Cantonese with being “not that Malaysian,” later also writing that when ordering food in Malaysia, “I have to hold up my fingers to indicate how many I want, because I forget how to say any number larger than three in Malay.” Similarly, Zauner confesses she “can hardly speak Korean,” citing her “elementary-grade Korean skills” for her inability to understand the conversations had between her mother, aunts, and grandmother over dinner in Korea. While Zauner does not, unlike Wittmeyer, explicitly equate her inability to speak her mother’s native language with a watered-down cultural identity, the very mention – and perhaps one might even read as the lamenting – of these language barriers by both authors reflects their belief in the salience and value of language, alongside food, as a connector to heritage culture.

By contrast, literature about second-generation immigrants who are proficient in their parents’ native languages highlights the success with which this cultural touchstone, even more so than food, connects them to their heritage culture. In their research on the role of food in identity maintenance and formation for first- and second-generation Latino immigrants in Ithaca, New York, Weller and Turkon found that of the individuals they interviewed, those with proficiency in Spanish “tended to regard language skills as being of greater importance in identity maintenance and formation than the consumption of heritage foods” (63). Such a finding was established based on the attitudes of one particular second-generation interviewee, who ranked his ability to speak Spanish as his “primary tie” to his Latino background (Weller and Turkon 63).

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Having come to acknowledge both the inability of food to create and hold a significant connection to my Chinese-Malaysian culture and the issues that arise out of forcing it to do so, it is all too easy to write food off entirely for its failure to fulfill the primary role I had assigned it all these years. Yet, it is in fact due to this decoupling of food from its previous role that I have come to realise and appreciate what (or who), if not heritage culture, food has successfully connected me to: my parents.

In recent years, food has played a central role in bringing me closer to my parents by helping to bridge the cultural divide that has always existed between us. Having been born and raised in markedly different contexts, the usual generational divide you might observe between my parents and me is only further compounded by our cultural differences. These differences have, for most of my life, opened up a rift between us, filled with misunderstandings and clashes over university and career decisions, the importance of friends versus family, as well as the unconditional expectations of filial piety and obedience. Because of these differences, I’ve always felt that I understood very little about my parents and the reasoning behind their actions and beliefs, and therefore rarely felt a deeper connection to them. The laws of filial piety may suggest that there is no need to look beyond the fact that your parents are just your parents in order to have a harmonious relationship them, but, as I’ve mentioned, filial piety is one of the things my parents and I don’t see perfectly eye to eye on. In any case, I have never been entirely comfortable with settling for seeing my parents as just my parents, and with taking whatever they say as gospel. For me, this kind of set-up is a far cry from the connection I seek with them. I’ve always hoped to bridge the gap between us, and food has been instrumental in helping me achieve this goal.

The relationship between food and parents for second-generation immigrants has not yet been widely or explicitly explored, but this fact does not mean it is a novel topic. In her thesis on second-generation immigrants’ experiences with “ethnic food” in Toronto, Canada, Kerith Paul notes that certain dining experiences sought out by her interviewees in their adulthood are done so “to connect with their immediate family” (one interviewee specifically cites yum cha!) (26). Similarly, in her essay, Zauner ponders

whether the Korean individuals she observes at the H Mart food court are “thinking of [their families]…whether they’re eating to feel connected to, to celebrate these people through food.” For Zauner, it’s clear that her connection to Korean food is deeply tied to her connection with her mother – after all, it was her Korean mother who raised her with “a distinctly Korean appetite.” She spends much of her essay recalling and reminiscing about memories of her mother, all of which contain food at their core – whether it is spending hours making dumplings together in America or gorging on Korean-Chinese food for their first meal whenever they travelled back to Seoul. It’s not only the fond memories created over preparation and consumption of food with her mother that highlight the link between food and connection to parents in Zauner’s piece, but also her mention of food as her mother’s way of expressing parental love: as Zauner writes, “I could always feel [my mother’s] affection radiating from the lunches she packed and the meals she prepared for me just the way I liked them.”

In his personal essay, Bosnian-American writer Aleksandar Hemon also conceives of food as “a conduit that [transmits] love,” describing his mother’s insistence on cooking him his old comfort foods whenever she visits him in “Bread is practically sacred”. In the piece, Hemon also unpacks his parents’ food habits, writing of their “poor-people food ethos, where nothing should ever be wasted,” their perception of food’s innate “hierarchy of value, wherein meat and bread are at the top” and vegetables at the bottom, and their disregard for adopting dietary changes even at the advice of medical professionals. All of these food-related attitudes and behaviours, according to Hemon, reveal a great deal about the environment in which his parents grew up: one where “subsistence could never be guaranteed, where living was always survival”, and where food – particularly bread, “the poor people’s most basic staple” – came to “[equal] life.” The article’s subtitle only drives home the significance of food in allowing second-generation immigrants to learn about their parents: as Hemon writes, “Nothing taught me more about my parents…than the food they cherished after fleeing wartorn Bosnia.”

Like both Hemon and Zauner, cultural food seems to be one of the keys for me to connect with and better understand my immigrant parents.

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However, the importance food takes on in my case is not necessarily because of distinctive memories made over food, nor because of any rare coded display of affection that might be transmitted through its preparation and consumption (my mum actually dislikes cooking, and though my parents do show their love by always leaving me the best cuts of meat and my dad also has no qualms about verbally announcing he loves me on a daily basis). It does have to do with learning about my parents and their pasts, though not necessarily through analysis of their food habits (many of which are actually identical to those of Hemon’s parents). Rather, the reason food has been critical in allowing me to learn about and feel closer to my parents is because of the rituals my family have created around it.

For the entirety of my life, my family has made a point of eating dinner together every night, at least when it’s feasible – a tradition apparently passed down from their own parents and their parents’ parents. I’m not sure that my parents would support my claim that they deliberately upheld this ritual in order to carve out a physical and temporal space for the whole family to come together at the end of our separate days; they would more likely say that they maintained the practice because that’s how it had always been done – and, besides, eating together makes cooking and cleaning more convenient. At the end of the day, I suppose it doesn’t really matter why we have this food ritual: if it’s the latter reason that motivated my parents to sustain this tradition, the former has nevertheless been the result of their decision.

Dinnertime in my household is marked not only by food, but by communality. No matter what you’re doing, you’re expected at the dinner table by the time the dishes have been cooked (or a bit before, if you’re me and have to set the table). It’s not that eating together is strictly enforced; if you’re caught in a situation or task whose start and end times are out of your control, dinner will go on without you – it’s just that we’d much rather wait for you if possible. Neither parent ever explicitly spoke this ‘eating together’ rule into existence or threatened us children with punishment if we failed to comply – it’s just silently understood.

However, while communal dinner may be a routine for my family, I hope this does not imply begrudging submission to the practice. In fact, I’ve come to understand just how valuable this ritual is, especially since in recent years it has become even more than just about spending time in each other’s company: it’s now also marked by the rich conversations that flourish over the meal. The bulk of our conversation actually usually happens after dinner, when our plates have been wiped clean, our cutlery set down, our stomachs filled (and possibly expanded). It’s in these moments when we’re all lingering in our seats slowly digesting, my sister and I not yet ready to tackle the large washing pile, that my parents start to become a little more talkative about the past.

It’s at our dining table that I have learned the most about my parents and their (hi)stories, where their nostalgia, grief, joy, laughter, and tears have surfaced, occasionally all at once. It is here, at this table, that they’ve helped me trace our family’s migratory past, starting with their great-grandparents’ respective journeys from the Guangdong and Fujian provinces of southern China to the small towns of Ipoh and Taiping in West Malaysia, to my parents’ own leap to Melbourne almost thirty years ago. It’s here that my mum has told me about how lucky she was growing up as the youngest child of seven because she never had to experience the same level of hunger and poverty that her elder brothers and sisters did. It’s here that my dad has reflected on how strong-willed my grandmother was, always working late into the night sewing clothes to put food on the table and pay school fees, all the while also cooking, cleaning, and raising four kids. It’s here that I’ve learned that my parents, too, grew up with their own identity struggles in a country they felt tried to make them suppress their Chinese heritage. It’s here that my parents have shared their relationship origin story (which disappointingly follows a rom-com plot to a tee) and made me gasp in horror telling me about when they first moved to Kuala Lumpur and had to spend most of their Saturday washing clothes by hand together because they didn’t have a machine back then. It’s here that my dad has recounted stories from his time spent studying in England, contrasting the excitement of no one telling him what to do at seventeen with the crushing pressure of knowing that failing any subject – and thus having to

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cough up money his parents didn’t have in order to repeat it – was out of the question. It’s here that I’ve been reminded of the career dreams and family ties they gave up in pursuit of better opportunities for my sister and me, and the residual pain of these sacrifices. Like for Hemon, it’s because of food that I’ve been able to uncover more about my parents’ lives (separately) and life (together) long before my sister or I appeared, and hence come to better understand why they are the way they are today. But, rather than this knowledge coming to me through observation of how my parents relate to and view food, it has come from their own sharing and storytelling over our dinner table. In this way, food has literally and metaphorically brought my family together – not necessarily through the nature of food itself, but through the experiences that revolve around it and the conversations that may only be accessed during those experiences.

Of course, I must concede that it is not only food and its rituals which have played a role in connecting me with my parents. It’s also the changes to our lifestyles, like my parents’ job changes and my move to Abu Dhabi for university, as well as family conflicts, which have made us realise each other’s importance. Today, my parents’ willingness and ability to share their personal narratives is probably a product of us all having more energy, time, and patience for each other. Still, it is our food rituals which have provided the opportunities for my parents to extend the invitation for me to hear their stories – and it is by accepting this invitation that I have been able to come into their world, to learn more about them and to feel closer and more connected to them.

Sure, there may remain differences between us that we may never reconcile – that is a given. But, having come to understand at least a fraction more about them, it becomes easier for me to see how these differences might have transpired. For instance, I can see more clearly now that our different priorities in life stem from the fact that they, like Hemon’s parents, have been driven by survival for the best part of their lives. Now that we are comfortably middle-class, living in a country my parents conceive as more just and prosperous than their own – though I’ll be the first to tell you it’s

not without its own issues – I’m free to set my sights on the higher tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy. For my parents, it’s a difficult paradox: they operated on the very bottom tiers for so long so that their daughters wouldn’t have to, yet the fact that this goal has now been realised doesn’t necessarily make it easier for them to suddenly abandon their survivalist mentality (who knows if that’s even possible after all these years?). In some ways, they continue to operate in this way, while I reap the rewards of being able to discover my passions and search for fulfilment. They fought for this result, but I’m not sure they’ve accepted it yet.

This kind of insight on why we diverge in our opinions and approaches towards many things in life does not result in us agreeing on everything – which I’ve come to realise should not be the goal in itself anyway – but it does allow me to extend a greater level of compassion towards my parents when we do come into conflict with each other. And this – an underlying respect for and understanding of my parents in spite of our disagreements – has made me feel much closer to them than I ever have before.

But why does it matter that food has helped to close the distance between my parents and me? How is this fact significant beyond being a feel-good happy resolution to years of parent-child disconnection? I argue that feeling closer to my parents does something to the way I feel about my cross-cultural identity. Because the rift between us arose largely out of my straddling two cultural contexts – the Chinese-Malaysian one I saw inside our home and the Australian one I saw outside of it – it formed a large part of the tension and negativity I felt about being between cultures. It wasn’t only my connection to a larger Chinese-Malaysian culture that I saw as being adversely affected by being born and raised in Australia, but also my connection to my parents, who I believed should have been part of the group of individuals who understood me most. My cultural anxieties were manifesting themselves not only on a larger cultural level, but also within my own family home.

Now that I have at least resolved some of the tension caused by my ChineseMalaysian-Australian identity on a micro level with my parents, I wonder if I might find a similar resolution to the disconnect I feel on a macro level

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with my heritage culture. Now that I feel more connected to my parents, might I feel more Chinese-Malaysian? Perhaps my parents are the gateway to feeling more Chinese-Malaysian, the “access point” for my heritage culture, as Zauner puts it. After all, it is from my parents that I inherited the ChineseMalaysian part of my cultural identifier; perhaps I’m more comfortable claiming it now after learning about our family’s migratory past and where this label came from in the first place? Or perhaps my search for connection to my heritage culture was never really about the Chinese-Malaysian label at all, but about being closer to my parents. This theory would seem to be supported by the fact that I started actively learning Cantonese a few months ago in order to communicate and connect more deeply with my parents, rather than as a conscious attempt to connect to the larger Chinese-Malaysian culture.

Truthfully, I am not convinced myself by either of these theories. I think it would be naïve – and, to an extent, dishonest – of me to conclude that feeling more connected to my parents has somehow magically eradicated the rest of my cultural angst about not knowing in which context(s) I fit as a mishmash of cultural labels. In reality, there remain so many questions about being Chinese-Malaysian-Australian and trying to ‘fit in’: what does it mean to belong somewhere – be it to a place, culture or label? What would it take for me to realise this belonging? Why am I even in pursuit of it, and is it worth it in the end? Finding the answers to these questions – if there even exist any – might take a lifetime’s worth of soul-searching, which I am not sure I’m prepared to undertake and reflect upon in the time I have left to write this essay.

In the meantime, while these questions remain unanswered, I think I can conclude that feeling more connected to my parents is a partial resolution to the problems borne out of my cross-cultural identity. It does not solve everything – far from it. But it has reduced at least some of the tension that I’ve associated for all these years with being a second-generation immigrant; it has, no matter how marginally, made it feel like less of a bad thing to be Chinese-Malaysian-Australian. And maybe that feeling is enough for now.

WORKS CITED

Hemon, Aleksandar. “‘Bread is practically sacred’: how the taste of home sustained my refugee parents.” The Guardian, 13 June 2019, www. theguardian.com/food/2019/jun/13/bread-is-practically-sacred-how-thetaste-of-home-sustained-my-refugee-parents.

Paul, Kerith. Nourishing place?: immigrant children’s “ethnic food” experiences. 2009.

Ryerson University, Major Research Paper. Ryerson Library Digital Repository. https://digital.library.ryerson.ca/islandora/object/RULA%3A1097.

Weller, Daniel L., and Turkon, David. “Contextualizing the Immigrant

Experience: The Role of Food and Foodways in Identity Maintenance and

Formation for First- and Second-Generation Latinos in Ithaca, New York.”

Ecology of Food and Nutrition, vol. 54, no. 1, 2015, pp. 57–73. EBSCOhost, doi:10. 1080/03670244.2014.922071.

Wittmeyer, Alicia P.Q. “I Admire Vegetarians. It’s a Choice I Won’t Ever Make.”

The New York Times, 15 Feb. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/02/15/opinion/ sunday/vegetarian-vegan-meat.html.

Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to

Extravagance. Princeton University Press, 1993. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/j.ctt7rqk0.

Zauner, Michelle. “Crying in H Mart.” The New Yorker, 20 Aug. 2018, www. newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/crying-in-h-mart.

Zhang, Jenny G. “The Rise (and Stall) of the Boba Generation.” Eater, 5 Nov. 2019, www.eater.com/2019/11/5/20942192/bubble-tea-boba-asianamerican-diaspora.

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