I wondered if this person actually believed the dish must belong to her simply because she’d anointed herself a purveyor of Indian delicacies to non-Indian consumers. She said it was her people who had invented it, though the evidence to the contrary was right there in the name.
But in her caption, she laid claim to the dish. She’d posted a photo praising a delicacy named after a city in my family’s state. One example has stuck with me, an error in an Instagram caption by a food influencer who originally hails from an Indian state that borders the one my parents are from. Sometimes it can seem as if make-believe countries have been drummed into existence for commercial purposes. In the digital sphere, Asian food culture is often performed in front of others in WhatsApp chains, Instagram posts, and Twitter rants. This quest to heal a loss - of a parent but also an ethnic identity - takes place in a literal grocery store. Zauner, whose father is white and mother was Korean, speaks little Korean, she writes, yet feels an almost excruciating intimacy with certain dishes that remind her of her deceased mother.
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“A beautiful, holy place, full of people from all over the world who have been displaced in a foreign country, each with a different history,” the artist Michelle Zauner called the Korean food chain H Mart in her blockbuster 2021 memoir, Crying in H Mart, a text that shows the undeniable poetry of the relationship between food and the self. Then there are the many food-centric memoirs and identity-focused cookbooks that promise Asian American readers self-knowledge, community, and a lifestyle glow-up of the most profound order, all in the space of a few hundred pages. Offline, “boba liberalism,” to borrow a neat term for consumption-based Asian American identitarianism, plays out via a reservation at some new “It” restaurant or a purchase of the right book.Īfter the hyperregional Indian restaurant Dhamaka went up in Manhattan last year, a tone of reverence crept into the voices of South Asian foodies trying to snag a table, as if a meal might contribute not only to one’s social currency but to one’s self-development.
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If the Twitterverse is to be taken seriously, the common American mistake chai tea - two words that mean the same thing - holds the source code for all second-gen South Asian pain, offending even the many well settled among us. But Asian food has crowded out Asian languages, arts, philosophies, and other cultural binding agents to become an object of jealous focus that must be protected from Alison Roman–esque neocolonialists who dare use yogurt or fish sauce. Why, though? Surely other minority groups possess their own lunchbox moments while Asian communities possess diverging legacies. In both scenarios, food holds the key to a sense of self. Flashforward to adulthood: Food becomes a mode of reclamation from the white bullies (who now probably fetishize those same dishes they once mocked, all that pungent kimchee and curry) as well as a thread to the parent and the lost country. Consider the lunchbox moment, a narrative trope in which the Asian kid realizes her Asianness, her difference, when she is bullied in the school cafeteria for the “exotic” meal her unwitting parents have prepared. The formula is written into our mythology. There’s an impulse to share and celebrate all the culinary wonders of an inheritance and to bristle when some wellness influencer mispronounces turmeric or khichdi. On the other, a sense that too much weight is placed on food as a source of meaning and identity. On the one hand, there is the desire to maintain a connection to the ancestral land.
If you are a member of the Asian diaspora in America, the push-pull around foodstuffs may be a tension you recognize. Not that I desired such an outcome, exactly, but nevertheless I felt its unlikelihood as a loss.
It seemed improbable that I’d ever meet someone who would be interested in shaping a life and a kitchen that so poetically transports a person to that other place.
As I took in this simulation - a Bangalore kitchen, painstakingly re-created - I felt a twinge of anxiety.
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They detailed the many moves that had gone into building their ideal pantry, spice routes forged with relatives back in India, tireless expeditions to local Indo-Pak grocery stores until the choicest brands and items had been identified through trial and error, the studied deployment of an Instant Pot in such military action that fresh yogurt and ghee were always on hand, not to mention dal and rice. He and his wife grew up in Bangalore, and a recent kitchen renovation set the stage for the reveal of a larger transformation that had been quietly underway for years. Last year, I visited a relative’s house in New Jersey.
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