Sunday, 07 June 2009

• Culture Shock via Food

  
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  Food is one of the biggest parts of Chinese culture. Even the most whitewashed Chinese people often still enjoy some warped version of Chinese food in the form of P.F. Chang's. Chinese food culture is so strong that it has managed to survive in different forms in different countries where there are large groups of Chinese (Britain, USA, Malaysia, Singapore, etc) when many other aspects of Chinese culture struggle to get by (religions, arranged marriage, filial piety, etc).
  
  So it's no surprise that when I first moved here, it took a while to get used to American food. It was a slow process, since we only ate Chinese food at home. Our family was so devoted to eating only Chinese food that we used to drive to NY Chinatown (a 1.5 to 2 hour drive) every weekend to buy Asian goods, since back then there were no Chinese supermarkets close by in New Jersey. Then one was constructed an hour from our house, and we would religiously go there every weekend instead. Then another one was made 45 minutes from our house, and soon after, yet another one was made 40 minutes from our house. We now interchange between these last two every weekend.
  
  Anyway, basically, the first time I got to try delicious American goodness was in first grade, when I started buying lunch at school. I remember I was confunded by a lot of these mysterious foods when they were presented to me.
  
  The first time I saw mashed potatoes as an option on the hot food line, I eagerly asked for a scoop of it, thinking it was vanilla ice cream. What luck! Did I want some of this brown stuff on it? No, I shook my head, why would I want to spoil my ice cream with that? I went back to my seat and tried a bit of the ice cream. Yuck! The texture was all wrong, and of course it was not sweet at all. I would not try mashed potatoes again until high school.
  
  I remember that countless times, I would get the alternate hot meal, a hot dog, because I was wary of the regular meals, which were usually foreign to me. One day, I decided to branch out, and I got a tuna sandwich off the alternate menu. I had seen many of my classmates devouring these with relish. Even though I could smell the reek of the processed fish, I decided that if so many people ate it so eagerly the taste couldn't be bad. Boy was I wrong. I took one bite and I was completely grossed out. To this day, even eating anything with a similar texture makes me nauseous. Two years ago, I was with some Big Straw friends on Craig Street and I ordered a chicken sandwich from Eat Unique. They had shredded up the chicken to resemble processed tuna. I was nauseated. I did not eat my lunch even though I was starving, and I have never gone back to Eat Unique.
  
  Lemonade is another traditionally American potable that I can't stand.I don't know why. I love lemon tea, I love eating lemons, I love thesour part of Sour Patch Kids (I dislike the sweet part, actually... Iwould spit it out if I were wasteful), I even drink Chinese blackvinegar on occasion. But for some reason I cannot drink lemonade. Iwish I liked it, because I would rather drink lemonade than carbonateddrinks, and oftentimes it is the only alternative in a vending machineor soda fountain.
  
  When I was in elementary school, Lunchables were all the rage. These were prepackaged lunches with either nachos or pizza or mini sandwiches. All of these choices required a liberal application of cheese. My classmates would often have cheese left over after eating their mini pizzas and whatnot, and others would clamor over sharing the cheese. One day, a classmate offered some of his extra cheese to me. Sure, why not, I figured, and ate the shred of mozzarella. Gross! How people consumed cheese on its own was beyond me.
  
  Over the years, cheese would continue to displease my taste buds many times. I remember being bemused at the idea of string cheese. Why would anyone want to eat that? Yet many of my classmates continued to have it as a snack throughout elementary school.
  
  I don't remember eating my first mac and cheese, but I must have had it at some point to have developed such an intense hatred for it. I tried it again two years ago at David's urging and reaffirmed my hatred for it. Sasha crashed my high school graduation party and tried to apologize for it with a gift of Kraft's microwaveable mac and cheese. I didn't mind her crashing my party, but I was repulsed by the gift. I left it on the counter untouched. Eventually Winne consumed it for me, thankfully.
  
  My conflict with cheesecake is probably the funniest cheese story I have. My then-boyfriend Kevin was (and is) great in the kitchen, and his masterpiece is cheesecake. In sophomore year of high school, he offered to let me try his delicious cheesecake. Sure, I said, thinking that people can't be mad enough to actually use cheese in a dessert dish. I took one bite of his prized masterpiece and spit it out, hacking and coughing. I thought the cheese in cheesecake was a misnomer, much like how sweetbreads are neither sweet nor doughy but rather calf intestine. Poor Kevin never offered me cheesecake again. This past year has been quite trying. My roommate Leto loves baking, and she loves making cheesecake. It pained me to see her making such beautiful cakes, knowing that if I tried them I would probably offend her by spitting it out after a bite. I'm still confused by the idea that cheese could be put in dessert.
  
  I think the best way to sum up my attitude toward cheese comes in this anecdote from Amy Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife. Two Chinese women are attending an American party for the first time. They come upon a table with snacks on it, and they decide to try crackers with some sort of paste on top. The first woman takes a bite and declares that the paste on top of her cracker is surely rotten. The second woman takes a bite out of hers to affirm, and she deduces that actually, the paste is supposed to taste that way. And that was their first encounter with cheese.
  
  I'm slowly getting over my animosity toward cheese. I've never had a problem with it when it was melted, aka on pizza, but even raw cheese on top of something (like a salad) would gross me out. Okay actually that still grosses me out a little. Why ruin a perfectly good salad? Anyway, nowadays I am a little more used to eating cheese on its own. I just rarely do it voluntarily.
  
  In fourth grade, I had a teacher who would have some sort of "bonding time" every week by posing a question to the entire class, which we would answer in turn. I remember vividly when my answers were considerably different from everyone else's. "What's your favorite way to eat an Oreo?" People responded with taking apart the cookie, licking the insides, dunking them in milk, etc, and when it was my turn, I had to respond that I had never had an Oreo. Everyone stared at me. "How is that even possible?" my teacher asked, in all seriousness. Another time, the teacher asked, "What's your favorite kind of bagel?" Onion, plain, poppyseed came up. My turn. I admitted that I had never had a bagel. Another week, "What's your favorite Pop Tart flavor?" Chocolate, strawberry, blueberry. I've never had a Pop Tart. "What's your favorite ice cream flavor?" Finally, something I could answer. Other kids went first. Vanilla, chocolate, Neapolitan. My turn. I said proudly that my favorite flavor was mango. The teacher and the class looked puzzled. Apparently this flavor, so common in Hong Kong, was unheard of (at that time) in the US. By the end of the year, I think my classmates considered me an alien.
  
  One final example of food-related culture shock lies in my Thanksgiving experiences over the years. In elementary school they taught us the quaint image of "Indians" helping the Pilgrims grow corn and squash and everyone was happy. Starting in second or third grade, they would ask us to donate to the food drive so some poor family could have a real Thanksgiving feast. They would go down the list of foods and ask kids to volunteer to grab this or that from their family pantries. Every year, I donated the same thing - napkins. We never had any of the other stuff - cranberries, yams, turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, etc - because we did not celebrate Thanksgiving, at least not in the American way. We started celebrating Thanksgiving over the years, but it was very gradual. At first, we just had a bigger than usual meal on Thanksgiving, although that might have just been the result of it coinciding with my sister's birthday. Then, we started having turkey prepared in a Chinese way. About seven years ago we upgraded to roasting an entire bird. Only a couple years ago did we start doing it with stuffing and mashed potatoes and all the traditional American stuff.
  
  Living in two culinary worlds has been interesting and eye-opening. For the most part, it's been a good experience, but I don't think I will ever be able to reconcile my taste buds with processed tuna.
  

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