Acknowledgments:Too many cooks spoil the broth
The familiar food-related adage cautions, “Too many cooks spoil the broth,” which may be true, but not for this book. A great number of “cooks” have had their hands in the completion of this collection. First and foremost, we thank the seventeen contributors for their enthusiasm, diligence, creativity, erudi- tion, and friendship.
We thank Eric Zinner, editor in chief of New York University Press, who believed in our project and pushed us to finish it. We also thank production editor Alexia Traganas and assistant editors Ciara McLaughlin and Alicia Nadkarni for their support and guidance throughout the completion of this book. We are grateful for the constructive feedback from the two anonymous readers of our manuscript. Their thoughtful comments and suggestions have improved this book immeasurably.
We would be remiss if we did not acknowledge the Association for Asian American Studies, as our participation in the 2010 meeting in Austin, Texas, and the 2011 meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, provided the original impe- tus for the teamwork that culminated in the publication of this book. We thank the AAAS officers, conference organizers, and members for their intellectual support and personal friendships.
Finally, we three editors would like to make the following personal acknowledgments.
Anita: I wish to thank my colleagues at Miami: Yu-Fang Cho, Nalin Jayas- ena, Mad Detloff, Luming Mao, and Gaile Pohlhaus for their generous intel- lectual feedback. My thanks to Jason Palmeri and Lisa Weems for an ever evolving context for critical eating in southwest Ohio, and for their contin- ued support and encouragement, I thank Michael Needham, Julie Minich, Bill Johnson Gonzalez, Allan Isaac, and Cathy Schlund-Vials.
Martin: I want to express my gratitude to Lisa Nakamura and Kent Ono, who were especially supportive during my research. Special thanks to Bill Johnson Gonzalez, Allan Isaac, Jose Capino, Rick Bonus, and members of the Filipino American studies “mafia” for their social and scholarly camaraderie, especially during delectable meals, spicy chats, and warm boisterous laughter.
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I dedicate my work to my parents and family for providing unconditional love amid feasts of adobo and sinigang.
Robert: To all those who I’ve cooked for this past few years, thank you for enjoying my food. Thank you especially to our apocryphal Momofuku bo ssam gang (Kevin Hatch, Matt Johnson, Julia Walker, and Deanne Westerman). My gratitude goes, too, to my Asian and Asian American studies cohorts at Bing- hamton University: Immanuel Kim, Sonja Kim, Cynthia Marasigan, Rumiko Sode, Roberta Strippoli, and Lisa Yun. My love goes to Nancy, Eliot, and Oliver.
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An Alimentary Introduction
Robert Ji-Song Ku, Martin F. Manalansan IV, and Anita Mannur
Understanding and apprehending Asian American food experiences begin and end with the body. The category Asian American is a historical U.S. fed- eral census designation that rests in part on the long history of what might be described as the Foucauldian control and discipline1 around the movement of Asian bodies to America, in part on their toil in various agricultural fields and plantations, fruit orchards, fisheries, and salmon canneries in Hawai‘i, Cali- fornia, the Pacific Northwest, and the South. That these same bodies sweated and slaved over hot stoves and small kitchens to produce many of America’s ubiquitous ethnic take-out food establishments—Chinese, Thai, Indian, Mid- dle Eastern, Japanese, and so forth—is neither coincidental nor incidental.
Many people in the United States, including the students in our Asian Amer- ican studies and food studies classes, often wonder whether Asians became a prominent part of the American food landscape because of their ancestral homelands’ intrinsically delicious foods. Or perhaps Asians are exceptionally devoted not only to eating good food but also to the entrepreneurial aspect of food, that is, to the business of producing and distributing food. Or per- haps Asians are “naturally” great cooks, just as they are popularly perceived as “innately” good at math. Simply put, is the love of food an indelible—and inescapable—part of the Asian DNA?
This book is a reminder that social, political, economic, and historical forces, as well as power inequalities, including discriminatory immigration and land laws, have circumscribed Asians materially and symbolically in the alimen- tary realm, forcing them into indentured agricultural work and lifetimes spent in restaurants and other food service and processing industries. While race is often popularly understood as a function of skin color and other physical attributes, critical race scholars like Michael Omi and Howard Winant,2 have demonstrated that racial meanings and the processes of racialization permeate all facets of social discourse. We suggest that this is especially true for most matters related to food. The tendency to equate racial features with gastro- nomic expressions is so persistent that a person’s race is commonsensically
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equated with what he or she ingests. The short—if not apocryphal—version of the nineteenth-century French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s much celebrated and quoted classic dictum, “you are what you eat,” has often been interpreted as meaning that an individual is, first and foremost, marked and signified by his or her food habits.
To define a person or a group of people principally by the food they eat is, however, to uncritically and narrowly essentialize them through the corpo- real terms of gustation and digestion. Also, those marked in such a way come to embody the foods and the corresponding values and meanings attached to them. Consider the racialized motives in perpetuating the image of African Americans eating fried chicken or watermelon, as Psyche Williams-Forson points out in Building Chickens out of Chicken Legs: Black Woman, Food, and Power and Kyla Wazana Tompkins illustrates in Racial Indigestion: Eating Bod- ies in the 19th Century.3 Consider also the irksome question Asian Americans often confront: “Do you eat dogs?” When asked of those of Korean, Filipino, Vietnamese, Chinese, or Cambodian ancestry, this question is rarely posed in good faith; rather, the motive behind such a question is not to know but to accuse.4 On the one hand, the controversy over the practice of eating dogs— especially in places like the United States where the distinction between what is pet and what is food is understood as affectively stable—is about the taxon- omy of different types of humans. On the other hand, this controversy is about determining who is a “real” American and who is not, what sort of cultural practice is “mainstream” and what is exotic, and what sort of food is disgusting and what is palatable.
The problem of equating personhood with food was part of the final epi- sode of the popular HBO series Sex and the City, which aired for six seasons between 1998 and 2004. Charlotte—one of the four main female characters in search of white, heterosexual, bourgeois, urban bliss—has been despon- dent because of her struggles with infertility. One evening for dinner at home, she lays out several unelegant boxes of take-out Chinese food on an other- wise elegant dining-room table. She calls her husband to dinner and immedi- ately apologizes for ordering Chinese instead of cooking the meal herself. Her husband, however, is unexpectedly cheerful as he produces an envelope and announces that he has “something from China, too.” He takes out a picture of a baby—the Chinese baby that the couple has been waiting to adopt. Overcome with tearful joy, Charlotte cries out, “That’s our baby!”
This scene from a popular television show illustrates the slippage between personhood and food. A racialized discourse that renders “Chinese” and “China” as provenance and a stand-in for not only a hasty meal but also an
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adopted baby serves as a reminder of the insidious ways in which race has become embedded in our everyday orchestration of bodies, meanings, and food. Not merely a descriptive category for people and nation, China—or things “Chinese”—is also regarded as a commodity to be bought, possessed, and ingested. The prerogative of multicultural cosmopolitanism is such that we can now “order” Chinese food from a Chinese take-out and have it deliv- ered to our home; we can also “order” a Chinese baby from a Chinese adoption agency halfway around the world and have her delivered to our home as well.
Senses, emotions, and affects constitute the corporeal frame through which the vexed relationship between Asian Americans and food is mediated. In the United States, the racialization of Asian Americans is often expressed in terms of bodily sensibilities and sentiments. The “trope” of the smelly and unwashed immigrant permeates discourses about citizenship and immigrant assimilation. It is telling that when Southeast Asian refugees were relocated to the United States during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the primers given to them to help them adjust to American life included tips on hygiene. Among the many lessons was reducing the odor of their food, especially when frying fish and using exotic ingredients that might offend their American neighbor’s delicate sense of smell.