The Organization of This Book
Our journey through the culinary landscape of Asian America begins with stories of the labor and efforts of Asian Americans individuals and entrepre- neurs who have found sustenance in the food-service sector. Part I begins with Heather Lee’s story of Chin Shuck Wing, a wage laborer in New York City’s service industry, who eventually became a lifelong restaurant worker during the 1930s. Christine Yano (with Wanda Adams) brings to life the voices of Asian Pacific American “cafeteria ladies” from the Ewa-Waipahu school dis- trict in Hawai‘i. Through interviews with this now retired group of women, Yano and Adams argue that the “school lunch”—a topic that has come under great scrutiny in large part because of First Lady Michelle Obama’s interest in school lunch programs—was the basis of a locally defined form of “culinary citizenship” predicated on an ideology of America rooted in a Pacific-Asian historical matrix.
In their chapters, Erin Curtis and Oliver Wang analyze the historical and structural foundations of Cambodian-owned donut shops and Korean-owned
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Kogi taco trucks in Los Angeles. Samuel Yamashita maps the emergence of Hawai‘i’s regional cuisine in an Asian American framework, establishing a context to understand the contribution of Hawai‘i-based chefs. Collectively, the five chapters of part I set the stage for the story of food in Asian America: about labor and about the pioneering efforts of men and women, refugees, and immigrants.
A picture of Asian American food pioneers would not be complete with- out an examination of the longer history of food in the context of U.S.-Asian relations, both domestically and abroad. Specifically, when we think about the historical circumstances in which Asian American foods were consumed and produced, we must consider the effects of wars and imperialism on the racial- ized and often racist contexts of Asian American bodies. In part II, Heidi Kim argues that during World War II, this context was most acutely experienced by Japanese Americans in internment camps. Her discussion of the camps’ mess halls illustrates how the site of communal dining functioned as ideological battlegrounds on which notions of Americanness were negotiated.
In their chapters, Dawn Mabalon and René Alexander Orquiza Jr. exam- ine the ways in which American colonialism transformed the Filipino diet. Mabalon addresses questions about the kinds of food that sustained migrants who settled in the United States before World War I, particularly the diets of Filipina/o immigrants on the West Coast and in Alaska during the first decades of the twentieth century. Orquiza, in contrast, explores the attempt by American reformers to transform the culinary knowledge and practices in the Philippines during the forty-eight years of U.S. imperialism. Robert Ji-Song Ku and Mark Padoongpatt offer a different Asian American critique. For Ku, the ubiquitous Kikkoman soy sauce and its history in the United States tell a fasci- nating story about when and where Asian Americans entered the mainstream. Mark Padoongpatt’s analysis of “Oriental cookery” during the United States’ Cold War intervention in Asia and the Pacific similarly argues that interest in Asia came before the arrival of large numbers of Asians and against the back- drop of hostility toward Asian bodies. Through and against the disciplinary mechanisms of anti-Asian sentiments in the United States and Asia, the five chapters in part II discuss where and when food became an index to think about Asian Americans entering the U.S. imagination.
If meanings of America are never stable, then meanings of Asian Amer- ica are even more precarious. Attending to the varied culinary formations in “Asian America,” the chapters in part III put the category of Asian America itself into crisis. How do foods become marked as “Filipino,” “Korean,” or “Thai”? What makes “foodies” into experts on what foods are “authentic” and
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what “fusion” is? Valerie Matsumoto examines how the multifaceted culinary work of nisei women beginning in World War II affirmed ties of ethnic cul- ture and community while demonstrating resilience in the kitchen. Nina F. Ichikawa asks why “American” landmarks like California cuisine, the health food movement, and New York green groceries are not seen as Asian Ameri- can milestones. Is it due to accidental oversight, intentional exclusion, or self- exemption? Might there be a confused logic that prevents certain kinds of con- tributions to “Americanness” from being defined as “Asian American”?
If indeed some cuisines are deemed to be discernibly “Asian,” what is it about Filipino food in Queens, New York City (as Martin Manalansan pon- ders) or Uzbek foods in neighboring Brooklyn (as Zohra Saed muses on) that make us think more expansively about who and what constitutes authentic- ity within Asian American foodways? More specifically, to what extent does the notion of authenticity become both a refusal to engage difference on its own terms and a form of nostalgia? Taking us back once again to the scene of food trucks, this time in Austin, Texas, Lok Siu asks what Asian Latino fusion and the food-truck phenomenon of the twenty-first century can reveal about immigration, mobility, and the intersecting histories of Latinos and Asian Americans.
Finally, part IV shifts from the ethnographic and historical to the literary and the artistic. The explosion in recent years of novels, cookbooks, and cul- tural representations of Asian American foodways has produced much criti- cal material. The chapters here look at the possibility of using food to read the multifaceted dimensions of Asian American subjectivity and personhood while also imagining more expansive definitions of Asian America.
Beginning with the organic farmer, Jennifer Ho examines how Don Lee’s novel Wrack and Ruin brings together the ecocritical, gastronomic, and artis- tic imagination. Margo Machida’s chapter on the visual gastronomies of food establishes how concerns about food politics, access to natural resources, and issues of sustainability have been fashioned into subjects for contemporary Hawaiian visual artists of Asian and Pacific American descent. Denise Cruz juxtaposes a reading of Monique Truong’s Book of Salt with the reality televi- sion show Top Chef to consider the multiple meanings of the Vietnamese and Vietnamese American chef.
With South Asian ingredients at the center of her culinary map, fabled Indian chef Madhur Jaffrey reimagines the global power and reach of South Asian cooking in Delores Phillips’s chapter. Then, in the last chapter, Anita Mannur juxtaposes two South Asian diasporic texts, Nina’s Heavenly Delights and Bodies in Motion, to examine how a narrative of queerness might realign
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the ways in which food and cooking are constructed as an implicitly hetero- normative formation.
The twenty chapters of this anthology cover new ground in Asian Ameri- can food studies. By focusing on the many struggles across various spaces and temporalities, they bring to the fore the potent forces of class, racial, ethnic, and gender inequalities that pervade and persist in production of Asian Amer- ican culinary and alimentary practices, ideas, and images.
Notes 1. Of the many works by Michel Foucault, see especially Madness and Civilization: A
History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), and the three-volume The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1988–1990).
2. See Michael Omi and Howard A. Winant, Racial Formations in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994).
3. Psyche Williams-Forson, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (New York: New York University Press, 2012).
4. See Frank Wu, “The Best ‘Chink’ Food: Dog Eating and the Dilemma of Diversity,” in Gastronomica Reader, ed. Darra Goldstein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 218–31.
5. Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1986); Gary Y. Okihiro, Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Tem- perate Zones (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Andrew Dalby, Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
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Part I
Labors of Taste
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