In Defense of Food Memory in Immigrant Fiction

When I was having a particularly difficult time last year, I brought out the huge AMC steamer my mother had brought over to Australia when she immigrated. She had given it to me when I moved out of home along with a slow cooker, a rice cooker and jars of cinnamon sticks, cardamom pods, star anise and cloves from Malaysia because she didn’t want me to “waste money” buying them in Australia.

I didn’t know how to cook when I moved out but I had watched my mother do it for years, never being allowed to touch anything, never being allowed to do anything but stand there, just as she had never been allowed to “get involved” when her mother and older sisters were cooking in the kitchen of my grandfather’s longhouse. It was a running family joke that I—the spoiled youngest child, the baby of the family, the princess—was completely useless and clueless in that way.

But I moved away from home and eventually I craved the food I had grown up with. The first time I tried to make curry chicken, I found that my hands knew exactly what to do—blending garlic and onion but not too much, not to the point that “the water came out,” frying it with lots of oil and all of the spices mother had given me until “the oil split.” Once the oil had split, it was time to brown the meat, to steam the potatoes in the microwave a little and then add them in at the end—you didn’t want them to soak up all the gravy by putting them in too early. It tasted perfect.

Seven years on, I had almost gotten through all the jars of spices and I had often used the slow cooker for lamb shanks and the rice cooker for not just rice but soups and congees, but the steamer still sat in the highest cabinet collecting dust. It was too big, too heavy, too hard to clean in the tiny sink in my tiny flat. Last year, I remembered it. I googled steamed egg and pork chinese and read through the recipes.

I called my mother who said that “all the recipes will say you need to add this or that but you don’t really need anything but the water, the soy sauce, the egg, the sugar and the pork” she told me. After waiting for the water to boil for a good half an hour and another twenty minutes of steaming, I had a plate of salty-sweet pork topped by a smooth layer of jiggling egg custard. The rice cooker clicked and then I had a bowl of hot rice too.

I ate my food on the couch. Then I went upstairs and lay in bed and cried. I couldn’t even explain the significance of this dish to myself. How tangy and gritty that pork was. Soft and firm like my childhood. I feel like a fool for writing this down even now. I hate people who talk about the significance of food to their childhood, who describe every mouthful like it matters to anyone but them. But I also hate that this has become a trope of so-called immigrant literatures, that in an age of what Yen Le Espiritu calls, “panethnic entrepreneurs,” that we’re considered sellouts for talking about things that might matter to us because they mattered to too many other people before us. It mattered to me. And sometimes I just want that to be enough.

My family was a lot of adults by the time I arrived. I was a kid, my brother was in university, my mother and father were middle aged, my grandma was old, as grandmas tend to be. They all loved good Malaysian food with lots of spice. Curry, achar achar, deep fried little fish, slit down the middle and filled with sambal, bitter gourd with fresh chili. I was too young for all of that so my mother and my grandmother made little bowls of steamed egg custard and pork for me.

I sat at the head of the table, a shocked dinner guest once said to my father (the youngest sits at the head of your table!), waiting for everyone to serve me, waiting for my own special dish to come out of the rice cooker. My mother would always say it was good we didn’t live in Malaysia where her sisters would tease her for spoiling me, tell her that I needed to grow up and learn to like spicy food sooner rather than later. My grandma didn’t say anything to me unless she was scolding me alongside my mother and father (a chorus of adults that seemed to go on and on), but she loved me and that dish was how I knew she loved me.

Can we even talk about immigrant families and food memory anymore? These memories feel wrung out and wrinkled on the page. They read like cliches, these wholesome immigrant family moments, ones that white people hunger for because as Diane Negra writes, “intense consumption of images of ethnic food betrays nostalgia for those kinds of familial and social relations…we now think of as “lost.” They read like concessions because as Sneja Gunew says: “Food as we know, has long been the acceptable face of multiculturalism.”

I don’t know how to write about these tiny little things that matter to me anymore because it feels like the appetite for them has passed. I am like the Yum Cha server with the metal trolley and the cold, unwanted siu mai coming round again and again, essentially begging for someone to eat it. The same old things again, my mother would complain when she came back to our table.

That night, I lay in bed and thought about my grandma. She had died four years ago and it still stung even though everyone’s grandma dies and everyone moves on. I thought about how she wouldn’t have wanted me to feel as sad as I do now. She wouldn’t have wanted me to end up half the places I had ended up. She wouldn’t have wanted me to hurt. She would have despised and dismissed out of hand the people who had hurt me.

She had taught me what a good person was and they weren’t good people. Boh Hoh. Pai See. The two things I didn’t want to be. That was that. She also wouldn’t have really understood—the truth is that we didn’t speak much. I wasn’t fluent in Hokkien and she wasn’t fluent in English. And she spent most of her time scolding me and beating me and cooking and cleaning for me and complaining about always cooking and cleaning for me instead of telling me what she thought about things. But I hold onto the few times that she did.

When I was a student in a writing workshop, I remember a white student complimenting me on being able to write food in my fiction without participating in the exoticism of so much immigrant writing. And yes, the tropes of immigrant fiction: food memories, foreign words left in Roman, the hush of banana leaves, hot weather, difficult families are tropes and these tropes can become commodities. I know that. But what happens when what writing about what genuinely moves you has a stigma, a sense of shame attached to it?

What if all I have of my grandmother now is a gold bracelet in a box that she reluctantly gave me on the eve of my wedding (and often asked for it back) and a handful of memories, some of which I can viscerally taste when I prepare and eat the same food she made for me as a child. Should I never speak of it, feel it, write it. Writing that tries to elude the shadow of other writing can start to feel so Levitican: do not eat, do not touch—clean and unclean. If a million other people have written about their bitter and loving and angry grandmothers, I hope my book sits within that genealogy.

I get the sense that immigrant fiction as a genre already felt dated by the time I started writing. But if I love the endless domestic fiction of bored, lustful white people who hate their suburban hells and their Subarus and their families, why can’t they love my domestic fiction back? I want to write about my life in the suburbs, too, being raised mostly by my grandma while my parents worked. Talking back to her, being beaten by her, hating her, loving her, being with her.

Writing food as an immigrant body is always fraught. Food memory in so-called immigrant fiction has its own constellation of cliches all of which can and have been commodified, translated into English, sentimentalized on the internet (do you remember the jokes around cut fruit that haunted Asian diaspora Twitter a few years back?), used to sell cookbooks and TV shows. Food is the salve of the immigrant child brought to them by their otherwise stoic, silent immigrant family in the popular imagination.

Have you eaten yet instead of I love you. Here’s some meticulously boiled, cut and peeled chestnuts instead of how are you. Your grandma might have been the one to constantly threaten and beat you with a bamboo stick as a kid but she was also the one to bring you deep fried ikan billis and sliced spam in a little purple dish that once held fruit on a Singapore Airlines flight. Your mother might struggle to tell you she’s proud of you but will always save the best bits of the whole chicken she just boiled for you.

Mothers and grandmothers, the authentic and the exotic other, the fashionably female genealogy of the homemade. I have other memories that fit into the colour palette of the immigrant family narrative—boiled yams wrapped up in Glad-Wrap to have as a snack at school that of course, I got teased for (another cliché)—and some memories that don’t. The plastic 101 Dalmatians plate I would eat toasted sandwiches with oozy cheese and blurry tomatoes on. The way my grandma warmed up peanut butter on crumpets in the microwave because it approximated the ban chung kueh she would have bought on the street in Malaysia. The bittersweet smell of Moccona coffee in her black cup (her favourite because “black is easy to clean, you can’t see any dirt”) which she had with her morning meds. Her love of raisin toast.

The father who made two-minute noodles boiled in a saucepan, drained and covered in a thick, caramel soy sauce for my breakfast and sliced up extra mushrooms to add to the tin of Campbell’s Cream of Chicken and Mushroom soup he made for my lunch. The ritual we used to have together—drive thirty minutes to the Coles in Moonee Ponds where they have a cafe and buy a single shepherd’s pie and a cappuccino and share them. I’d have the froth and the chocolate powder, he’d drink the coffee. I’d have the whipped potato on the shepherd’s pie and he’d have the meat.

The older brother who had a car and took me into the city to have the most decadent hot chocolate I’d ever had—the kind they make out of a bar of melted dark chocolate. The grandmother who always bought me a potato cake and a dim sim to eat while we walked back home from the shops.

These are real parts of me but when I write them down, I am afraid of them. They feel deceptive or self-deceptive somehow. Benign or sentimental descriptions which obscure the genuine struggles of immigration and immigrant family life. I don’t know who they’re for or how they’ll be read. Writing food as an immigrant feels naïve as if you have no idea what you’re doing, who you’re selling yourself too because this, too, is a part of the contract between you and the imagined white audience.

As Ghassan Hage writes about cosmopolitan consumers of ethnic food, “it appears as narcissistically available to itself … they want it to seduce them by appearing as if it is not trying to seduce them.” Like a boy who wants to feel that he is the one pursuing a girl, they want to feel that they are the discoverers of virgin territory. The girl, who is all the more seductive when she modestly lowers her eyes and doesn’t seem too forward, is like the ethnic Other who is ready to be discovered by a some worldly explorer. I don’t want my writing to feel like that.

But even resisting tropes and expectations of immigrant food and immigrant writing have begun to feel like a trope to me—like what Viet Thanh Nguyen writes about as the resistance/assimilation binary in Race and Resistance. Resistance = good. Assimilation = bad. Sometimes, I just feel tired from resisting, from working so hard to make sure that my writing isn’t for the white gaze that it distracts me from what I need to really write. And sometimes it feels like resisting that gaze is just commodifying my work for another kind of gaze—the kind of white gaze that gets off on that resistance.

I want to surrender sometimes to my desire to write about the things that hurt me and heal me even if they’ve been written about before, even if they’re expected of me, even if they’ll be bitten and devoured by someone who doesn’t really understand it. I want to remember what it was like to return in mind to the place I had at the end of the dinner table, being coddled by my family with the crispiest parts of the fish and the softest part of the chicken. From that vantage point, I want to write about the world just like that spoiled, useless, completely clueless kid would have. Is this too sentimental an image to end an essay on?

_______________________________________

But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu is available now via Unnamed Press.