Nostalgia, Authenticity and Hope in Immigrant Foods
By Cyrena Lee
As a child growing up in a predominately white town, the smells of orh ah me sua (Taiwanese oyster vermicelli) and appearances of our dishes elicited disgust and bewilderment from our neighbors. At Ikoyi, I found myself on the other side of that. Photo by bryan... from Taipei, Taiwan, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Food is a form of discourse, and some meals have the ability to transmit new ways of thinking and seeing the world. For me, an elaborate 13-course lunch followed by a showing of the film Everything Everywhere All at Once (EEAAO) prompted a deep investigation into the problems of trying to categorize and place dishes and cuisines that form due to immigration and overlapping cultures. But the meal as a lens to watch this film made clear one answer: There is beauty in being as-of-yet unnamed and uncategorizable.
Immigrant food can have a Proustian effect, allowing the eater to jump impossibly in time and place. The same might be true of being an immigrant, in general: You move, and you become a different version of who you could have been. It’s a macro life decision that definitively alights a new path forward, in a strange new world.
This past May, I took a train from Paris to London with two objectives: to lunch at the recently two-Michelin-starred Ikoyi, where the chef is an old acquaintance, and to catch the 4:30 showing of EEAAO, which stars my longtime idol Michelle Yeoh and is directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert.
As the film’s Eurostar train flew through worlds in abrupt transitions, I felt a faint electroshock of awe: context changes just by crossing an imagined border, suddenly the language, food and culture were completely different.
My 13-course lunch had the same effect of hurtling me through space and time. Informed by the co-owners’ respective West African Nigerian and Chinese-Canadian and British upbringings, the restaurant meshes flavors and spices from around the world while focusing on micro-seasonality in its English surroundings.
And so, while I chewed over moin moin and pine nut egusi, I found myself wondering was it a type of dim sum? A pudding? Was the jollof rice that arrived literally smoking with wok hei and covered in crab custard still a classic West African rice dish? How do we categorize food—and by extension, ourselves?
Immigration as Universe Hopping, Disgust and Love
Like the owners of Ikoyi, I am a child of immigrants, and my palate has been influenced by far-flung places. My parents landed in the United States in the 1970s from Taiwan. While their settings shifted underneath their feet, their plates kept ties with their cultural background. I grew up eating rice with every meal and family-style dinners with a vegetable dish, a meat dish and a soup. The chopsticks served as nimble bridges between the world my parents came from and the American suburb I grew up in. In defiance, I tried to trade them for forks and knives whenever I could, to arm myself in a battle to assimilate.
As a child growing up in a predominately white town, the smells of orh ah me sua (Taiwanese oyster vermicelli) and appearances of our dishes elicited disgust and bewilderment from our neighbors.
At Ikoyi, when a piece of sweetbread arrived dressed up with sour carrot and drizzled in a chili sauce, the artful plating didn’t do much to ward off my disgust at the idea of eating glands or guts. And here—being the disgusted rather than the disgusting, being confronted with my own limits of comfort and biases—felt like once again being transported to another universe.
“We’re not primed to see things a certain way because we’re not used to it,” says Jenny Dorsey, a Shanghai-born American chef who has served meals that have included plates called “That’s Disgusting,” using ingredients commonplace in her native China like garlic chives, freshwater eel and white snow fungus. “A dynamic in food and bev is that people are expected to be coddled and taken care of when they’re out dining. They don’t want to feel discomfort.”
As I polished off the sweetbread with relish—I have a soft spot for anything spicy and slightly numbing—I felt a sense of discomfort in liking something that I categorically hated. The break in my personal taxonomy ruffled my feathers, leading to a tension that both repulsed and drew me in.
But the more discomfort we feel, it seems, the more progress can be made. In the film, Yeoh’s character jumps to another universe where (spoiler alert) people have hot dogs for fingers and apparently take a deep pleasure in licking the hot dogs of others. In this world, as the love scene between Yeoh’s and Jamie Lee Curtis’ characters heat up, mustard and ketchup appear with disturbing connotations.
At first, this all-American treat and condiments taken out of context wholly disgusts Yeoh’s Evelyn. But eventually, she gets over the culture shock and finds the beauty and love behind the hot dog love despite the very different contexts. I took from that that the more we are able to stay with the discomfort of unfamiliarity, the less scary.
It’s a lesson that can translate tidily to food culture, but another pitfall awaits at the other end of the spectrum: an obsession with keeping things exactly how we remember them.
Nostalgia and the Illusion of Authenticity
“Authenticity is such a loaded word, I don’t believe it exists,” says Clarissa Wei, a food writer and host of Whetstone’s Climate Cuisine podcast. “It’s just a certain type of food from a certain type of place and time. We just have an impulse to categorize food.”
Nostalgia becomes a dangerous trap when it’s a driving factor for whether or not a certain type of food is considered authentic. Ikoyi’s jollof dish takes a West African staple and spins it on its head, adding a layer of golden-orange luxury with crab custard and a fiery, savory breath of Cantonese wok hei infused with fish sauce more common to East and Southeast Asia.
I wonder if people who grew up eating jollof would try this interpretation and travel back to the dish of their childhood. Would they draw the inevitable comparison that was the right one? Wonder what they’re doing here, eating this?
It’s at this point that I had my epiphany, tying together the Ikoyi meal and EEAAO: In the film, Evelyn’s mind runs back through her life and always lands at the definitive moment where she decides to leave her home country to go to the U.S. When she is introduced to the multiverse and sees all the different Evelyns who exist, there is never a question of which one is the “real” or “right” one—there are merely different Evelyns who exist as a product of their environment.
If one could take the same lens and apply it to food, there would never be an argument over what is the most authentic dish. Each dish would exist in its own moment, as its own creation of everything that led up to it.
“Right is a tiny box invented by people who are afraid,” the character Joy says to Evelyn.
In this world, where Joy is the villainous Jobu Tupake, she tries to destroy the multiverse by constructing an everything bagel in which the gaping center hole sucks everything into oblivion. The choice of an everything bagel was a conscious one.
“It’s very American to want everything to be on a bagel,” Kwan says.
The everything bagel is the result of immigration, with bagels first coming to America by way Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the early 19th century. The addition of poppy, sesame, garlic, onion and salt seems to have happened in multiple places, at different times, with claims of invention from the likes of entrepreneur Seth Godin to a marketer to restaurateur Joe Bastianich. But the everything bagel is also a symbol of American maximalism and of the limitless choices a hyperconnected world offers: to have everything, all at once.
“When A24 was trying to figure out how to market the film, they asked ‘what genre do you think this is?’” Scheinert recounts an anecdote, where a mixed audience were split on labelling the film a comedy, science fiction, action, and family drama. “Then one guy raised his hand and said, ‘it’s kind of like an everything bagel!’”
Jokes aside, the lack of language to categorize the film only reinforces the need for more freedom to break barriers and categorization.
“Creativity is fusion and theft,” Scheinert says. “You steal other ideas, stick them together, [as long as you] fact check yourself and figure out where your ideas come while respecting those traditions.”
Mash-Ups and Authenticity in 2022
Kwan has his own relation to food: His mother, who emigrated from Taiwan as a back up plan for her family’s now-defunct motherboard microchip tech empire, now helps run the uber-popular Han Dynasty Sichuan chain, after multiple lives of running a nail salon, a corner store, teaching Windows at a community college and homeschool teaching.
While he ate baozis and mantous and other traditional Chinese foods growing up, his mother also tried her best to re-create American dishes. On birthdays, she served chicken nuggets, “which were essentially General Tso's chicken, prepared the way at a Chinese American restaurant, deep fried and without the sauce,” Kwan says.
Kim Pham, daughter of Vietnamese refugees and the cofounder of Omsom, a startup that sells kits for cooking Asian dishes at home, has long been battling the phrase authentic, which she calls a burden that global majority chefs and cuisines must bear.
“We weren’t sure how to describe what we do…authentic is a tricky term that’s often paired with a lot of different things, and often used in a Western-centric view,” Pham says. She works with a variety of chefs who have been roasted on Yelp for not being authentic, but to her, “they’re pushing what authentic means, bringing creativity and inventiveness.”
By the end of my day of consuming the meal and the movie, I felt strangely enlightened about the ideas of invention and authenticity.
I used to think that when one can get an authentic slice of something anywhere, the specialness of that exact moment in a specific place seems to be lost, erased by ubiquity and mass production. But the Daniels’ film and foods that continue to reinvent and insist on rethinking and reimagining ways of what could be possible gives me hope.I’m open to innovation in food and accepting of new identities. My then-seven-month-pregnant stomach was full and warm with the expanding multiverse and multiple cultures melding into one, focused on possibilities rather than loss.
