Growing up half Chinese in the American midwest, Crystal Chan found the rules of race and identity confusing, especially when it came to eating – not least because she had a foodie father and a mum who hated cooking
To my father, food was something to savour, to relish, to study. He loved cooking. More precisely, he loved food. At the greengrocer, he – and only he – would first choose the very best onions, broccoli and green peppers. Then he picked up the meat, to be sliced thinly at home in our kitchen. As he's Chinese, he would fire up the wok and throw in the food, ingredient by sizzling ingredient, each according to its cooking time, each according to its flavour.
My mother hated cooking. Food to her was nothing more than the drudgery of shopping, storing, preparing, eating and cleaning, all for a mere four to six hours of stomach satisfaction. Then the whole process had to be started all over again. For a family of four, this was never-ending. She minimised cooking time as much as possible: when she cooked, the food came out of boxes. When my brother and I went shopping with her, she put us in the instant food aisle and let us choose the boxes we wanted.
No one ever said that white people like my mum cook with boxes and Chinese people like my dad cook with woks, but as a biracial child, that's the rule I came up with. Of course, at some point I met white people who cooked with a medley of sauces and spices and flavours and Chinese people who made TV dinners, but that was in the future. First, I needed to muddle through the confusing rules of race and identity, trying to make sense of what I experienced. It didn't help that I was growing up in a small city in the American midwest, in the middle of cornfields, where other minorities were few and far between. In the 80s, we were the only mixed-race family I knew, probably the only one in town.
When you're a mixed-race person in a monoracial world, you learn that it's hard, if not impossible, to fit in as you are, so you learn to take on the identities around you. You also learn that the lines of race and culture aren't solid. They blur. They shift, depending on the context, and when they shift you need to shift too. Interestingly, these lines are hard and fast for everyone else – so monoracial people tend to stay in their boxes while you hop in and out, depending on the situation, depending on the need.
Take eating noodles. Chinese noodles are very long and rarely cut in the cooking process. They are served long and as you eat them with chopsticks there's no way to cut them except with your teeth. Whether the noodles are in soup or stir-fried, you need to shove them into your mouth and snip them as you go. When I was five I was invited to a friend's house for dinner. This was one of my first invitations and I felt excited, to say the least. It was spaghetti for dinner and the whole family stared at me in horror when I started stuffing the noodles into my mouth, Chinese-style. The mother said tightly, "We don't eat like that."
Confused and ashamed, I picked up my knife. I had eaten spaghetti at home, of course, and eaten it American-style, but no one ever told me that certain noodles need to be eaten in certain ways and that mixing styles was prohibited.
Eating utensils can also be laden with meaning. When my family went to Chinese restaurants, the waiters would give chopsticks to my dad and forks to my mom, brother and me. At the time, I thought they always gave forks to kids, but now I realise that had we been an entirely Chinese family, there would have been chopsticks all the way around. As it was, my dad had to ask for chopsticks for us and I was proud at the looks of surprise we received when we used them with dexterity. I didn't understand that we simply weren't expected to know how to use them as we weren't fully Chinese: we weren't a part of "them".
The separation of cultures was no more apparent than when buying groceries. To buy milk, pizza or boxed foods, all we had to do was drive to the grocery, pick up the selected goods, and then head home. To buy bok choy, fish sauce or Chinese bouillon, we had to wake up at dawn on a Saturday and help our parents load the car with a huge cooler and travelling gear. Then we settled in for a three to four-hour drive to Chicago's Chinatown. Here we would load up on two months' worth of groceries, have lunch at our favourite dim sum restaurant, and buy multiple bags of Chinese pastries.
Finally, we had to drive for three to four hours through corn fields to get home, arriving late at night. It wasn't until I was 10 or 11 that I realised none of my (white) friends needed to drive four hours to get groceries – why were we the only ones?
As separate as these cultures were, sometimes they mixed themselves in strange ways. We always celebrated the Chinese New Year with a Chinese hot-pot dinner: we placed an electric pot at the centre of our dining-room table and filled it with soup base; around it were small dishes of raw beef, chicken and pork, raw veggies and mushrooms. We would slip what we wanted to eat into the pot and cook them, a bit like fondue. That was what I always associated with Chinese New Year – until, in my 20s, I learned that the Chinese have very traditional dishes and foods, none of which I had recognised or heard of. It was then that I realised that my family had simply invented the hot-pot Chinese New Year; somehow, in our mixed-race family, the hard and fast traditions could be softened, bent, reshaped.
My mum tried to bridge some of the gap by learning how to make Chinese food, despite her antipathy to cooking. My dad rarely made American food; he was rather scornful of the bland American cuisine. Interestingly, as kids, my brother and I always celebrated when it was Mum's turn to cook – we clearly preferred her boxes to Dad's wok. Perhaps unconsciously, my brother and I were tired of standing out in this monoracial world, of not quite fitting in anywhere: as we couldn't look like white people, at least we could eat like them. Whatever the reason, we favoured Mom's boxed food, much to Dad's vexation.
Today, I am a foodie. I agree with my father: food isn't just sustenance, it is identity. And for anyone who has eaten comfort food, it is a metaphor for home. Being biracial can bring with it inherent tensions and the search for identity and belonging can manifest itself in many different ways. I no longer live in the small town of my youth; here in Chicago, I have chosen to live in a neighbourhood that is one of the most culturally diverse in the country and I enjoy food from all around the world within blocks of my apartment. Today I'll eat Indian food. Tomorrow Ethiopian. The next day, who knows?Maybe I'll stay home and cook a fusion dish myself. God knows I'm getting better at it.
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