We talked about family backgrounds, origin countries (I’m the only one whose parents were born in the U.S.), childhoods, vacations, politics and current events, sports, cultural oddities– you name it. Oh, and a good portion of the night also went to discussing some of the overall concepts and questions regarding South Asia in terms of its political, social, and economic systems throughout each country. To round out the night, we critiqued many of the articles and scholars that we had read throughout the course, and talked through ways of improving the course for future terms.

It really got me thinking about how lucky I am to know these people, my professor and my seven peers, and how I would have gone through my whole life not knowing what I learned about them had we not eaten dinner together. How many other amazing classmates have I missed knowing throughout my college experience? Regardless of missed opportunities, I am fortunate to have had this night now, at the very end of my undergraduate years, to segue into the new relationship I will share with these people: that of colleagues. I left with such great respect for the lives of all of them, and excitement for what our lives hold ahead of us.

In the chapter “Waizhou, U.S.A.,” Lee describes immigration in all its aches and pains, and brings new dimensions to every Chinese take-out or buffet restaurant I have ever entered. These men, women, and even entire families, have started life anew, and in the United States, the best way for Chinese people to do this is the Chinese food industry. Lee introduces a family, and the mother has lived several years in the US without having learned English. Without the ability to communicate in English, this family (and many others) are limited to jobs in the food industry. And, as Lee points out, the Chinese food industry in the United States is hardly even the food with which these newly-arrived Chinese people are at all familiar.

Lee came to know this family while they lived in New York City, and subsequently wrote an article on their hardships; it was published in January 2003, in the New York Times (I recommend a quick read of this, to get to know this family). But this article is merely the beginning of a tragic tale: she recounts their hard journey of getting to the United States, and then the decision to move the family down to a small town in Hiawassee, Ga., where they bought a small Chinese restaurant in a strip mall. The tale that unfolds in the book is far more tragic, and scarily honest in its assessment of Chinese immigrants adapting to life in small cities across the country.

[It should be noted here, for lack of a better location, that "Waizhou" means, basically, "out-of-state" in Mandarin, and this is the term that defines all of the United States beyond New York City. Hence, Waizhou, U.S.A. is an appropriate term defining the locales across small-town American where Chinese restaurateurs end up.]

The family, Ms. Zheng and Mr. Ni (husband and wife) and their three children, Jolin, Nancy, and Jeffrey (nicknamed Momo), were living in chaos for awhile, apart while each Zheng, Ni, and Jolin was allowed entrance into the US. After living several years in poor conditions in New York City, Ni convinced his wife a relocation would be their best plan. But without much English, Zheng and Ni had a difficult time functioning in the rural Georgia community– quite a far cry from the New York City Chinatown they had left. The family’s money went farther, but at the expense of cultural misunderstandings and family dysfunction. Not long after arriving in Hiawassee, Jolin began acting out against her mother. Questions arose about the childrens’ safety, after a report  was filed that Momo and Nancy had been playing outside the restaurant unsupervised; things went from bad to worse, and the children ended up in foster care. A strange case of domestic abuse followed, with Ni’s arrest (although, as Lee points out, the entire situation is a bit debatable, and the real circumstances may be different).  Ni spent two nights in jail.  This second offense meant the children could not come back home. Zheng and Ni both took it very hard, obviously so; it was made that much worse by the language and culture barriers. “Difeh” began to consume their lives: DFACS, the Georgia Department of Family and Children Services, that is. All of a sudden, their lives were analyzed, personal, invading questions were asked, and DFACS controlled when and where the parents were allowed to see their children. This can all be read in much more detail in Lee’s account of the unraveling; I am only trying to cover a tiny outline. But she does raise the issue of weakness in the child and family agencies system. “Newspapers are always filled,” Lee says, “with accounts of how child and welfare agencies ignored the warning signs and failed to protect the life of some fragile [child] who ended up dead. It’s less common to hear about the flip side, when the government intervention makes things worse.” Ni even felt that the way he was treated was a violation of his human rights, and way beyond anything the authoritarian regime in China had ever attempted upon him. This family’s hardships are worth considering; they are merely a few immigrants among hundreds of thousands sharing the Chinese-American experience.

Lee says on her Web site that this family’s story was part of her inspiration for the book. The unraveling, and somewhat haphazard reorganization, of their lives, and the cultural confusion and destruction that took place between the Hiawassee community and this 5-person Chinese familial unit, sheds light on the larger issues facing Chinese immigrants today. There is great demand across the country for Chinese restaurants– every little American city has at least one. And most often, they are run by Chinese people, who cook food that slightly resembles the food they were raised eating, and sometimes have trouble speaking English with you. Even if completely fluent, they speak English with an accent. I never took this to mean very much; to me, I would think, this person was obviously born in China, came over here, end of story. Turns out that is far from accurate. It amazes me to think of the stories behind the faces I have seen in restaurants and take-out joints, and of what these people may have encountered in order to have the opportunity to serve American-style Chinese food. Here, I do not mean “opportunity” to imply that any American is entitled to be served food by a Chinese immigrant; I mean it to suggest the imagined life, set against the reality.

This is one of the most poignant and significant chapters in Lee’s chronicles of Chinese food. The humanity of this Chinese family and the pain, legal battles, fights, and cultural confusion that threatened their cohesion (and, indeed, inflicted permanent damage) allow a window into the life of Chinese restaurant owners and workers. For such a well-loved, hugely popular food institution in the US, Chinese food businesses seem to remain behind that impersonal veil.

Read Jennifer 8. Lee’s book, for the full account of this family’s bittersweet story. Their story is an important account of one aspect of modern America, juxtaposing the popularity of Chinese food in nearly every city across the country with the stories of the families who wake up every day to cook the food.

To do so, we’ve read a collection of poetry written by Japanese Americans about the internment during WWII, American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang, and Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. It has been a fortnight full of enlightening ideas regarding what your ethnicity means to others and to yourself, and how one adapts culture, and creates hybridity. The guest professor (the entire course has been taught by guest professors, except for the first 2-week segment taught by the coordinator, Dr. Tom Keene), Sarah Robbins, has facilitated a series of great class discussions, getting us really deep into what it means to be Asian-American.

Somewhat by coincidence, my own curiosity lead me weeks earlier to a book on the new release table at Barnes and Noble– one that delved into the curious incident of a Powerball lottery that had several dozen winners, all of whose numbers had been identical and inspired by the same thing: a fortune cookie. The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food, written by New York Times writer Jennifer 8. Lee (yes, 8), takes the reader  on a  journey into everything you’ve never imagined behind the ethnic food we love so much; and, Lee argues, it isn’t really all that “ethnic” anyway. Chinese American food is essentially American food, says Lee, and from there she shares stories about the origins of the fortune cookie, the international argument caused by soy sauce, the dangerous lives of Chinese deliverymen, and a heart-wrenching tale of a Chinese immigrant family who was nearly torn about by working and living in a rural Georgia town.  I have found this book to be an interesting addition to my own understanding of the Chinese-American experience. Though it focuses on food, who can really argue that food is not a basic playing field for cultural exchange, no mater what your ethnicity or geographic location? Even without knowing a person’s language or culture or history, they can share with you their food. And so, through this familiar medium, Lee explores the whole globe to define “Chinese food.”

I am going to share an expert here, because I think it is an excellent illustration of the way we see cultural hybridity today, and how “assimilation” itself may be changing in meaning. Her sentiments in this passage echo almost exactly a point we touched upon today in class– when a minority combines itself with the majority, what elements of each culture are retained, which are lost, and to what extent might each be a bad or good thing? By giving up parts of your own culture to assimilate, how much becomes a personal loss? And what happens when walls or bumps arise between the two cultures one may be living in that might cause someone to step back an reevaluate their identity? She adds to it an interesting additional point: when the minority or immigrant population becomes an integral part of mainstream society, that society itself adapts to it, and appears different than it used to. We can see this most clearly all around us in the United States. As shes says earlier in her books, we often think of apple pie as being quintessential “American”– but when is the last time you had apple pie, and when is the last time you are Chinese food? Exactly. Probably in the last week or so. Interesting…

I think it is a testament to the writer, and a great cultural learning tool, that we can see elements of the Chinese American experience in her own exploration of American Chinese food.

I’ll leave you with her words:

“As much as the mainstream changes the immigrants, the immigrants change the mainstream. As recently as three decades ago, being American often meant distancing yourself from your immigrant ancestry. In her 1975 essay “Ethnicity and Anthropology in America,” anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote, ‘Being American is a matter of abstention from foreign ways, foreign food, foreign ideas, foreign accents.’

Even our definition of ‘assimilation’ is changing. The old-school definition referred to how a minority blended into a majority. Now social scientists are pushing a new definition: the convergence of disparate cultures. The popularity of Chinese food shows that assimilation may no longer require that minorities be subsumed into the majority. Instead, in a country where 20 percent of the population consists of immigrants and their children, assimilation means convergence from all sides.

…

In reality, General Tso’s chicken is arguably as American as it is foreign, Chinese only in the way that burritos are ‘Mexican’ or spaghetti and meatballs is ‘Italian.’ These are ‘native foreign dishes’– ‘native’ because they originated here and may exist nowhere else, but ‘foreign’ because they were inspired by other cuisines. American Chinese food has developed its own identity– so much so that it is sold in Korea, Singapore, and the Dominican Republic as its own distinct cuisine. “