Or, Ramblings on Interstitial Spaces, Part 1/2.

From 12 o’clock, roughly clockwise: Chinese collard green (don’t know the proper English name), pork chop, prawn, salmon, turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing, marinated roast beef, xian bing, sauteed green beans, julienned jellyfish with cucumber, [yellow?]fish with celery and tofu, seaweed salad.

This was one of two coma-inducing Thanksgiving dinners I consumed at the end of November, during the short holiday. (The delicious, stomach-expanding meal in the picture above was demolished chez ma petite soeur, vraiment.)

I realized only after eating, while melting into the living room sectional, that both dinners were a bit strange and very un-American. Giant platters of Chinese banquet dishes (chicken feet, sliced jellyfish, dumplings, to name the more prosaic offerings) were laid out buffet-style at the house of each Chinese-American host, eclipsing the puny bowls of turkey, stuffing and cranberry sauce. (At one house, the stuffing was of a distinctly Chinese variation — sticky rice with dried fruits, nuts and tofu.) Dessert consisted of assorted chocolate cakes, tiramisu, fruit trays and store-bought pies from Costco. Many guests (myself among them) took second helpings of cake and tiramisu. Nobody touched the pies.

It’s been a slow unraveling for me, but I’ve only realized over the past few years how easily my Chinese-ness—and that of my fellow Chinese-Americans, even those born in the States—can manifest itself in the most commonplace of situations. When I hung out with my white friends in high school and ate pizza at their houses, or watched The Exorcist in their dens, I ascribed the few differences that I did notice to more obvious factors. Academic parents. Catholic parents. Wealthier parents. Until college, for example, it never occurred to me that Americans ate anything other than gingerbread during Christmas. Despite having grown up in predominantly white New England suburbs, I still didn’t know what a mince pie was—although I was quite fond of PopTarts, at least until I realized that they were disgusting. Even one of the kids with whom I had both Thanksgiving dinners this year—a close family friend born in the States, a college freshman at Cornell who spent his secondary schooling at a New England boarding school—commented that he’d never tried “cranberry jam” before. 

I’ll spare you any pseudo-philosophical, late-night babblings on cultural divide / assimilation, since most of my recent thoughts on the topic have pooled in the realm of the socio-economic but have yet to take any real shape beyond simple commentary.

So here is what I can offer you, however redundant: I can read William Faulkner but not the Chinese newspaper, I can cook risotto but not egg drop soup, and I will quote The Wire at length but fail to understand a rudimentary Chinese pun. Yet I was also raised by a tiger mom and an engineer father who hates cheese, and sometimes you just have to shake your head and laugh when they ask you, for the tenth time since graduating from a school where you didn’t take a single science course, why you don’t see yourself going to med school.