Growing up, I felt uncomfortable with how little I connected to my racial identity. I cannot speak Mandarin or Burmese; I do not have first-generation immigrant parents. I am thoroughly Westernized.
This was particularly concerning to me when I first began writing for a literary magazine that dedicated itself to the “Asian American experience.” I wanted to be able to write beautifully about my Asianness, wanted to convey my relationship to my heritage as lyrically as the Asian authors who topped the New York Times Best Seller List every year. But I didn’t even know what my relationship to my heritage was. I could not relate to the personal experiences of my Asian friends, nor most representations of Asian Americans in the media.
In those stories, there were always lunchtime microaggressions and a profound discomfort with being Asian, and the writer always seemed to have some poetic reckoning with their race at the end. The same stories were told repeatedly, turning lived Asian American experiences into new tropes. It wasn’t the nerdy math kid now. It was the daughter who wanted so badly to be White, the graphic acts of violence (always in Chinatown) where an elder got spat on and called a slur. More than anything, it was the ruthless and cruel mother who could never say “I love you,” who slapped her child across the face then cut up fruit – pears, oranges, mangoes – in forgiveness. Each time the rhetoric veered closer to claiming that for Asian people, food was love.
No book contributed as single-handedly to this trope as Crying in H Mart, a critically acclaimed memoir by Michelle Zauner released mid-pandemic recovery. As the world grieved the loss of family, of structure, Zauner offered up her turbulent adolescence in comparison. She described her complicated relationship with her mother, fraught and uncomfortable. At every mounting tension between the two, the scene would mount with a heavy-handed tasting of kimchi, a climactic spoonful of jjigae. This is love, Zauner seemed to be convincing herself. Food is how she loved me, she repeated, and each time I believed her a little bit less.
The ravings about Crying in H Mart spurred a wave of similar personal essays, many of which were submitted for publication in my magazine. But each piece I read felt more reductive than the last. The trope may have started out purely, with genuine love and fondness for childhood memories. But I had seen it perpetuated over and over, each time offering less nuance and seeking more pity, wallowing in itself. It seemed the easy way out, to justify poor parental communication (and in Zauner’s case, an at-times emotionally abusive relationship). It allowed writers to resent their parents, but still pardon them in front of the entire world.
As I read, I decided my discomfort stemmed from one core realization. The lone act of making food should not be equated to love. There’s no love inherent in food preparation. Food can be weaponized. Food can be withheld. These writers know it’s guilt that brings their mothers out, reluctantly knocking on their doors with a bowl of fruit. They wish their mothers would use their words.
The prose of Crying in H Mart did not validate my Asianness. My reaction to it did. Realizing how disappointed I felt only strengthened my conviction that my narrative and experience was valid. My story does not need to look like Zauner’s or anyone else’s to be equally Asain American. But then who were these thousands of identical, sad stories for? Certainly not the Asian Americans already living them. I believe that if our history was properly taught, we would not have to resort to stereotyping ourselves into something more “understandable” to White people. Instead, we just keep on hearing about the Chinese Exclusion Act and Stop Asian Hate. If we read Asian American literature in English classes, if we talked about Black and Asian solidarity, if we learned about our history independent of its contributions to Whiteness, maybe then I would not have disliked Crying in H Mart so much. Maybe then I would not have grown up reading narratives whose only purpose was to try to garner White sympathy. Maybe then I would have understood earlier that my Asian identity is authentic, just as it is.