A few premises must be established. Firstly, all of us have an "ethnic" background. Secondly, "normal" food is relative to its region and culture of origin. That being said, some of us may have experienced the shock of realizing that our parents who packed our lunch with so much care, failed to explain that this bag o collard greens and cornbread would soon get us ostracized at the lunch table. Thanks Mommy. Some of my friends have experienced the horror of their kimchi waifing in the air, or their daikon clearing rooms.
It is interesting how many people I come across who explain their first accounts of thinking themselves as ethnically "different" (in the US) refer to childhood lunchroom experiences. The
teasing, questioning, and consequential isolation resulted in many of us many of us begging Tia, or Nona or Mummy-ji to make a "plain," "American," "white bread sandwich." No hummus and pita, no beans and tortilla, just a plain sandwich. We rejected the heavy lunch bag of being alone and different in exchange for a knapsack of privilege-the privilege of being "our kind of people." This new knapsack also went unexplained in that it wasn't filled with just "regular" food instead of balut (Vietnamese fertilized duck egg) and "regular" fruit instead of durian, but it also contained shame, guilt, and the potential for higher cholesterol.
As "they" and I ate the next day, with the victory of the soft white bread sandwich, we still somehow knew that we lost something that day. We might have overcome the ostracism, but we succumbed to rejecting the welcoming smells of our motherland.
1 comment:
nice. older & wiser, I'm thankful that my kids will have a bit less of that as they eat their pickled plum rice balls with seasoned seaweed. I'm thankful my mom embarrassed me with Japanese food in my lunch as now I find out my friends were jealous :-) to all the haters, so sad that your lunch is so PLAIN ;-)
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