It’s a brightly colored, well-designed time for Asian-American cookbooks. I was at a bookshop in Manhattan the other week and pulled eight or nine. This bumper crop includes First Generation by Frankie Gaw, The Woks of Life by the Leung family (who writes a popular blog of the same title), My Shanghai by Betty Liu, and Korean American by Eric Kim. They were easy to locate in the cookbook section, as the shelves were helpfully organized by ethnicity! The “Asian” section encompassed Chinese, Taiwanese, Indonesian, Taiwanese-American, and Chinese-American cuisine. Japanese and Korean cookbooks were mysteriously separated out, but adjacent.
The cookbooks mostly begin with sentimental preambles about an author’s immigrant upbringing and the confusion of cross-cultural experience. There’s always a gauzy photograph of a cute Asian family: the cook in his or her youth. A predictable inventory of themes and anecdotes emerges: go back to China, grandmother’s cooking, a death in the family, not white enough, too white, survival, food as language, gross American food is actually good, my beautiful mother, taking your family for granted, immigrant trauma. The food itself acquires an uncanny rhyme: scallion pancakes, pork dumplings, and lu rou fan.
The authors are not being disingenuous or enterprising. On the contrary. The renderings of immigrant experience and their attendant recipes feel precise and painstaking. In First Generation, Frankie, for instance, describes secretly throwing away the scallion pancakes his father packs him for a weekend camping trip, ashamed that his friends might see them. Gaw interprets the memory as a sign that he “had to acknowledge joy in [his] own heritage,” and publishes a recipe that includes step-by-step illustrations. The Woks of Life approaches scallion pancakes from a different angle, describing the sense memory of scallion oil in the narrow streets of Shanghai, long ago. Its recipe goes to great lengths to address nearly every detail of the process in words — from the shaggy initial dough to every minute that dough will take to absorb precisely one tablespoon of water. I’m drawn to recipes that have new ideas and points of view: a surprising new technique borrowed from the macrobiotic world, a shortcut that means my hands won’t get sticky when I bake. I hate to dismiss the scallion pancake recipes in these cookbooks, but their sameness doesn’t inspire me to cook, no matter how rigorous they are. I’m not convinced that a recipe is special because of a headnote describing its emotional significance. Good recipes, like all good books, shed light on new facets. Instead, taken as a whole, these recipes and the books they’re in start to feel like they rolled off the same factory line.
How painful to plumb the depths of your specificity only to come out looking indistinguishable from everyone else.
And while we’re here, at the factory, who is buying cookbooks in 2023, two decades into the ubiquity of YouTube cooking demos and recipe blogs? Cookbooks have always been big, beautiful objects. But, given their dwindling utility in the face of the internet, they are objects now more than they have ever been: beautiful, collectible, representative of certain tastes and values, approaching manhole-cover dimensions and weight. The ones filling my arms evoke fantastic heady multiculturalism, a unique flavor that works, the emulsion of two far-flung cultures: Kolkata and Dallas, Shanghai and Sydney. But the specificity of these amalgams — and the food itself — gets lost in the jumble of legible clichés. How many times does one need to learn how to mix together the two ingredients, flour and water, that comprise the hot water dough used for scallion pancakes? And there’s no chance that I’d rely on detailed descriptions and charts, exacting and beautiful as they are, to teach me how to laminate the actual pancakes, instead of locating a TikTok tutorial, which serves up the same information for free, more precisely, and in under a minute.
What I’m really saying is that I don’t believe these cookbooks are for cooking, even as their authors work hard to explore, invent, and tinker. Instead, I think the cookbooks are for reifying a story about identity and about existence. For the authors: visibility and their own specificity. For the buyers: an “authentic” story either like or unlike their own. But the expectations of the market seem to require legibility along the lines mentioned above: shame, pride, humility, and success. Put as much time as you want into researching your specific version of those beats, you will still be washed out by the same pat narrative. How painful to plumb the depths of your specificity only to come out looking indistinguishable from everyone else.
I spent a decade writing a memoir about my relationship with my brother that is woven together with a personal field guide to ferns. It touches on the same themes as the Asian American cookbooks I’ve mentioned above: my childhood, my family, loss, white supremacy. Yes, trauma. Even food as a kind of language, though not a very loving one: My petulant father, for instance, was possessive of my mom’s affection and by extension, her cooking. Throughout my childhood, he would throw emotionally abusive temper tantrums if mom made “special” food for my brother or for me. In an abusive relationship, a boyfriend who was more than twice my age punished me for eating anything other than fruits, vegetables, and seeds. I’ve written about food my entire career and I never tire of how emotionally resonant and complex this mundane necessary thing can be: cooking it, eating it, thinking about it.
I recently read my manuscript all the way through, for the first time in a year, and was mortified to see so many tropes of identity. In one scene, I defend my immigrant mother against a racist cashier; in another, my then-undocumented father gets beat up in downtown Atlanta. Elsewhere, I write about my beautiful grandmother who wasn’t able to emigrate and died tiny and poor in a dark apartment in Shanghai. Cut to my great-grandfather, buried and lonely, his headstone overgrown on grave-sweeping day. All of this stuff is true and devastating, but my parents are also well-educated and well-off. I grew up comfortably. I thought about a critique Jay Caspian Kang makes in his book, The Loneliest Americans: that we Asian Americans often use trauma in our stories to make ourselves look more appealing, and in order to get ahead. I also thought about the essay, “White Psychodrama,” in which the philosopher Liam Kofi Bright identifies a media market driven by the White Repenter, an archetypal consumer who absolves their white guilt by publishing, buying, and reading books that either illustrate the suffering of nonwhite people or instruct white people on how to behave.
Bright is generous with the whys for the POC Intelligentsia: He reminds the reader that there are systemic reasons for this dynamic. And also, if white people want to make themselves feel better by paying money to writers of color, who can blame those writers for cashing the checks?
But wait, I didn’t choose to cash in. I chose to make art. And in fact, I chose to write in a way that I had hoped would push against the exact market dynamic Bright describes. And yet!
As long as I have been a writer, white editors, bosses, and mentors have steered me away from complex forms of racial analysis, encouraging me instead to make a home in racialized victimization. A tiny example: Many years ago, an editor told me that an essay I had written about my parents’ obsession with being “high class Chinese people,” and how this intersected with and diverged from other facts of racial identity, wasn’t interesting, but that the body-image issues I’d picked up from growing up around white girls was. It became clear to me over time that pitching stories from the point of view of being a second-generation immigrant, an Asian-American woman, or simply, non-white, was advantageous to winning assignments. I also had an easier time publishing stories about topics that intersected, however vaguely, with my identity (salted duck eggs, soy sauce, Asian-American dating) and that denounced an abstract force called “whiteness.” (I was also aware that I was a valuable resource: Stories about Asian-American topics with an Asian-American byline invite less mob scrutiny.) It wasn’t at all cynical. I am interested in observing and writing about Asian-American culture and the parts of my personal history that intersect with race and identity. But it’s also true that I often leaned in, especially when I was first starting out.
It’s easy to pick on cookbooks, because they’re formulaic and literally about consumption.
Bright suggests two options for snapping out of the psychodrama: First, take a step back and address what is actually material about what you are doing. And second, figure out a way to detach yourself from the psychodrama market. I decided that meant complicating the racial stakes of my book by describing how material facts of American life (like “money”) complicated the picture, and being honest about the mortifying ways in which American racial dynamics benefited my family. I tried to hack away at the sentimentality of my narrative to try to convey the actual experience of my story.
I’m sure there’s still a way to spin my book as a brave tale of Asian-American empowerment. But I found that writing with this attempt at truth recharted my narrative so it was actually mine again, like resetting a broken bone. The work is a wilder and more cohesive book that is about mental illness, love, and the fallibility of stories. And though the book was always also an exploration of ferns, before I rewrote the memoir sections the ferns sections read like a toy or an experiment. A less sentimental exploration of identity helped me connect my experience to something outside of myself, to empathize with and humanize others, non-humans, too.
It’s easy to pick on cookbooks, because they’re formulaic and literally about consumption. In the market, memoir also attempts to evoke a heady multiculturalism and convince you of its singularity. When race is involved, both kinds of books get lined up into categories that blur them into one another: another story about war trauma, another cookbook about a brilliant homecook mother, a book like the others next to it on the shelf while also being less about the rest of the world.
Back at the bookstore, I was hunting for a few vegan Asian-American cookbooks I’ve been interested in but hadn’t been able to find at the library. I’m drawn to the creativity and imagination it inevitably takes to recreate whole traditional cuisines without animal products. They didn’t seem to exist in the Asian, Korean, or Japanese sections; I found them on the “Vegan/Vegetarian” shelf.
These books’ emphasis on being animal-free made them feel less like objects for show. They felt purposeful in my hands, forward-looking, more connected to the world. And while they also adopt identitarian tropes in their introductions, there was something redemptive about their commitment to a lived reality in which fewer things suffer. Small changes are still changes. They were: To Asia, with Love by Hetty McKinnon, The Plant-Based Wok by Hannah Che, The Korean Vegan by Joanne Lee Molinaro, and Mission Vegan by Danny Bowien. I wanted to cook from them.
Wei Tchou writes about food, nature, and identity. Her memoir Little Seed will be published by A Strange Object/Deep Vellum in May 2024.
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