Are We What We Eat? Food and Identity in Late Twentieth-Century ...

Jen optimistically and humorously³ presents characters who look toward their futures in American society.

In addition to depicting the relationship between immigrant husbands and wives, both authors demonstrate how these parents, through their acts of cooking and eating, influence their American-born children, who work to reconcile the seemingly contradictory (ethnic and “American”) components of their cultural identities. Initially, Alejo and Mercedes’s younger son, Hector, imitates his father’s excessive acts of eating in a failed attempt to become an “authentic” Cuban male. Eventually, though, Hector understands the futility of trying to claim a lost past and instead consents to a cultural identity that honors his Cuban past while embracing his American present. Like Hector, Ralph and Helen’s daughters, Callie and Mona, consent to hybrid cultural identities, evidenced in part by their appetites for a variety of ethnic and “American” foods. And like their mother, these girls work to construct gender identities that undermine postwar definitions of “proper” femininity and that therefore serve to satisfy their physical and emotional hungers.

The Land of Milk and Honey:
Ralph and Alejo’s American Dream

As they leave their respective motherlands, Ralph and Alejo naïvely believe that America, the proverbial land of milk and honey, allows for and even encourages limitless acts of food consumption. Initially, though, Ralph (unlike Alejo) hopes to abstain from such decadent acts: On the ship that takes him from China to the United States, Ralph writes a list of “aims” that, if followed, will allow him to “cultivate virtue” and “bring honor to the family” (American 6). By making his list, Ralph, who studied under “the cleverest, most diligent, most upright of scholars” in China (7), is following a Confucian philosophy that, as Ch’u Chai and Winberg Chai explain, “stressed moral cultivation as the chief concern of life” (30). Ralph’s goal of honoring his family upholds the Confucian doctrine of jen, the “central thesis of the whole system,” which is based on hsiao (filial piety) and ti (fraternal love; Chai and Chai 24).