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

explains, they “do not instantiate American behavior; they only perform its representations and, even then, at a slant” (Americas 47).

In addition, Grover mistakenly believes that to behave as an assimilated American male, he must act as a voracious consumer of sex as well as of food; while Ralph waits at the diner counter, Grover goes into the kitchen and has his way with one of his waitresses (American 104). By having this quick fling with one of his employees, Grover is not acting as a “typical American,” especially one who lives in culturally conservative, postwar America.⁷ In this way, Grover demonstrates that he is ignorant of the appropriate gastronomic andsexual behaviors necessary for assimilation. Significantly, when Grover offers the waitress to Ralph, “walk[ing] her like a puppet in front of him” (104), “polite” Ralph says “Nononono” (104). Although Ralph strays from his aims regarding food consumption, he does not act as an indiscriminant consumer of sex and, in this respect, appears more like a “typical American” than does Grover.

Ralph publicly eats “American” foods in an attempt to assimilate, but privately and within his home, he consumes foods similar to those that he ate in China, for he cannot consent to an exclusively “American” identity by abandoning the culture of his descent. In fact, Ralph proposes to Helen because her “cooking [is] so agonizingly close to that of his family’s old cook” in China “that his stomach fairly ached with the resemblance, even as his mouth thrilled…. One day [Helen] had her crystal chicken just right, and her red-cooked carp too” (American 57). After they marry, Ralph instructs Helen on how to prepare foods similar to the ones that he ate in China: “More ginger, he coached. Less vinegar. More soy sauce” (45). As Ralph teaches Helen how to cook, he continues to perform the role of food preparer, which he previously played in the boarding house’s communal kitchen, and in both spaces he maintains a visceral connection to his cultural past. “Paradoxically,” though, these culinary acts “inflamed more than abated his homesickness” (American 45) and in so doing undermine Ralph’s objective of forming an identity that is both “American” and “masculine”—an identity that he believes depends on the excessive consumption of “American” food.