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

Chinese culture. Grover spends most of the time on the telephone, making business deals, and as Helen, Theresa, and Janis praise Old Chao for receiving tenure at his job, Ralph remains quiet, aloof, and unable to eat (American 45). Although Ralph has immigrated to the United States to become an engineering professor like Old Chao, he no longer is interested in his friend’s form of success. Instead, Ralph hopes to forsake this dream that was conceived by his father in China (5) for his own dream of American success, which begins when he meets Grover, the American-born entrepreneur.

Ralph’s new American dream of becoming a self-made millionaire continues when he leaves the dinner of traditional Chinese food and joins Grover for a meal of “American” food at one of Grover’s diners. During this meal, Grover teaches Ralph what Grover believes are “typically American” eating habits, which the two men misconstrue as excessive and decadent. Because they mistakenly believe that only the content of their food signifies their cultural status, they think that the more they eat, the more “American” they appear; they consider only the quantity of the food, not its quality or the context of its consumption. After Ralph’s hamburger is served, “Grover reache[s] across the table and remove[s] the top half of the bun…. He pile[s] on top ketchup, mustard, relish, a tomato slice from his own cheeseburger super deluxe, a few rings of onions, five French fries” (American 102). For the remainder of the meal, Ralph follows Grover’s lead, ordering an ice-cream soda, onion rings, potato salad, coleslaw, a chocolate milkshake, apple pie, cherry pie, and Black Forest cake (102–103). As he did at the hotdog stand, Ralph eats to the point of physical discomfort, but now he takes joy in his pain (103), which he, like Grover, believes signifies his identity as a “typical American” male. By emulating Grover, who according to Phillipa Kafka embodies “a violation in his essence of the primary ideals of Confucianism” (88), Ralph hopes to replace his Chinese identity, based on moderation and self-restraint, with one of excess and selfishness, qualities that he believes are typically American. Of course, by eating so excessively, Ralph and Grover work to magnify and emphasize their Other status in the dominant culture because, as Rachel Lee