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

Yolanda consents to an “American” identity and performs behaviors that validate her choice, the dominant American culture often does not recognize her as an “American” because it defines anyone of Dominican descent as an ethnic Other.

Although an individual may try to consent to one permanent cultural identity, others such as the title character in Gish Jen’s novel Mona in the Promised Land, assume multiple identities depending on the place, time, and circumstances. I suggest that unlike assimilation, which requires consent—a substantial psychological change—passing (culinary or otherwise) depends only on the performance of appropriate behaviors and society’s acceptance and validation of that performance. Laura Browder explains that unlike assimilation, passing, which she calls “ethnic impersonation,” works to confound and to destabilize society’s “fixed ideas about the meaning of racial and ethnic identity” (11). According to Browder, “ethnic impersonators” attempt to “free themselves from the historical trap of an unwanted identity by passing into a new one” (10) and in so doing demonstrate the transient and complex nature of identity formation.¹¹

More germane to this analysis of cooking and eating in ethnic American literature, however, is Camille Cauti’s discussion of culinary passing, or “attempting to gain acceptance among an ethnic group to which one does not belong via the preparation and eating of certain foods” (10). Like Browder, Cauti distinguishes passing from assimilation, “a process that more often than not produces a permanent identity change” (Cauti 11). Certainly, the literature is filled with characters who engage in acts of culinary passing that allow them to temporarily switch identities. In Mona in the Promised Land, for example, the title character passes as an “authentic” Chinese girl when she tells her Jewish friends’ mothers that in her home she eats “authentic” Chinese food made by her immigrant mother; in reality, though, Mona eats Americanized versions of Chinese food, similar to the dishes prepared and eaten by her friends’ mothers. As Mona passes, she does not consent to an “authentic” Chinese identity, which would be impossible for her—a Chinese American—to assume even if she tried.