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

explains that cooking and eating ethnic foods “allow the performers to recreate their ethnic identity, maintain traditional boundaries…, and nurture familial closeness” (193).¹² Some assimilated Americans, such as Peter from Black Dog of Fate, attempt to make this ethnic cultural connection in the United States, whereas others, such as Yolanda from How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and the narrator of Andrew X. Pham’s memoir Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage through the Memory and Landscape of Vietnam, physically return to their ancestral homelands and there engage in ritualistic acts of eating. Most often, what motivates these individuals is what Matt Herman calls “a nostalgic desire, in the sense of acquiring something ‘authentic’ in a modern world based on reproduction and simulation” (127) or what Raspa calls “a nostalgic yearning for the wholeness of a simpler, pastoral life” (193). In the United States and abroad, this nostalgic desire or yearning leads to the individual’s effort to revert to or assume a non-American or non-Western identity by eating foods that he or she believes are free of American or Western ingredients and culinary influences. The literature demonstrates that trying to re/claim an ostensibly authentic cultural identity is futile not only because such “authentic” foods are scarce or even nonexistent in the United States and abroad¹³ but also because the individual who tries to do so is, like the hybrid foods that he or she eats, a mixture of many cultural “ingredients,” both ethnic and “American.”

In addition to switching from an ethnic to an “American” identity or vice versa, a person may attempt to redefine himself or herself in two less common ways. Some individuals, like the title character of Mona in the Promised Land, try to swap one ethnic identity for another: in Mona’s case, a Chinese American identity for a Jewish American one. However, more often than not, these individuals, like those from the previous two categories, remain emotionally hungry as they work to limit rather than to expand their identities. Mona, for example, realizes the folly in trying to switch identities by denying her Chinese heritage; accordingly, Mona works to construct a permanent cultural identity of hybridity and inclusiveness, in part by preparing and consuming foods from a variety of cultures that satisfy her physical and emotional hungers.