A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

“Juk,” criticizing its lost nostalgia and arguing that the idea of ‘comfort food’ serves to
show Asian American inequality, having to resort to the reassurance of ethnic comfort. 421
Local literature, however, has a host of positive examples of how food connects
people across ethnic lines. In Joseph Stanton’s poem “The Kim Chee Test” the haole
narrator remembers how being accepted by his Korean father-in-law “wasn’t because / I
made your daughter happy,” but was aided by his ability to appreciate the spicy pickled
cabbage:
the best of it sears the tongue like a battle cry
a warm scream of pride
at being alive
and Korean.
It’s hotter stuff
than I was born to handle,
but the taste is there. 422
In the end, though, both men are equal, and even: When he orders the right beer, the older
one has “just passed the Michelob test.” In the afterword to the 1998 Bamboo Ridge
collection Growing Up Local, co-editor Bill Teter identifies food as one of the central
aspects of being Local: “Local people love to eat, love variety in what they eat, and love
to talk about what they love to eat. […] While we drank coffee and tried to digest, we
talked about our favorite plate lunch places back home. Local people talking serious
grinding.” 423 Hence, the impressive list of foods for the protagonist’s birthday party in
Kathleen Tyau’s novel Makai is only one of numerous examples of the richness and
variety of Local ethnic foods serving as a stand-in for the larger cultural richness:
My mother has been cooking for weeks. She tells everybody no potluck, and then
she panics, so now we have everything she made – pork with oong choy, sweet
and sour spareribs, shrimp with black beans, squid with sin choy – plus what she
orders from Kapahulu Chop Suey, chef special noodles, ginger chicken, char siu
421 Wong 1993: 71.
422 In Chock/Lum 1986: 88. For Nora Okja Keller, on the other hand, the craving for and refusal of Kim
Chee at certain times of her life is linked to her identification as Korean: “I smelled like garlic, like
kimchee, like home. […] I didn’t want to smell like a Korean. I wanted to smell like an American, which
meant being odorless” (See Nora Okja Keller, “A Bite of Kimchee,” in Chock et al. 1998: 295-299, here
296-7.)
423 Bill Teter, “Listening with an Outsider’s Ear,” in Chock et al. 1998: 348-9.
161