A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

pork, San Francisco and Peking roast duck, black mushrooms with bamboo shoots
and water chestnuts – plus roast turkey, baked ham, and sweet potatoes, because
she’s afraid Annabel won’t eat Chinese food that doesn’t come from Fat Lee
Woo. And people still bring food. Sushi, teriyaki, lavosh, taco salad, namasu.
Feeding time is six o’clock. In the meantime, everybody’s eating pupu. Lumpia,
ahi poke, cuttlefish, sour-cream-and-chive potato chips. 424
Tyau’s first novel, A Little Too Much Is Enough, goes even further in endowing multi-
ethnic food with meaning. It is made up of recipe stories and household advice, (such as
“How to Cook Rice,” or “Mixing Poi”), sprinkled with family memories, resulting in a
genealogy of food, the bounty that signifies ‘home.’ Similarly, in Laura Iwasaki’s short
story “Salesman’s Daughter,” the mangoes she describes are metonymic for the home she
misses:
Because my craving for the silky, opaquely orange, piercingly sweet flesh of
mangoes is a genuine neurotic fixation, and, despite all the glum wishful thinking
I apply to those sickly excuses for mangoes available on the mainland, nothing
comes close to the fruit of that mammoth tree sprouting from the reddish-Black
lava rock in my parents’ backyard. 425
Special foods, religious rituals, or cultural celebrations serve as reminders of ethnicity
and belonging.
On the other hand, many contemporary Asian Locals have only a faint idea of
their ethnic heritage. This is reflected in literary texts such as Juliet Kono’s poem
“Yonsei:”
You live so far away
From what connects you.
You have no recollection
Of old plantation towns, […]
The indignities cast by hard labors.
Your blood runs free
From the redness of soil. […]
And yet once a year
424 Kathleen Tyau, Makai, Boston 1999: 233-4.
425 Laura Iwasaki, “Salesman’s Daughter,” in Bamboo Ridge No. 73 (Spring 1998): 182-90, here 182.
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