Strange Skewers and Squid:
I knew the restaurant was different the moment I stepped inside. It smelled authentic; a draft of soy and sweet sesame wafted from the kitchen and for a moment, I felt like I was in another country.
The store owner’s wife, a plump lady from Beijing, greeted my friends and me as we took our seats. When the first dish, consisting of beef heart, tongue, and tripe, was brought to the table, my friends, who were foreign students from China and hadn’t eaten good Chinese food in two weeks, dove in like a pack of wolves.
I stayed still.
When the skewers came, I hungrily snatched the ones I recognized - beef and squid. But the sight of chicken liver skewers brought my insides to a grinding halt, even if they were sprinkled with the spices I loved.
At one point in my childhood, I too would have grabbed for those skewers and gobbled them up without a second thought. Growing up in Wisconsin with my parents, both of whom immigrated from China, I was introduced to traditional Chinese cuisine at a young age. The maxim “Chinese people would eat anything under the sun” holds some truth to it; my favorite food at age six was pig feet. I loved everything from its robust, meaty taste to the bone marrow, which I would use a chopstick to pick out and slap onto my tongue. I used to enjoy chicken feet too, cleaning all the cooked skin and scraps from the bones with my teeth. Today, I wouldn’t touch any of them.
Times like these are the moments when I wonder what happened all those years, when a medium-rare steak and sautéed spinach replaced the food from my origins that I used to enjoy. Unlike many other Asian-American families, mine frequented western food chains quite often, Chili’s and Applebee’s for example, where the sight of dishes such as chicken or pig feet would have sent customers out the door. From going to school to eating with friends, I grew accustomed to the “refined” American cuisine - calamari, hamburgers, roasted turkey. Over time, the thought of another pig or chicken foot across my tongue left my mouth quivering rather than salivating.
My friends from China refer to me as an “ABC” - an American-Born Chinese. For a long time, I thought that the difference was only between languages. At the restaurant however, I realized that this gap in cultures was probably more significant than I had thought.
When more dishes rolled up to the table - chicken heart, mutton fat - I found myself reaching for the spicy noodles more and more. They were the only dish on the table that I actually recognized. As more and more unrecognizable skewers of meat came to our table, I grimaced. When my friends ordered another round, I told them to add five squid skewers just for me. It might have been bad manners, but I had no choice.
Even through something as simple as the food we eat, I’ve realized that being an “ABC” has changed me in more ways than one. With that in mind, when the next round of food came, I munched away at the squid skewers, thankful that my taste for exotic seafood hadn’t left me yet. In the end, I ate until I was full.
But the entire time, I left the chicken livers alone, knowing that my stomach could not handle them. As much as I wished I could enjoy the skewers with my friends, I knew the truth was we were standing on opposite sides of a cliff, joining hands, but not on the same ground anymore.
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