Essential question: What impact does cooking Cantonese food have on me and my family?

The other day, I was looking through photos of the informational walls I had taken at MOFAD’s (Museum of Food and Drink) exhibit on Chinese food in America. I had gone pre-corona to their exhibit in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, right by McCarren Park (ah track). These informational boards talked about Chinese Exclusion and immigration and integration into American society. However, one of them was titled “Mid-Century Mainstream” and talked about how “By the end of WWII, Chinese food had entered the American mainstream. Chinese restaurants were everywhere. But the food they served had also entered American homes.”

This made me think about my own experience with Chinese food, both the American kind (what my family called “ghetto Chinese”) and the homestyle Chinese food I was more familiar with. I wasn’t really raised eating take-out Chinese; it costed more money and didn’t taste as good as the food my family cooked. But I also associated take out Chinese food more with American culture and not my own. I don’t know why we called it ghetto Chinese food but it wasn’t until I was thinking about this project that my mom told me the food we ate and cooked at home was considered “peasant food,” meant for people who couldn’t afford as much. That the food we ate was more a reflection of the ghetto Chinatown was than the American Chinese take out I disliked.

Through this, I realized that Cantonese food is comfort food for me. Even though I learned that it is not the high-end restaurant-style food and is instead considered peasant food, my memories and feelings attached to them run so deep that this knowledge could only make me take more pride in my Chinese heritage.

This is the photo I’m talking about