I was, however, less convinced and almost said, “No, a real Chinese restaurant is not like this!” The exaggerated décor of the restaurant, for example, provided a picture only of some sort of fantasized Chinese garden restaurant. Louis.Įntering the restaurant, I heard an American say, “I love this Chinese restaurant, it’s very Chinese!” Some of his friends enthusiastically agreed. It was for this reason I was excited when a friend offered to take me to a Chinese restaurant soon after I arrived in St. With such a culinary shared reminder of my cultural heritage and cultural experience in America, the Chinese community here could create a sense of home for me. My thought was, if I could have fresh Chinese food, sitting with Chinese friends at big tables, it would help bring back those special memories of home. Food is so important to Chinese culture that I consider it a fundamental part of my heritage. When I first came to the United States, I was fairly preoccupied with Chinese restaurants and food. With this in mind, my ambition has been to see how Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans deal with their cultural identity through eating and cooking, and furthermore how they negotiate things culinary between their motherland and adopted cultures. Noticing that I was cooking and eating more Chinese food here than ever back home in China, I began to ask myself: Where does this particular longing for my home country’s food come from? Considering not only myself but the larger Chinese-American community, the natural corollary question was, assuming I was not alone in this experience, how is food experienced and what is its function in the Chinese-American community?įrench sociologist Claude Fischler says, “If we do not know what we eat, how can we know what we are?” Put in another way, food can serve as something of a code expressing one’s cultural identity. Louis, they are not what I would have ever termed “Chinese.” To address this lack of authenticity, I took it upon myself to launch a “small” Chinese restaurant - my home - and then to invite friends to experience what I considered to be the authentic Chinese food experience. While there are some wonderful Chinese restaurants in St.

My interest in understanding the relationship between foods, countries and their citizens can be traced to my first experience eating Chinese food in America.

Eating Chinese Food Naked by Mei Ng