Our Culture is Our Cuisine
No more news and soul-searching hard words, soft words, bad words on Chinese America for me. And she asks me during a video seizure of situation comedies what it feels like. She’s been locked up all her life and never saw anything like me before. From way down in comfort I tell her being a Chinaman’s okay if you love having been outlaw-born and raised to eat and run in your mother country like a virus staying a step ahead of a cure and can live that way, fine. And that is us! Eat and run midnight people, outward bound. Chinaman from the Cantonese, yeah, I tell her, we were the badasses of China, the barbarians, far away from the high culture of the North where they look down on us southerners because we do not have the noble nose, because we are darker complected, because we live hunched over, up to our wrists in the dirt sending our fingers underground grubbing after eats. We were the dregs, the bandits, the killers, the get out of town eat and run folks, hungry all the time eating after looking for food. Murderers and sailors. Rebel yellers and hardcore cooks. Our culture is our cuisine. There are no cats in Chinatown. Up North they had time to wait for the mellowing of the wine. They cooked with a lot of wine, a lot of vinegar. Us, it is three-day quick whiskey and fast rice wine. We eat toejam, bugs, leaves, seeds, birds, bird nests, treebark, trunks, fungus, rot, roots and smut and are always on the move, fingering the ground, on the forage, embalming food in leaves and seeds, on the way, for the part of the trip when all we’ll have to eat on the way will be mummies, and all the time eating anything that can be torn apart and put in the mouth, looking for new food to make up enough to eat. Up North they used all kinds of grains and fancy goodies, while everything with us was the rice of long wars and bad ground. Rice. Rice. Rice. Rice flour, rice noodles, rice rice, rice paste, burnt rice boiled out of the pot for dessert and ricewater to wash it down. I’m proud to say my ancestors did not invent gunpowder but stole it. If they had invented gunpowder, they would have eaten it up sure, and never borne this hungry son of a Chinaman to run.
~Frank Chin
“The Eat and Run Midnight People” ~ The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R.R. Co. : Eight Short Stories ~ Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, 1988 / pg 11
