My childhood dinner table was not filled with your average fare. A Thai immigrant growing up in the suburbs of Baton Rouge, I inherited the best of both worlds when it came to food.
My mother spent hours on Sunday afternoon preparing earthy curries and sour larb to eat throughout the week. An Albertson’s rotisserie chicken one or two nights a week stretched a paycheck, but Fridays brought an indulgent feast.
A pickup truck that sold boiled crawfish out of the cab supplied my favorite memories of our family. Dad cracked open a beer. Mom mixed a fragrant sauce of garlic and fish sauce and lime. My sister hung up the ever-busy phone of a high school junior. And we sat on the floor of our apartment with 15 pounds of those spicy, salty crustaceans between us and old newspapers spread out underneath us to catch the juice that ran down our arms as we peeled them.
The four of us together and tingling of spice under my nails made that apartment floor the holy ground of my childhood. Those hours shaped me. Sitting cross-legged on smudged newspaper, I learned that food had the power to bring people together. Even now — a divorce, two grown and independent daughters, and thousands of miles later — the safest place for the four of us to gather is over a meal.
Assigned Seating
Meals outside the home were much different. My memories of second-grade summer camp are marked by harsh commentary and pinched noses over lovingly packed lunches. While TLC’s No Scrubs played on repeat in the background, I learned food brings the same types of people together — drawn together by the assigned seating of affinity. There was no longer the open seating of newsprint on cheap carpet. There were seats chosen for you, and those seats affirmed who didn’t belong. Fish sauce and lemongrass had become polarizing issues. Party lines were drawn. I sat alone.
I begged my mom to make more “normal” food — the kind we ate in the school cafeteria. I still remember how the air felt that morning when she woke me up, excited to show me the broccoli and cheese casserole she made me before work (a request I’d made after my cafeteria lunches showed me what other families ate). I sluggishly followed her to the kitchen, took one bite, and promptly told her, “It’s not the same,” before climbing back into bed. I lay there, drifting in and out of consciousness, trapped between the heaviness of sleep and the clarity that I had just done something terribly inexcusable.
I had betrayed my own heritage, asking my fantastic Thai cook of a mother to copy mass-produced cafeteria food, and then shaming her for her lack of knowledge that American cheese was the missing ingredient. I felt ashamed of who I was, and I felt ashamed of my shame. But I knew the price of admission to the table was conforming my taste buds to the menu of my peers.
A Return to Roots
We moved back to Thailand right before I started middle school, and my food world shifted drastically. Dishes I’d never seen before were placed in front of me, and I discovered the key was not to ask too many questions. Everything was different, and I adopted a new way of eating — I let my palate judge before I let my mind interfere. I let my tastebuds shape my opinions.
I let people — relatives excited to be reunited, my parents eager to share the food they grew up with, street cooks who found my American accent and my request to wash the residual spice out of pans amusing — feed me whatever they wanted. (Well, with the exception of spicy foods. Like Clark Kent, I returned to my home planet to discover I was vulnerable and weak. My Thai immunity to spice would not recover until several years later).
My appetite for the food grew much more quickly than my mastery of the language. I stumbled through everyday conversations but ordered my favorite dishes like a local. Food once again became a vehicle for love, a source of connection. I was relearning the means by which I could reunite these seemingly disparate parts of me — the cajun and the Asian, the immigrant and the American, the dutiful daughter and stubborn individual. That sacred space of shared meals once again taught me that food can bring healing and connection, that those differences within me were not liabilities but could lend even more flavor to the way I experienced the world — like a squeeze of fresh citrus that brightens a dish.
These lessons sat dormant until my second year of college when I finally had a kitchen of my own. I cooked for my friends, in the loosest sense of the word. Chicken slathered in mayo and baked, green beans poured straight from the can into a dollar store bowl. My attempts grew bolder as time went on — chopped vegetables added to jarred pasta sauce or tacos with toasted shells that set off our fire alarm — but Thai food never appeared on the communal menu.
In college, my visits to the Thai grocer resulted in brown paper bags filled with the comforts of home, immediately tucked into my cupboard and only brought out on weekends when my roommates were gone. On the rare occasions I used Thai ingredients, I preemptively apologized for the smell or ate hunched over the kitchen counter, trying to shield my food from sight.
Some lessons are more easily forgotten than others, and it would be a slow process of unlearning the shame of my childhood. It would take over a decade of meals, the curiosity of friends, the unapologetic boldness of Thai flavor, and a change of jobs to help me rediscover how food is a powerful force for connection, identity, and healing.
The World at My Table
A few years out of college, I began working with an international student organization on college campuses in California. Every day felt a little like a U.N. training simulation. Every day was a new lesson in differences. I learned about bindis and hijabs, I celebrated Mid-Autumn festival and tried to explain what in the world bunnies or marshmallows had to do with Easter. I found that English was terribly confusing for someone trying to learn what “lit” means by looking in the dictionary. I realized someone’s jumbled English might obscure, at first hearing, the fact that they are a professor at the top university in their country. I learned about different religions, other countries’ perceptions of America, and whether or not people think “Jesus” is a person or a curse word.
But I also learned what transcends differences. Kindness is a language understood by all. Homesickness can strike when one least expects it. Belonging is what everyone is looking for. And everyone loves food; food is the universal currency of love.
In beautiful and ironic symmetry, my adult life is now filled with fish sauce, curry paste, shallots, coconut milk. The smells that used to fill me with shame now serve as an aroma of welcome to others.
Struck by a statistic that about 75% of international students never step foot into an American home, I made it a personal mission to invite students over for a meal. “I’ll cook you Thai food if you teach me about your culture.” I’ve entertained China, Italy, and Nigeria at my table. I’ve shared a meal with Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, and atheists all at the same table.
And with each meal, I grow more and more convinced of our need to eat together. What is lacking from our tables are seats reserved for those who differ in palate, perspective, and politics — a much-needed contrast of flavor that lends complexity to a bland course.
Children today are learning the same lessons I learned at summer camp, but on a global scale. We have spent years rewriting pedagogy, researching child psychology, and creating Disney-worthy stories to tell our children to just “be themselves.” And yet they only have to look at a screen or a dinner table to see that, no matter who you are, being yourself automatically results in 280-character rant from one table or another about how you are the part of the problem, and how the world would be better off without people like you.
We want comfortable dinner parties and comfort food to soothe our weary, news-laden souls. But we have confused comfort with convenience, in an age where we so often also mix up listening with hearing, disagreement with hatred, love with enablement, unity with uniformity. Convenience is fast and efficient; it feeds the greatest number of people in the most cost-effective way in the least amount of time. Comfort rarely cares about these things.
Comfort is kneading pasta dough by hand with a student from Italy while she shares about growing up with parents from two different ethnicities and faiths. Comfort is eating two hours later than planned because we learned by experience that jollof rice is a labor of love.
We live in a world of convenience. Stereotypes simplify our mental energy as we sort people into sweeping categories. Choosing friends and news feeds that agree with us while unfollowing or vilifying those who differ creates a world in which seaweed-wrapped rice crackers are not just unfamiliar, but disgusting and just cause for rejection.
But the table was meant to be a place of comfort, a place where no matter what you had done that day or how you felt, you could pull up a chair — or day-old newspaper — and simply belong.
As we break bread or naan or lavash together, we follow the example of a Savior who met people at the most tangible level — not simply with show-stopping miracles or radical calls to action, but in bread and wine, fish over coals, a tax collector’s supper, a lamb prepared for a feast. Jesus knew that those who felt they were too far from God to come to the altar could, at the very least, come to the table. And so we follow this man who, in a world that feels so driven by scarcity–a scarcity of resources, of seats of power, of justice–spent his precious hours on earth eating, drinking, and creating more seats at the table.
I find the echoes of those childhood taunts growing fainter as I tie on my apron and cook with my new friends. I learn that belonging, like food, is an act of love we give to each other. Everyone needs to eat, so everyone gets a seat at the table. Between bites of food, we are forced to listen before speaking. Before we debate our differences, we must find agreement on one fundamental point:
The more flavor, the heartier the meal. Take it from this Cajun Asian.