An Interesting Dish
San Diego’s effect on the diets of Asian immigrants
By Audrey De Haan
By Audrey De Haan
Vinh Hung supermarket, tucked humbly into a strip mall on Camino Ruiz, is a secret portal into another culture. Next to their crate of coconuts, I was excited to discover a congregation of big, bloated, lazy jackfruits, as scaly and gnarled as armadillos, plus jars of lotus stems, and a haven of vaguely threatening-looking fruits that were so tasty but my friends wouldn’t try. In Vinh Hung, I was an explorer: everything was alien.
There’s a restaurant squished inside the supermarket too, called “Hong Kong BBQ,” which apart from selling a Chinese array of dim sum (steamed dumplings), flat noodles, and duck porridge, proves that Vinh Hung isn’t solely Vietnamese. I’ve heard there are little Filipino shops in there too. The building was a movie theater originally, so Vinh Hung has proportions utterly unnecessary for a supermarket, extending three stories into the Mira Mesa skyline. The best part is that my family is the only caucasian one in sight, which I take as a reliable measure of authenticity. Many Asian families flock to Vinh Hung for its abundance of international foods that American stores don’t sell; despite living in San Diego for decades, Asian immigrants are able to retain largely authentic diets, because inside San Diego is this miniature Asia. Whether drawn to San Diego by science industries, academia, or other reasons, the Asian community has grown to about 166,970 people (15% of San Diego’s population), easily large enough to cultivate its own ethnic grocery stores and provide its families with easy access to traditional ingredients. And there are so many ingredients in markets like Vinh Hung. Labelled in various languages, I can name very little of this food, and even less of it can I cook with, but it’s clearly used by someone. These imported ingredients, whatever their use or function, are allowing Asian families to retain the culture and tradition of their homeland. These ingredients are slowing acculturation into a Western diet to a crawl. The process of acculturation is more complicated than the American “melting pot” metaphor implies: America doesn’t take all the mixed backgrounds and identities of its citizens and blend them into into a new, and completely uniform, confection. But neither does it just fling all its mixed backgrounds into one place without any coherence or unity, as implied in the new trendy “salad bowl” metaphor. Finally, there’s the “ethnic stew”, a happy medium: the ingredients stay whole and distinct, yet they absorb flavors from one another under a unifying sauce. For a true multicultural society, the “ethnic stew” is a much healthier aspiration. San Diego is an interesting dish. Look at the demographics, and you’ll see a wide array of diverse ingredients; however, driving through the neighborhoods will reveal your diverse ingredients separated back out into little piles by type. La Jolla and Scripps Ranch are largely white, Mira Mesa and Linda Vista are largely Asian, and Barrio Logan is largely Latino; you can almost feel the atmosphere shift when you cross the invisible borders. Like an uncooked wedge of green papaya that adds exotic flavors to a stew, yet resists softening, the Asian community maintains its distinct sense of homeland within greater San Diego. But has San Diego and the rest of its population penetrated this morsel at all, imparted any flavors? To get an idea, I interviewed adults I knew who were born in Asian countries. At first glance, Asian assimilation toward San Diegan cuisine seemed minimal: Shana, a professor of accounting at UC Riverside, hadn’t cooked much as a student in Korea, but started making Korean dishes when she moved to San Diego. This wasn’t hard, she told me, because thanks to Zion Market, there wasn’t an ingredient she couldn’t find- maybe excepting cow liver. And actually, I found that elusive cow liver as I was wandering around Vinh Hung. Haiqin, a researcher at NOAA, told me that while many Chinese vegetables (he named fennel, asparagus lettuce, chives, and bamboo shoot) are unavailable in American grocery stores, they’re still easy to find in Chinese shops; and Mariko, who moved from Japan almost thirty years ago, said something similar. Because of the three Japanese grocery stores in San Diego (Mitsuwa, Marukai, and Nijiya, her favorite), she can find every ingredient she needs. She can make any Japanese dish here. Remy, a Filipino mother who’s lived in Australia, Scotland, Canada and Texas, told me that she’d never been able to find decent Filipino ingredients in local stores until she moved to San Diego, where she was able to resume her childhood Filipino diet. San Diego, rather than imprinting flavors of its own, was providing a unique space for international cuisine to flourish untouched. Maybe this shouldn’t have been surprising. I knew the process of acquiring language (according to sociologist Calvin Veltman, “language death” happens fast: within the first two or three generations) and so I was almost disappointed by the less-than-dramatic changes I saw in cuisine. I tried to rationalize my results: speaking the national language probably mattered more, I thought, when trying to sync up with the locals; by comparison, diet is relatively private and unobstructive, especially when there’s no struggle to find authentic foods. So was “cuisine death”, and really even cuisine evolution, a mythical concept for Asians in San Diego?
When I listened further, with my new expectation of dietary consistency, I heard something different. “I cook way more in San Diego,” Jeremy, a native Malaysian, observed, after returning to San Diego from a year in Singapore. “In Singapore, meals are very cheap, maybe three dollars for dinner, but groceries are very expensive.” The reverse was true in San Diego, he said. Also, “The things you can make are just different, because you can get different fruits and vegetables.” Western meals were reported slipping into the weekly schedule. Both Mariko and Shana mentioned that they ate American or European meals once or twice a week, and Jiyun, from Korea, explained that she ate more American meals because the closest grocery stores were Vons and Ralphs. My contacts reported shopping at American grocery stores at least half the time, because ethnic stores could be far away. One American dish even snuck into everyday eating: salad was a new American concept for many of my contacts, but thanks to San Diego’s salad-culture it was happily absorbed. Both Jiyun and Shana explained that, while Koreans eat more vegetables, San Diegans eat fresh, uncooked vegetables. Other changes include baking, which is very uncommon in many Asian countries (most Asian households don’t even contain ovens), increase in meat consumption (apparently, meat in Korea is twice the price of meat in San Diego), and expansion of food variety, especially Mexican. Surprisingly, San Diego even introduced many Asian immigrants to other Asian cuisines. But it was from Jiyun that I heard one of the most compelling acculturation stories. Her children, Justin and Hannah (now sixth & fourth grade), disliked having Korean food packed for school lunches. “Because one of Hannah’s friends, who’d never tried Korean foods, saw it and said, “ew,” Jiyun explained tenderly. “She wasn’t trying to be mean.” And Jiyun understood Hannah’s desire to fit in, so now the entire family finds sandwiches and other American foods in their lunches. “Justin and Hannah have Korean foods only once every day, for dinner,” Even Jiyun’s husband Bongyong, who has “authentic Korean taste”, is now slightly more accepting of Western foods. The kids, on the other hand, “Love it.” So while dietary habits change only gently (though, indeed, by varying degrees) for many first-generation Asian immigrants, the diets of their young children veer suddenly towards Americanization, dragging the rest of the family along in their wake. Why? Because by attending public schools, their children have opened cracks in their solid, uncookable chunk of homeland, allowing the flavors of San Diego to seep inside. Both language shift and culinary acculturation seem to take large strides in the first two or three generations of immigrants, as children enter the society of their peers. But I’d guess that echoes of Asian cooking stick around in immigrant families for more than three generations, especially in a place like San Diego, where Asian ingredients are plentiful. “They have everything,” Shana assured me, referring to the authentic ingredients available in nearby grocery stores, and neatly summing up my results. Because of San Diego’s vast Asian population, the pressure to conform is light-handed. A few ingredients are less common and the stores are farther away, but the main press to change is the repulsed face of an elementary school student, peering into the lunchbox of her best friend. But acculturation is a give-and-take process: even as the taste of San Diego advances on Asian diets, the flavors of Asian tradition are appearing on more San Diegan plates. There’s hope that one day elementary school kids won’t startle at the sight and smell of Korean food. The basket my dad carried through the aisles of Vinh Hung filled up with the varieties of produce we knew how to eat: bananas, persimmons, bean sprouts, and something kind of like bok choy. Other groceries were sought and found as well: rice noodles, fishball and beef. On top of the pile went something called “wintermelon mooncake” that my dad discovered in the bakery section. Because we’re in Vinh Hung, so why not? |