My Kwik Trip Gas Station Has Always Been There for Me
I want to preserve this old gas station because it feels like preserving myself.
I want to preserve this old gas station because it feels like preserving myself.
Whether one calls it “adaptation” or “assimilation” is a matter of one’s personal politics. But I—like the food I love—am undoubtedly changing.
While the world has continued to change, Kraft’s product has remained the same, somehow evading inflation at one or two dollars per box.
I felt I had something to prove. But the Manhattan, unchanged since its nineteenth-century origins, has nothing to prove.
What I didn’t say was how much of home each of those packs brought with them.
Lunch-packing videos have shown me that, regardless of your age or your body size or how big of a breakfast you had, we all deserve to eat.
For me, longing for filter coffee and missing my father are one and the same.
Diners are affordable, accessible, and a staple of our national imagination. They’re also disappearing—and we need them now more than ever.
To my family, yams are more than just a root vegetable.
A year in fruitcake means a year soaking in hope and optimism. Committing to the cakes meant believing that we would all see some semblance of survival.
Before I knew it, I finished my re gan mian, and I was filled to the brim with Wuhan, now a place no longer foreign to me.
Like rojak, our fluid and hybrid identities, I believe, make us more accepting as a community. Mixture is celebrated instead of shunned.
Was my rejection of the durian, Southeast Asia’s King of Fruits, a betrayal of my cultural identity, of my life in Singapore?
Each time I contend with the reality of another month—season, year—apart from extended family, I drive my ennui to Namaste Plaza.
My first unkosher months weren’t especially guilt-ridden; if anything, it was the closest I had felt to coming of age.
I could almost sense them beside me, as if the spattered index cards they’d left behind had come to life.
Both the sandwich and I were ‘made in China’ but with an undeniable Americanness.
To these writers, saunf occurred in the world as a curiosity, but not as an inevitability.
Could I really not keep anything from the unbearable whiteness of being?
They were our new friends, and we wanted to treat them to food from that had become special to us.