Oct 04, 2022
How My Maker’s Manhattan Made Me
I felt I had something to prove. But the Manhattan, unchanged since its nineteenth-century origins, has nothing to prove.
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.
We weren’t exactly rewriting our family traditions, but it felt good knowing that there was still a place for me in them.
I pray my baby will love their body, or at least accept it, and carry it around the world, just as I have carried them too, with pride and joy.
“The food scene in the Bay Area is dying because everything is so expensive; rent is expensive.”
