In my grandma's kitchen

I remember the first time my grandma made gorditas, smashed in with a fork, drenched in the butter-like spread that my sister and I always longed to taste in the setting of our own kitchen. My grandma would mold the thick, circular pancake made of masa harina in her wrinkled palms—she knew exactly what size they should be for her big-bellied grandchildren—and then placed it on the heated pan situated on her outdated stovetop. It was such a simple food, not even a dish, but the experience was so gratifying because it was something my mom would never make at home. It’s plain masa-colored surface turned golden brown as she cooked it, making sure that the inside was warm and chewy, and that plenty of steam would flow from the top when she stabbed her fork into it.

My sister and I knew this was a rare food experience that we needed to savor while my mom wasn’t around. My grandma, on the other hand, was indifferent to our taking two extra spoonfuls of artificial-looking butter and smothering it into the crevices of the gordita. We’d wait for it to melt before we dug in. We felt like fugitives trying to escape the health-conscious ways of our one-time marathon-running mother and previous Miss Panamerican titleholder, a memory she dwells on often.

To anyone who doesn’t know my grandma, a smashed gordita soaked in butter sounds like the average junk most Mexican children crave. It’s a cheap food that she would make for the six kids she had to raise by herself on the east side of Chicago after she ran away from an abusive husband in Guadalajara. I had the chance to visit my estranged grandfather on his cattle farm big enough for a family of 15 during a family trip to Mexico when I was nine years old. He lived there by himself with two dogs whose visible rib cages said it all: he was a selfish man. He had the leathery and tired face of someone who worked in the sun all day and cared little for personal relationships. His closest relationships were with a bottle of tequila and his rusted, mud-stained pick-up truck. He didn’t know my name, but it didn’t phase me. My grandma never went on these trips with us to Mexico. The kid in me thought it was because she was still in love with my grandpa and wasn’t prepared to dig up all those old emotions. My sister was the mature one and thought she just hated him.

I’ve learned more about my grandma through her cooking than in the conversations we’ve had. She let her two-foot-tall steel pot do the talking—the one that was dented and scratched all over the silver surface from years of cooking caldos for the big family she created. Her servings of caldo de albóniga, caldo de camarón, pozole and menudo always reached the rim of the bowl, especially after the frequent and welcome addition of her Mexican rice—the envy of every Guzman who tries to replicate her recipe on holidays. Generous portions of food waited for my sister and me on her thick wooden table tainted with the aesthetically displeasing floral patterns on her cups and placemats. Florals have since become engrained in my head as an indication of old age.

But my grandma never seemed to age. She was a short, plump and proud Mexican woman with all the confidence I could hope to attain by her age. She was always in the kitchen, always wearing the same cotton thermal underwear tops and bottoms. Year after year, when I would visit her small home, I was expected to march straight to that wooden dinner table upon arrival where I’d be greeted with the foods she knew I loved. I didn’t know much about my grandma other than that she loved me enough to feed me my weight in foods with a chicken bouillon aftertaste. But I felt safe whenever I sat down to eat in her home. Everything she cooked, especially the gorditas, tasted better because I ate it in her kitchen, a modest space with warm carpeted floors, outdated brown tile and kitchenware she kept from her previous life in Mexico.

Her kitchen had all the reminders of family; family pictures from the early 90s taped onto her enamel icebox, their white edges visible all around from the rips and tears and all the hands they’ve passed through.

Her home reflected the most important values I grew up with. There was always something cooking in her house because she knew the way into her family’s hearts was through their stomachs. Once I was old enough to understand the vulgarity of swear words, she would yell in my direction, “Pinche cabrón! You better stop fighting with your sister or I’ll kick your ass!” I let out a childish giggle because I found her obscenities endearing. Later on, I would realize that what she meant to say was, “Without family, you have nothing.” And she was the best example of this, something I remembered once I stopped holding a grudge after she took out the paddle to slap my behind when I misbehaved. When she was up for the task, she would invite the family to her house to make tamales for Christmas. She made it easy for my six cousins and me to assemble the cornhusks and the masa—my favorite part of the tamal. We’d form an assembly line that stayed intact for just a few minutes, until we got the bright idea of sneaking upstairs to steal animal crackers, artificial fruit cups and Welch’s grape juice from her pantry. We were gluttons, but my grandma wouldn’t have it any other way. Food brought the family together, so the more the better.

These gorditas defined my childhood food experience: the longing for food I always wanted but could never have, and the embarrassment that came with eating authentic Mexican food when everybody else was eating Lunchables. Lunchtime at my grade school was what set the cool kids apart from the weirdos. And it was weird to bring cheese quesadillas and rice in a plastic lunch bag. I liked eating traditional Mexican food in the security of my own home, but it was never something I wanted to eat in the presence of my grade school girlfriends. The ends that were cut off of their PB&J sandwiches on white Wonder bread were the cherry on top of what I considered to be the epitome of the All-American Girl’s lunch.

I forgot about these silly concerns in my grandma’s kitchen, the one place within a reasonable distance where I wasn’t embarrassed to be Mexican, and where I was proud to be part of a family who shows their love through food. But it was also a reminder that I had a long way to go before I could be the person I was inside my grandma’s house outside of it as well.

A lesson in culture, genuine emotion

After his gruesome account of the Portuguese pig slaughter, Tony Bourdain says he starts to notice the things missing from the average American dining experience: large groups eating together, the family element, living close to your food, and the resistance to change at the expense of maintaining food traditions. Although I often lost focus during his breathtaking and incredibly detailed descriptions due to the constant reminder that no matter how intimate a moment might have been, the camera crew was nagging at him to extract more information from his subjects, I was always brought back to this idea.

In my opinion, eating with a group of people makes for a better experience than eating solo. But in the U.S., the family and group element of dining is generally absent from the culture (the living close to your food and food tradition arguments will be put on hold for the sake of length). We settle for fast food instead of slow food, and sacrifice dinner with the family because it’s convenient with our long workdays. Of course everything is relative, and it’s easy to criticize our culture when juxtaposed with foreign ones that seem refreshing at first glance. This isn’t always fair if the comparison at hand is based on a snapshot of that culture taken from a chapter in a book like Bourdain's. I don’t know much about cultures outside of the U.S. and Mexico, so I feel guilty for condemning our values and priorities in the U.S. when all I have for comparison is an author’s words that I have no reason not to believe.

As somebody who places a high value on family (which is due in part to the Mexican cultural values I’ve grown up around) and has grown up in a neighborhood with similar values, I’m hesitant to generalize that we fail to appreciate the beauty of family, of large groups eating together, in the American dining experience. Part of this is because I believe we’re social people in the U.S.—we like to go out, to spend time in large groups.

On a different note: Bourdain's book on extreme cuisine reads like a travel book just as much as one all about food. He knows it's impossible to understand and appreciate a country without knowledge of its history and the events that have shaped its present-day culture--a culture and identity that he shows us can be reflected as much in the food as in the surroundings. I've always been one to pass up a history lesson for the fun stuff like a pig slaughter, a tapas marathon, or a desert lamb feast. Knowing about a country's customs and cultural values, however, made the experience of reading about these events much more rewarding. I was blown away by the amount of detailed information he provided about the people and their history, even if he did it while smoking himself into a state of enlightenment that he proudly, and often, describes.

I didn’t know much about Anthony Bourdain before I started this book, so after the first several pages, I assumed he was the insensitive and intrusive Giant American Savage that radiated from the introduction. I still don’t know him very well, but what struck me in these first several chapters was his ability to take a real emotion like guilt and translate that so honestly onto the page with an intensity that made me feel like I was present in real life.

(Side note: I found an interesting interview with Bourdain from Time magazine. Check it out!)

Always a visitor

Food is more than a substance that brings back memories of a childhood in which Bich longed to be another Judy Blume character. She was the kid with the bulky lunch box instead of the brown paper bag and the one Girl Scout member whose food contribution tasted like construction paper. She knows that her life isn’t the fantasy she escapes to when she reads about the Ingalls family. Food is the way she fills the voids in her life; she sneaks American food into her room to feel more American; she’s enamored with the descriptions in her children’s books of food prepared by families that set the standard for what she thinks her family must look like; and she steals a plum from underneath the statue of Buddha in the hope that he’ll awaken and answer her prayers for a 20/20 vision and prettier clothes.

Food is her way to cope with the reality of being a Vietnamese-born, not-quite-as-American-as-she-would-like-to-be American, and her way to salvage the fantasy that she has of being a leggy blonde; when she eats like her Grand Rapids neighbors, for those moments she believes she has the power to change herself from the inside.

But food is what snaps her back to reality as well. After all of those visits to Ponderosa, a place more like a cafeteria than an actual restaurant, she sees the false hope it represents as it brings her family together then fails to keep them that way. Ponderosa represents a world of possibility, like the move to Ada, but like her and her family, it doesn't turn out to be what she hoped for. And stealing Jennifer's Toll House cookie doesn't make her any less Vietnamese on the outside.

Food is also the way through which she begins to recognize the complexities of her adolescence. She writes, “Gone were the days of bread and honey.” Bread and honey are reminders of Anh and Crissy, who have embraced the teenage lifestyle and left Bich behind. Once Bich realizes she is old enough to deny her sisters' commands without feeling fearful of not fitting in, it comes at a point where she is so disconnected with them that they no longer share any playful moments. I think it's this detachment from her sister and stepsister that she becomes aware of the influence of other female figures in her life--Rosa and Noi.

A part of me was expecting an ending in which Bich totally abandons any feelings of shame in being Vietnamese, and rejects the part of her that tried so hard to be American. It makes sense that the ending is ambiguous (will she see the turtle and find good fortune, or will she be the person who sits day after day waiting for it to appear?). I get the sense that she has come to peace with being a "Vietnamese-born American girl", but still has the same internal conflict; Bich ends the book in a scene where she's in Hanoi, left with an empty journal that she cannot fill in this place where she's always a visitor.

Finding an identity through food

I chose this article from the New York Times as my choose your own adventure piece because it's a great start to talking about the connection between food and place, and it’s something people from all backgrounds can relate to. The article discusses the importance of food to a city's identity, and how the food that a city is known for is most often the city’s best food as well; for example, the pierogi in Pittsburgh or the Philadelphia cheesesteak. Whenever my family and I travel to a place we’ve never been to before and we’re overwhelmed with dining options, we ask the locals because they know the town the best. This article brings back memories of a small restaurant/tortilla factory back home in Chicago called El Milagro (see picture) that I would never have visited if my dad had not forced me. It’s in the middle of a run-down street that receives very little traffic.

At a place like Kalamazoo College where students come from all parts of the world, everybody has a unique story about their experience with food back home. Food is an important part of any culture, and an important way for a place to create an identity among a sea of chains.