Asian
vs.
Asian American
By Emma Chen
You Are What You Eat
Discovering Asian American Food
At a mall food court, a man stands at the center of the sphere made up of countless restaurants. As he looks around, a broad red sign, with a panda on the logo attracts his attention. On the sign are vocabularies that he doesn’t understand, but there is one word that he recognizes, “Chinese”, and he made the choice.
“Imagine you are 12,000 km away from home, you are in this foreign land for two months now, and you are craving for the taste of home, but instead you had something that tastes nothing like home,” Chen Fu said. “I ordered the Orange Chicken, a classic dish in Hunan, which I ate growing up.”
After the first bite, he immediately could tell there was nothing right, but it was the closest thing to Chinese food around the small town. Fu later found out Panda Express is known for its Americanized taste, and it is Asian American food.
Fu immigrated from Hunan Province, China, in 2017. Since he was little, he wished to open a restaurant for his mother. To make his dream come true, he came to the U.S., where everyone has an opportunity to achieve their dreams. To study how to become a chef or business owner, Fu worked at numerous Asian restaurants to learn the best business model, he used to be a busboy at a local family-owned Chinese restaurant in Cleveland, a sushi chef learner at a Japanese Sushi Restaurant, and a waiter at a Chinese-style buffet in Los Angeles, and he is now working as a manager at an Asian American restaurant, the Foo Chow Restaurant, in LA Chinatown. Rather than a place to eat, Foo Chow is more like a tourist attraction, because it featured the movie, Rush Hour, starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker.
“Foo Chow Restaurant has been passed to different owners, back in 1998, when the film was in production, the restaurant was managed by Chinese immigrants from the Fuzhou region in SouthEast China, and serving people from there,” the manager said. “But after the transfer of ownership and the popularity of the film, more Western or American customers came, so the kitchen made some changes, and more items were added to the menu to, match what they are familiar with. So the restaurant is now selling Asian American food, but with some hidden dishes only the Foochow people know.”
How was Asian American food created?
America is known for its diversity, and people used to describe the country as a “melting pot.” However, introduced by NPR, a “salad bowl” describes the phenomenon better. Immigrants from all over the world are put together in a big bowl, with different shapes, colors, textures, and nutrients. When the salad is being mixed, each ingredient is still the same, but they now have lost some part, or blend in with other ingredients.
However, the ingredients don’t always travel well, some don’t survive in a different environment, and some are banned in the U.S., so these cooks utilized whatever ingredients are available. In terms of taste, they had to water down some spices or meet the American palate to deep-fry everything. And that’s the brief history of the invention of Asian American food.
According to Merrill Shindler, a long-time food critic for Southern California News Group, and host of Feed Your Face on CRN, the history of Asian American food started as early as 1849, when the Chinese workers traveled to the U.S., hoping to share a profit from the Gold Rush and railroads constructions.
“The Chinese men came along to the U.S., without their mother or wives who normally do the cooking,” the expert said. “So when they want something that tastes like home, they try to cook the food as they remember. They remembered dumplings, they remembered rice, they remembered noodles, but they didn’t know the seasonings and the process of making them. So they created new cuisine, from what’s available next to them.”
A professor at the University of Southern California, a senior food writer in LA, and a cookbook writer, Tien Nguyen used the concept of “You are what you eat” to explain the formation of Asian American cuisine.
“Asian American food exists because Asian Americans exist,” Nguyen said. “When you’re thinking about Asian-American food, you are referring to America, about Asians in America. These Asians in the U.S. are making food based on what is available in the local area, or what ingredients are financially sustainable.”
“Asian American food exists because Asian Americans exist,” Nguyen said. “When you’re thinking about Asian-American food, you are referring to America, about Asians in America. These Asians in the U.S. are making food based on what is available in the local area, or what ingredients are financially sustainable.” ⸻ Tien Nguyen
Differences between Asian and Asian American Food
The main difference between Asian and Asian American food is the taste.
Asian food gives Americans an experience of the unfamiliar mouth feel, from gelatinous animal skin to broths that are barely skimmed, to a spoonful of fat that can coat the lips, to Sichuan chili pepper that numbs the mouth, and Thai green pepper that burns everything it touches. To adjust to a taste for wider consumers, some changes need to be made.
The Orange Chicken from Panda Express may have a lot of taste, but it isn’t authentic, even if it was inspired by “Tangerine Chicken” a dish from the Hunan Province of China.
The main difference between the two is the source of the citrus taste. According to an interview with Panda Express’s CEO, Jimmy Wang described Orange Chicken as “dark meat coated with a light batter, the sauce is a balancing act of sweet and sour, a little yin–with brown sugar and honey–and a little yang–Chinese black vinegar and soy sauce”, and most importantly, Panda Express uses oil from orange peels to flavor the chickens. Meanwhile, Tangerine Chicken uses dried orange or tangerine peels, it is sweet, sour, and with a hint of bitterness, because of the traditional Chinese medicine used. Compared to the authentic version, the Americanized dish is simply sweet and sour.
“If you are eating Tangerines Chicken in China when the dish is on the table, your mouth will start to produce saliva right away,” Fu described. “Because the aroma of citrus is sour but with a hint of sweetness, it will increase the appetite. And covered by the sauce, are the golden crispy chicken. By using the deep frying method, the outer coat captures the juice of the chicken. When you bite into it, the first sensation will be the smell, it travels from your mouth to the nostril. Then, you will get to the crunchy coat, which is perfectly coated by the tangerine sauce. Next, the chicken juice will burst out into your mouth. And lastly, after you chew a few times, the bitterness of the Chinese medicine will finally come out, balancing the sweet and sour taste.”
However, countless authentic Asian cuisines are being Americanized.
Coming from a Vietnamese background, Nguyen traveled back to Vietnam to connect with her roots and discovered that every cuisine that spread to the U.S. is often “very fried up”. The same theory applies to Japanese sushi. Normally the sushi chef uses freshly caught fish as an ingredient. After cleaning the fish thoroughly, the chef cuts the meat into bite-size pieces, then puts it on top of a rectangular shape of rice, which is seasoned with vinegar and salt. But once it is spread to the U.S., the ingredients are switched to spam, fried tempura, fake crab meat, and avocado, which is foreign to Japan.
For many Americans, Japanese food is the famous California Roll or Dragon Roll, but people from Japan have never seen sushi in such a form. Moreover, some restaurants are taking the frying to the next level. In a sushi restaurant in LA, a new item was promoted at the restaurant’s Instagram Post called “Sushi Burger” which is a burger made with two pieces of deep fried bun-shape rice, and inside it, rather than cheese and pattie, sashimi (raw fish), sliced cucumbers, and Japanese Mayonnaise sauce are in place.
“My Japanese ancestry might rise from the grave and kill me if I call this Japanese food,” Joe Miyano joked about the post. Miyano is the owner of Jichan’s Onigiri, a traditional Japanese handmade rice ball restaurant, at Monterey Park. “Onigiri is something the Japanese parents would prepare for their children for lunch, my goal is to create a sense of home when people come. To achieve my goal, I flew back to Japan to observe the local market, learned my grandfather’s recipe, then came back and invented the recipe that would remind people of home with the ingredients that I found in the U.S.”
Another example is the king of street food in Thailand, Pad Thai. In the traditional Pad Thai, the rice noodles are stir-fried with eggs, raw bean sprouts, dried bean curd, and dried shrimp. The most important part is the fish sauce and the tamarind paste. The tamarind plant is native to countries in southern Asia and Africa, it is sour, tangy, and slightly salty. And fish sauce is used as an umami element, it contains liquid made from fish that have been coated in salt and fermented for up to two years. Fish sauce is used in numerous dishes across Asia, including Kimchi from Korea and Pho from Vietnamese. But the majority of Americans described the fish sauce as stinky and thought the process of making the sauce horrifying. Therefore, in the American version, both tamarind paste and fish sauce are removed, and replaced with what Americans are familiar with for the taste of sour and salty, the ketchup.
“When I first got to USC and saw the Chicken and Shrimp Pad Thai at the Farmer’s Market, I was thrilled, because I heard the owners speaking in Thai, and I knew it’d be delicious,” Pooh Chumpoon said. Chumpoon is an international student from Bangkok, Thailand, he is a freshman majoring in Business. “When I opened the box, I was disappointed. What I saw first was a pile of salad, as I continued to dig, I saw no dried shrimp, no bean curd, and no crushed peanuts. For me, these are essential to Pad Thai, without those, I wouldn’t call it a Pad Thai.”
Other than Chumpoon, the others at the Farmer’s Market seemed to enjoy the Pad Thai very much, the booth was always lined up with students and faculties. Many even say it is the “best Pad Thai they ever had in life”, and some (including me!) have it every time the Farmers’ Market opens.
Based on the reactions of Asians trying out Asian American Food, they might not consider it as authentic or is the taste of home, however, that doesn’t mean Asian American food is less delicious. As Nguyen stated, “It is just a process of people moving and living”, Asian American food is created by Asians living in the U.S., and for them, that is the taste of home. Whether it is Orange Chicken, Fried Sushi Burger, or Pad Thai made with ketchup. Food is identity, and they are what they eat.
In the past few years, Asian cuisine is the fastest-growing cuisine in the U.S., according to a Euromonitor report, sales of Asian quick-service restaurants grew by more than 135% over the last 25 years. While Asians enjoy traditional Asian food, Asian American cuisine will continue to evolve as globalization continues to bring in more cultures to influence one another.