Feast of Words: Andrew Lam on “East Eats West”

We slowly give up blandness to savor the pungent lemongrass in our soup, feel that tangy burn of red curry on the tongue. Tomorrow’s classics are today’s bold experiments: tofu burrito, hummus guacamole, spring rolls with salsa dipping sauce, lamb in tamarind sauce, lychee martini, wasabi bloody mary.

Yet it did not always seem so. For first few years in America my family and I were terribly homesick. At dinnertime, my mother would say, “Guavas back home are ripened this time of year, back at our farm,” or someone else would say, “I miss mangosteen so much,” and we would shake our heads and sigh. But then a friend, newly arrived in America, gave my mother some seeds and plants. Soon mother’s small garden in the backyard was full of lemongrass, Thai basil, Vietnamese coriander, and small red chilies. Homesickness was placated by the fact that home was coming, slowly but surely, nearer to the golden shore.

Now imagine my mother’s garden spreading over a large swath of California’s farmland. Southeast Asian farmers, in the footsteps of last century’s Japanese and South Asian farmers before them, are growing a large variety of vegetables in the Central Valley and trucking them to markets all over the state. Hmong, Filipino, Thai, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Korean, Laotian, South Asian, Latin American farmers join the rest and sell everything from live chickens and seafood to Thai eggplants and edible amaranth, from hyacinth beans and hairy gourds to oriental squash and winter melons, from Buddha fingers to sugarcane. I, for one, have learned not to underestimate the power of immigrants’ nostalgia. Here in California, it often becomes retroactive; so much longing for home recreates it in the new landscape. On a sunny day, visiting the local farmer’s market, there are fragrances and sounds so oddly familiar that, were I to close my eyes, I could imagine myself back in my hometown, in the verdant, fog-filled plateau of Dalat, Vietnam.

In my lifetime here I have watched the pressure to move toward some generic, standardized melting-potted center deflate—transpose, in fact—to something quite its opposite, as the demography shifts toward a society in which there’s no discernible majority, no clear single center. Instead, the story I often see here is one where one crosses, by various degrees, from ethic to cosmopolitanism.

Thus for this holiday season my family and I celebrate without a turkey as the centerpiece – bouillabaisse and Vietnamese crab spring rolls please! One lives, that is, in an age of enormous options in an astounding diverse and fertile region where human restlessness and fabulous alchemical commingling are becoming increasingly the norm. And, that complexity is infused in many ways by the taste, and here in the West, increasingly informed by that certain eastern sensibility.

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NAM Editor, Andrew Lam, is author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, and East Eats West; Writing in Two Hemispheres.

Odette Keeley is host and executive producer of “New America Now”, NAM’s TV show, as well as anchor for NAM”s weekly segment on “Upside” – both airing on- Comcast Hometown Network CHN 104. This video feature was also featured by Keeley on “Upside.” Valerie Klinker is a content producer for YO! & NAM.