Last summer, I took a mandatory Advanced Writing class, which happened to focus on food. Our first essay was a personal food narrative. Here is the lightly edited version :)
I’m not big into photos – I used to dodge them as a child, my Instagram is an empty wasteland, and my camera roll is filled with practical photos of documents. I’m not big into food photography either, but there’s one food photo that I whip out at every given chance.
At the beginning of this year, I decided to go cold-turkey vegan once I moved back to Boston, out of some lurking anxiety about the environment. And I was totally unprepared for how difficult that first week would be – I struggled to no end to figure out what to eat. It turned out my previous grocery list of staples consisted almost entirely of animal products: milk, eggs, ham, cheese.
One Friday after classes, I reheated some leftover rice, heated up this awful ginger-flavored seitan that looked like brown solidified peanut butter, and some frozen corn. It looked practically dingy against the gray plate, and the sadness of the meal was funny to me. I just knew I had to capture it.
With time, I figured out what to eat and what to buy, but I’ll never forget that first week of bold experimentation and lackluster results.
A lot of people tell me that they could never go vegan for cultural reasons – that too many of their cultural foods have animal products.
All I ate growing up was Chinese or Asian food. It was to the point of almost exhaustion. Every time my family traveled, no matter where it was – London, Paris, Cancun, Las Vegas – my parents would always seek out Chinese food in almost any form. This past winter break, my family went to Universal Studios, where we got Panda Express for dinner.
After going to college though, I grew to appreciate the lengths they would go to for Chinese food. They would go to parking lots where they traded cash for frozen dumplings from the back of somebody’s van. They would make biweekly hour-long trips to the best Asian grocery stores. They worked those WeChat group chats for the freshest foods of their youths. No matter where we were, how Americanized I grew to be, I always had the taste of home on my tongue.
In Boston, I hunt for this one dish in particular: liangpi consists of cold rice noodles doused in chili oil, with cucumber matchsticks and springy tofu poufs. It’s refreshing and tangy and a little bit sour. At home, my parents got it every time I asked, driving the full hour to Philadelphia to some small Xi’an restaurant. Spoiled from my parents’ love language of food, I had never thought before that it would be hard to find, but it is – I’ve scoured and scoured Google Maps and Yelp and tried three times to make liangpi myself. But I guess that challenge makes the dish extra special.
Liangpi is also completely vegan. Although sometimes I feel a fluttering hesitation in my ribcage about the fact that I will never be able to have things like mooncake with egg yolk or zongzi with braised pork or most dimsum dishes ever again, I’ve learned from my parents that with enough effort, I can find the taste of home anywhere.