When eating out, most of us simply focus on taste, price, and convenience, but the inquisitive foodie takes their ideas a step further: Rather than simply asking, “Does this taste good?” or “How much does it cost?”, he or she may wonder if people understand a culture better after voraciously consuming their cuisine. According to Grace Lee in her 2015 documentary “Off the Menu,” the answer is usually “yes” — an expansion of the American palate, however subtle, does occur with the consumption of foreign food, which may be followed by a small opening of the American mind as it learns about the intricacies of other cultures via their cuisines. However, even if “It tastes good,” and “It’s so cheap,” is as far the eater gets, the food itself remains a statement of cultural expression that can be critically examined.
With the relatively recent influx of Asian immigrants into the United States that skyrocketed following the enactment of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act — a piece of legislation that abolished stringent the quota restrictions on the number of incoming Asian immigrants — ethnic food has accompanied, first with the varying Asian cuisines planting deep roots in the American culinary canon. Soon after, a type of multi-ethnic cuisine arose out of these varying Asian culinary traditions, eventually becoming what is known today as “Asian fusion food.”
As of late, Asian fusion food combines differing culinary traditions, whether they be trans-Asian (largely East Asian) or trans-Pacific (largely Mexican). With menu items like sushi burritos (sushirittos), bulgogi fries, and culturally confused rice bowls, Asian fusion food doesn’t endeavor to transport its eater to a distant country, as ethnic food usually can, but instead, desires to highlight the very inauthentic, mangled cultural forces that mash together to form, in short, an “American.” According to James Talde’s Asian-American: Proudly Inauthentic Recipes from the Philippines to Brooklyn, Asian fusion cuisine is meant to “remind you that you’re home, in that strange and awesome country where we live” and laud the “strange and awesome” new America founded off the thriftiness of immigrants. Asian fusion thus creates a sort of intercultural solidarity, giving a culinary middle finger to preset notions of who an immigrant is and what kind of food they are expected to create. As a whole, Asian fusion cuisine illustrates the rebellious inauthenticity of American identity, a mixed and mashed identity revealing the complex character of Americans.
The timeline of Asian fusion cuisine can be traced back to the 19th century, when Chinese immigrants modified their cuisine to cater to white Americans’ taste, and to rethink preconceived notions of what Chinese food ought to be. Chop suey, a hodgepodge of meats, vegetables, and rice (or noodles), mythically arose out of San Francisco’s Chinatown after white workers fell in love with what was really a jumbled platter of leftovers. It also wasn’t uncommon to see chop suey served alongside American comfort foods like steak and chicken, a juxtaposition that might point to a desire to reassure white customers that they could find familiar foods amidst “exotic” offerings. A century later, in the 1980s, Caucasian chef Norman Van Aken formally coined the term “Asian fusion food,” appropriating the word from jazz fusion, a genre that blended jazz with rock, funk, and R&B. Asian fusion food began to enter into the mainstream after the 1983 launch of Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant Chinois on Main, which offered menu items like foie gras with pineapple, tempura tuna with uni sauce, and whole fried catfish with fried ginger. By and large, early Asian fusion cuisine as a formal category was instigated by white chefs, and it was only in the past decade or so that Asian Americans began to reclaim and re-popularize it.
Currently, many chefs under the umbrella “Asian fusion” bristle at its flawed nomenclature, which may be a product of its thorny connotations to what Felipe Fernández-Arnesto describes as “lego cookery,” a careless mixing of contrasting cultures. Bill Kim, a Korean American chef who works at restaurants like Chicago’s UrbanBelly, describes the “Asian fusion” as an “abrasive and impersonal term,” emphasizing the intimate attention he pays to his cuisine and criticizing a label that has been overrun with copycats that “do sushi, but also do Thai.” Kim, on the other hand, borrows from his diverse upbringing, creating dishes like a crackly-skinned pork roast learned from his Puerto Rican mother-in-law. Preeti Mistri, an Oakland based chef who appeared on Top Chef, says the superficial, denigrated Asian fusion label negates her authenticity as a first-generation immigrant, describing her work instead as “who I am as a person.” Overall, chefs often feel as though “Asian fusion” is a slapdash labeling of their highly diverse cultural palettes. However, the problems associated with labeling are heavily outweighed by the power that Asian fusion cuisine exudes as a collective, a power that celebrates authentic inauthenticity in the face of a society that considers inauthenticity a sin.
Contemporary Asian fusion cuisine can be best visualized by conjuring up the image of five nondescript food trucks roaming around Los Angeles, known collectively as Kogi. With a menu designed by chef Roy Choi (a two time member of the Time list of 100 most influential people) and a skillful social media presence run by Alice Shin, customers line up daily at the food trucks to order cheap short rib tacos and tofu burritos. It is no longer the Norman van Akens and Wolfgang Pucks who are presenting consumable Asian elements to haute cuisine audiences — if anything, “the streets” have literally reclaimed Asian fusion as their own. Now, Asian American chefs cater their multi-ethnic foods to multi-ethnic communities, creating what Choi describes as “food that isn’t fancy.” The result is an unconventional uniting force of different ethnicities, a unification bypassing traditionally political methodologies into the more agreeable realm of taste buds.
Most importantly, contemporary Asian fusion cuisine draws on the multi-ethnic upbringing of its creators, and by extension, the multi-ethnic upbringing of many young Americans. The current wave of Asian fusion food trucks and street stands is largely the product of an upbringing dominated by Asian cuisine at home, but “taco stands, fast food joints, barbecue shacks, hip hop, and graffiti” everywhere else. Roy Choi, the Michelin-star winning head chef of Kogi, describes Asian fusion food as a reflection of his variegated life story, in which he and similar chefs “look in the mirror and see Americans,” so “[their] food is a reflection of that.” Certainly, Asian fusion cuisine picks and chooses from other cultural culinary histories, but this picking and choosing is one that is visceral and lived, as chefs create food by intermingling diverse parts of their identity, which itself arose from a cultural melting pot of formative experiences. Furthermore, for many of these Asian American chefs “aligning themselves with African American or Latino culture was easier than finding common ground with white culture.” In its historical context, the Asian American cultural surge largely piggybacked off the black civil rights movement, and so, as Stanford professor Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu cites, identifying with other minority cultures was a natural transition: “For me it was a way of identifying with a bigger struggle, because there wasn’t much I could identify with, being Asian American.” Asian fusion cuisine thus became a natural manifestation of interracial solidarity, a sort of unified interlocking of arms against the tyranny of the majority.
Asian fusion food has taken a position of, if anything, quiet subversion in Donald Trump’s America. Trump’s relationship with Asia, although less fraught than that with countries like Mexico, has nevertheless been a relationship riddled with inflammatory, racist rhetoric: China has been cast in a diametrically opposed, Cold War-esque light, in which “the Chinese” are “taking our jobs” and perpetrated “the hoax” of climate change. Regarding the Japanese, Trump has perpetrated less extreme claims, but claims nevertheless riddled with racist stereotypes, mocking Japanese negotiators saying “We want deal!” in typical Trump-esque racist fashion. Without even mentioning what Trump has said about Mexico, it can be tacitly understood that Trump is not only using his bully pulpit to cast whites against minorities, but minorities against each other, a divisive fracturing that Asian fusion food quietly seeks to undercut.
Today, a customer can pull up to an Asian fusion food truck, order a kimchi quesadilla, and leave with a full stomach and happy heart. At the same time, the chef is able to express a (now) rebellious form of inter-minority identity, an identity arising out of his or her multi-ethnic upbringing. This manifestation of interlocking culinary traditions thus becomes emblematic of the dire need for solidarity between all minorities, Murphy-Shigematsu describes Asian fusion cuisine as “not authentically Asian, but authentically Asian American.” As a result, Asian fusion cuisine has become symbolic of one way in which Asian American identity can be found outside of highly racialized and compartmentalized binaries. It is this authenticity of a hyphenated American identity spanning across all minority-American communities that Asian fusion strives for, a reckoning of the “authentic other.”
