Have You Eaten Yet? | AAPI Heritage Month

by Tina Alhani, Chief of Staff

Most of my memories growing up revolve around food. We’re not religious, so we’d go to Buford Highway, Atlanta’s corridor of immigrant cuisine, every Sunday morning. That stretch of road, that was my place of worship. 

We’d usually spend a couple hours there. Honestly, I hated it when I was younger. It was pretty boring. It was not by any means a pleasure to go to Buford Highway. It was just another long-winded grocery trip. 

The older I became, the less I came to view Buford Highway trips as a chore and the more I would come to appreciate them as pilgrimages.

Hit the road at 10/11AM, get to a restaurant (a selection among a rotation of places my parents frequented), two Asian markets (minimum), go to a bakery to get no less than 10 buns (an assortment of sweet and savory), go home. The car would be filled the aromas of different Asian ingredients and prepared foods. 

In Asian culture, food is indisputably a love language. There is the shared notion that the inquiry, “have you eaten yet?”, is one that Asian parents will offer in lieu of The Three Words that are traditionally said in any given American household. 

In “Crying in H-Mart”, grief manifests in Asian supermarket aisles. Eddie Huang lists his 10 Commandments for Beef Noodle Soup in his memoir “Fresh Off the Boat”. The Pixar short “Bao” depicts a mother’s newborn as a dumpling. 

If you are what you eat, then I am a cacophony of bold and beautiful flavors. My nostalgia comes largely in the form of food. 

My heritage is Indonesian. I’ve never been to Asia, and I can barely speak Bahasa. If you dropped me off in Indonesia, I’d stick out just like any other American. But if there’s any redeeming quality, it’s my proud consumption of Indonesian food. 

My kitchen always stays stocked. Soy sauce is just as much a necessity as water. God forbid I run out of Jasmine rice at any given point, and yes- it has to be Jasmine. Sambal oelek is another essential. Fried shallots? That goes on everything. Lobak and lemongrass sit right next to the broccoli in the fridge. 

When I found a Southeast Asian market in Chicago that had all the Indonesian ingredients that I’d been searching for for months that I couldn’t find in any other Asian market near me, I came home with such a haul. I hate shopping, but if it’s for groceries, you might as well tell me that I’m shopping for Christmas presents. For myself. 

The AAPI identity is itself interesting. It’s far from a monolith. Sure, “Asian food” is a thing, but Asia also has 48 countries. So what does “Asian food” even mean? It can’t mean food that’s eaten with chopsticks, because not all Asian countries even use chopsticks. I grew up eating food with a spoon and fork. Sure, I know how to use chopsticks, but that’s not my go-to vehicle. 

Chinese takeout is just as American as apple pie. There are more Chinese restaurants in the US than the combined total of McDonald’s, KFC’s, and Popeye’s. Your carb of choice on any given weeknight is more likely to be noodles than a pair of hamburger buns. Sriracha is as ubiquitous as ketchup. 

Boba shops seemingly outnumber Starbucks stores. Everyone knows what lychee, ube, and matcha are. Ten years ago, these flavors would not have dared enter the ice creams, cocktails, and lattes of the mainstream. 

Of course, this is a pretty surface-level view of Asian food in America. Without even realizing it, I’ve fallen into the common trap of reducing Asian food to the over-simplified, literally packaged version of itself for the sake of a broader audience to understand a metaphor. 

So, what does Asian food mean? It would be incredibly unfair and unjust to reduce the notion to a DoorDash order or a trending latte. 

How can you condense an individual’s narrative, their cultural upbringing, and their struggles through a single dish? Well, you can’t, but it’s a good start. 

This is modern-day identity reclamation to the AAPI community: telling stories through distinct plates and flavors. Food is the clearest way of conveying a narrative. It’s intimate, it’s intentional, and it’s art. 

- Tina