How to Cook a Dragon
We went to a book reading at the Get Lost bookstore in the Castro last night. The author, Linda Furiya, is ethnically Japanese but grew up in a small town in Indiana where her family brought in the only ethnic diversity. Begin the tale of cultural confusion! Actually it gets more complicated - at 30, she ends up in a serious relationship with an American man who lives abroad in China. She leaves her apartment and job in San Francisco to visit him in Beijing and ends up staying for years. This book was about her experiences in China and she uses food as a metaphor to describe everything she went through during those years.
I could relate to the cultural confusion being Indian American and not being fully Indian or American :P She had an even more exaggerated experience growing up as the only Asian in a small little town. She seems quite American in terms of her outlook and way of life, but in terms of food, she mentioned seeking comfort in both American and Japanese food. Her parents only cooked Japanese food, but she did tell us about a close neighbor who taught her mom (and her) how to make pie crust and turkey and stuffing and some other great American classics. In Beijing, with food as her solace, she found it very difficult to find any of her comfort foods. She talked about how she and her then-boyfriend overcame the challenges of making a grilled cheese sandwich (they had to use their bread machine instead of the sweet thin-sliced white bread found in Beijing) and how they searched everywhere to find shoestring french fries to accompany their homemade burgers (one of them used to run down the street to the McDonalds, but the fries wrapped in plastic there would be soggy by the time they got home...finally they found shoestring fries in a random mom and pop grocery store.)
Someone asked at the end if she has been back to China since, and she said that she doesn't want to because she left so many memories there (I think referring to her relationship that ended there). But the other thing I found interesting and kinda lovely was that she spoke about not wanting to change her memories of Beijing and Shanghai. She doesn't want to go back and see how it all looks different, but rather wants to believe that they are the same cities she experienced so much in for those years.
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