Baby Corn

Based on the people I follow on Twitter, I come across a lot of content that deals with racism that I would probably not otherwise see as a white person in the suburbs. One of those recent discoveries was the Brown In PDX Tumblr page. Reading over it was horrible in general, but this was the entry that made yesterday's post necessary:

http://browninpdx.tumblr.com/post/59124418747/baby-corn

I feel a need to dissect this a little.

First of all, Asia is big. We kind of covered that yesterday with some of the differences between Korean and Lao food. To be fair, they are not exactly neighbors. Vientiane and Seoul are about 3000 miles apart, so you should expect some differences.

I have heard some people talk about Northern versus Southern cuisine in India, and even people who don't eat a lot of Chinese food often recognize that there are some differences between Szechuan and Cantonese food. And Laos is not a particularly large country, but without me ever going there, and only interacting with the refugee population in two California cities, I still met people from at least three different mountain tribes. There were similarities, but there were also differences in food, language, and clothing.

I can only assume the woman in the story, when she lived in Asia, did not specifically live in Thailand, because surely then she would have said that, but what does she think Asia means? Let's even take out the Indian subcontinent and Russia (because it dips its toe in Europe), and the Middle East for no good reason, and still do you think that living in Mongolia would tell you what it's like to live in Malaysia? Shouldn't living abroad have made you less ignorant?

Okay, she was on shaky ground anyway. First of all, requesting things not on the menu your first time at a restaurant is questionable, and if you must do it at least leave the attitude behind.

Also, it is very questionable to use the term "you people". There are situations where it works. If I enter my work environment and find that my coworkers are standing around looking guilty in a sea of feathers and straw, I might reasonably say, especially if I have some managerial capacity, "You people have some explaining to do!"

On the other hand, if I am using "you people" to educate you about what foods you like, or what kind of characteristics you have, based on skin color that I have in fact mis-characterized because while the waitress did list Asian as a part of her heritage she also listed black and Caribbean, I am leaving myself open to criticism. I can see where employment in the Thai restaurant might seem like a context clue, but you think the largest continent on the planet is monolithic in its cuisine, so you lose all the points! Idiot! It would make more sense to walk into a French restaurant and insist that they make you a pizza in the name of Catherine de' Medici.

Incidentally, I think half the cooks at the Mongolian grill (which we all accept as not truly being characteristic of Mongolian food, but still tasting good) are Mexican, because one of them lived near our neighborhood. Actually, we had a next-door neighbor who was from Mexico but worked at an Indian restaurant too, so workplace is not a great predictor of heritage or ethnicity.

I believe tomorrow I will write a bit more about how we get people who feel so comfortable proclaiming their ignorance, and especially how we get them in Portland.

For now I will go back to my opening of yesterday, where Asian food makes me think "Yum!" That is pretty much true, because for me it means papaya salad and egg rolls and nasi goreng and Mongolian beef and pot stickers and bento and hom bao and a lot of different things that I like a lot. At the same time, Asian food includes sushi. With my combined aversions to fish, cucumber, and avocado, I do not love sushi. Asian food also includes a lot of foods that I have never tried, some of which I would probably love and others not.

(And the only thing I really remember seeing baby corn in was a dish of happy family that's claim to fame was including eight different vegetables. Adding it may have been a matter of running up the numbers, unless someone can use the baby corn clue to figure out what country that woman lived in.)

The continent of Asia includes mountains, hills, jungles, steppes, coastlines of oceans and rivers; of course there are lots of different foods. There are also different types of homes and jobs and modes of transportation. This could be said about even the smallest continent because there are some strong regional differences in Australia.

If you can accept that there are a lot of things that you don't know, and just enjoy the variety, that complexity is great. If you always feel like you know better than anyone else and need to show it, well, the world is the same size, but it's going to seem a lot smaller.