Secret Kitchen
The Crustacean restaurants serve what type of fusion cuisine?
Euro-Asian fusion cuisine
What is an Okazuya?
It’s a Japanese American eatery, that used to be particularly prevalent in Hawaii but has been decreasing.
Which famous movie presents Indian food as disgusting to the public, especially in comparison to Jhumpa Lahiri’s and Nilesh Patel’s representation (normalizing American food)?
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Asian Americans have been symbolically and stereotypically linked to what industry?
The food industry
How many generations of women run the Crustacean restaurants (from Secret Kitchen)?
Three
Why is it interesting that the Crustacean restaurants are run by women?
In Vietnamese families, men are typically considered to be the head of the house.
Name two kinds of food that can be found in an Okazuya.
Typically musubi (Japanese rice ball), sushi, tempura, or teriyaki
Uma Narayan claims that what type of food festivals are “one of the rare public events where one is visually, viscerally, and positively conscious of the range of diverse ethnicities and identities that in face constitute us as a community”?
Think location.
North American food festivals
What is the name of the cooking show mentioned in the reading that combines Western and Asian cuisines?
East Meets West
What is an example that shows that all foods do not make for equally appealing cultural ambassadors (from Shifting Plates)?
Filipinos eating dog cuisine within the context of America (different cultural attitudes that can lead to negative stereotyping).
Why did Helene and her family flee from Saigon, Vietnam to San Francisco in 1975?
The Fall of Saigon
Before what significant world event did these Okazuyas begin by Japanese immigrants?
Before World War II
What is the main similarity between Lahiri’s stories?
The students do not want to eat the foods their mothers packed them (they are ashamed).
OR
The importance of food in people's lives.
Many participants perceived fusion cuisine as exemplifying the dangers of what?
Assimilation, which is often equated with “becoming white”
Fusion cuisine was and is, as most participants bluntly stated, “white food”
Why did male Vietnamese American refugees often suffer from malaise and depression after settling in America (from Secret Kitchen)?
They often underwent a loss of social status in their migration, feeling alienated and powerless following their migration. They generally develop these problem as their abilities to function efficaciously as traditional male breadwinners are inhibited.
How does the Crustacean physically show influences of the Vietnamese American experience through its interior and service?
It has antiques and creations reflecting the colonial period (warm wood architecture and ceiling fans), and it also has American-style service and hospitality (also descriptive menus).
Why is it no surprising that okazuyas are decreasing in number?
The owners do not want their children to continue the okazuyas because of the long hours, hard work, and monotony associated with the job.
The author claims that “food marks the racialized body in more traumatizing ways.” What do they mean? Think in terms of young students.
Younger students who are more naive and choose to eat certain foods that carry stigma (visually, scent-wise, and such) may experience prejudice against them, which can have negative effects early on like a student asking their parents to pack a less smelly ethnic lunch so that they can fit in better.
TRUE OR FALSE
Ming Tsai claims that fusion cuisine is the cooking that can produce chaos on the plate and in the mouth.
He avoids this by having respect for the different culture’s ingredients and traditional techniques. He harmoniously combines two distinct culinary approaches.
What does the pleasure of the texture of tuna spark (from Cooking Up the Senses)?
A more haptic dimension of the intersection between touch and vision and how it triggers sensory memories and biographic scenes
The An family were able to weave which three parts of their story into their restaurants’ brand? Name one.
Colonial nostalgia, the refugee exodus, or the gendered entrepreneurialism
What is the contemporary mixed plate supposed to convey?
It's supposed to symbolize the ways in which ethnic groups have shared not only their foods, but also their political and economic interests and cultural lifestyles in a common society dubbed “local” or “multicultural”.
What is an example of a stigmatized food presented in the reading?
large python stuffed with live snakes that crawl out of its belly, plate of dead beetles, individual monkey heads stuffed with chilled monkey brains, dog eating, chutney sandwich, etc.
What about Ming’s voice emphasized what many participants felt immediately to be a dissonance between what they saw (am Asian man about to cook Asian dishes) and what they heard. What kind of American accent did he have?
his Midwestern lilt/accent
What was so controversial about the two episodes of the cooking show featuring male chefs as guests (from Cooking Up the Senses)?
One woman thinks that cooking in public and for salary is the domain of men while men believed that it was more liberal and progressive to show them as cooks. These men were picking up household tasks that are traditionally seen as female work.
However, in many Asian immigrant households the woman is still the bearer of tradition and source of domestic labor.