by Melissa Tolentino
What it’s like to find your identity through food, and the experience of being a hungry and confused third culture kid.
i
We begin where it always does: with the mother.
My mother makes chicken adobo most of the time because I don’t like the spareribs kind. Over the years, the recipe has changed a bit. Recently, she’s started to mix tamari gluten-free soy sauce with the aggressive Filipino soy sauce – a light with a dark to create a twilight sort of dressing. It has a good sheen to it and tastes even better.
Sometimes, she uses just the wings. Sometimes, it’s thighs and drumsticks. The onions are always soft, translucent. The longer you leave it, the more the flavors mix – it’s the dish that keeps on giving, right up until the day you can no longer eat it.
Adobo goes fast on my plate. It taught me to remember where my stomach calls home, no matter how many places it has been to.
For me, a home-cooked meal is less about whether or not it feels homey and more about where the tastes of my life have led me. Adobo, my mother’s flavor, has always brought me the knowledge that I’m purely a child of the diaspora. I only know the Philippines through her and my father and my aunts and uncles who immigrated and the collective experiences of my American-born cousins, and our dream of the country is wildly different than how it actually exists in real life.
Ours is milder, brewed with spices and sauces of a different nature. Ours knows where it came from, but sings differently on the tongue. Ours is quiet but tangy. Ours gives us a language that isn’t quite English or Tagalog. Ours knows it can never go home in quite the same way.
ii
In my late twenties, I am plagued by the fear that I have celiac disease, because why have just regular run-of-the-mill anxiety when you can have health anxiety?
At night, I lie awake and think of all the things I’d never be able to eat again. Bread, which means sandwiches and subs. Pasta, which means lasagna and literally half of everything good in this world. Breaded things, which means the majority of my diet. Soy sauce. Eel sauce. Panko. Pastries. Cakes. Pies. Love. Dreams. Happiness.
I think about all of that, and I think about having to start my life over, and how suddenly my past would not only consist of fond memories of people and places, but also food I could never eat again. How much my life would change and how I would have to re-forge my relationships: my brother and I, bonded through hot wings and whiskey. My wholehearted dedication to my dad’s ketchup-slathered fried Spam and eggs with rice, which is now the only way I can eat eggs, Spam, and rice. My childhood in New Jersey, framed by Capri Suns and Rita’s strawberry ice. My entire life, peppered with my overwhelming love of Japanese food.
Japan is where I truly discovered that my taste buds were meant for glory, or perhaps where my adolescence convinced me of that. I grew up with Japanese food more than any other kind of cuisine and it has always been my comfort food. From the first time I moved to Japan when I was eight to the fourth time I moved there when I was twenty-two, I have always felt closer to the flavors of Japanese cooking than I have to anything else. Adobo reminds me of my family; Japanese food constantly reminds me of all the myriad ways I’ve changed amid all the little ways I’ve remained the same.
Most of my recipe repertoire consists of Japanese food, because life led me to Japan, and I dug a hole there and laid a part of myself in it to rest for eternity. Tonjiru, pork bone broth, reminds me of every time I wanted a hug from a person but couldn’t, so I got one in a bowl instead. Tempura (real tempura) brings me back to that alleyway restaurant in Sasebo that I went to almost every weekend, where the chef dipped shrimp in batter and then dropped it into a river of oil, all right in front of me. Onigiri rice balls remind me of slugging through grad school in Tokyo, as does a plate piled high of karaage chicken and fried curry bread with a half-cooked egg in the middle.
Some people say that their lives are a storybook, filled with chapters they haven’t yet written and chapters that can never be revisited again. That’s nice. But my life is a kitchen full of stacks of plates and bowls, towering high to hold me up above the tables where the memories of my well-eaten, well-loved life simmer and nourish.
iii
My least favorite kind of food is naked food, especially naked meat. I don’t enjoy roasted or grilled chicken that is skinless, boneless, and spiceless, because you could just as easily fry it or stew it and it would be juicier and tastier. I prefer my pork chops breaded and then put to bed over Japanese-style curry and rice. I don’t like plain burger or chicken patties, because that just screams “I was too lazy to make this into a proper meal.” Even steak has to be dressed in some way, though I’d never stoop so low as to eat it with ketchup. Give me a nice chimichurri sauce or some horseradish.
The bottom line: give me color. Aside from the fact that I just don’t find the taste of the meat alone appealing, it seems so lonely to me. Why have just a patty or an isolated slab of grilled chicken when you can give it friends? It could be a party. Why not make it a party?
Maybe I missed the mark on roast chicken the way I missed the mark on many “American” things growing up: getting a driver’s license at sixteen, drinking in high school, not being raised for the majority of my adolescence overseas on a naval base in the Pacific.
Roast chicken is dry and flavorless, which is often how I feel about being American – in the context of white-centric America. The way I see it, the United States is more about all the things we are other than just being “from” here or being born here. I’m all about hyphens and mash-ups and knowing your history because my America is all about other peoples’ histories coming together in a mashed-up, hyphenated state of being. Which is also the way I feel like chicken should be: glittered and jazzy, not naked and pale.
I will never understand how people can throw away chicken drippings when it’s the best part of the dish. America is the chicken and everything else we are—everything else I am—is the savory goodness. Filipina, yes. Navy brat, yes. Third culture kid, definitely yes. Gimme a whole bowl of that.
iv
When people ask me where I’m really from, it’s not just annoying and rude and racist and exhausting, it’s also a long story that I don’t feel like telling. Any part of it has to follow with an explanation:
Oh, I grew up in Japan. Are you Japanese then? No, I’m Filipino. So you were born in the Philippines. No, I’m American. I don’t get it.
I speak Japanese. So you’re Japanese. No, I’m Filipino. And born in America. Then why don’t you speak Tagalog? I was mostly raised in Japan. Uh, okay.
It has always been easier for me to build my bridges with food, whether it was talking to people about the Filipino dishes I based my childhood on or the Japanese cuisine I embraced in my most formative years. Everyone understands the connection we have with what we put in our mouths, how we seek certain flavors so much they become an integral part of our lives. It’s evident in our language, in the words we say: that is the bread and butter, the beans and rice. He’s a snack. She’s as sweet as honey. I’m as sour as vinegar.
So let me say this instead to the eternal damned question of where are you from: regardless of whatever else I am, I am definitely full. I’m constantly full of life and of gratitude, because of all the rice I’ve eaten that has come from my loving parents, from the too-salty adobo my brother makes, from all the embutido my grandmother puts on my plate after she carefully peels off all the foil. I’m full of all the hey-remember-whens that my best friend and I share about Japan and food: remember when we ate 20 pieces of gyoza before going to an all-you-can-eat buffet, remember when we baked a cake with four pounds of chocolate in it, remember when our entire four months of study abroad in Nagoya revolved mostly around an izakaya that had only meat skewers served by cute boys. I’m full of the joy of discovery from my senior year of college, one of the best years of my life, because I had a job and discovered restaurant week and duck confit and how my friends that year were going to be my friends for life. I am full of the joke I share with everyone that someday, I hope someone proposes to me with a chicken nugget.
The only identity I’ve ever been able to fully accept, one hundred percent, is that of being a third culture kid – someone who grows up between, and among, cultures without ever really belonging to any of them with any true certainty. I could never, would never, call myself Japanese, but my heart, my stomach, will live and die in that country. I am Filipino, but only in the way my family has taught me to be so – in our food, which has always been the lifeline of any diaspora. And I am American, because I’m confused, and I eat too much, and I love it.
v
The kare-kare goes very, very fast at Tolentino holiday parties.
My cousins and I eat it like we are never going to eat anything again as long as we live, which may be true, as karekare has a lot of fat. You can even see it when you stir the stew: glistening slices of pork fat, so juicy the light makes it look like they’re winking at you. We eat it until our hands are sticky and the pork bones are dry.
I used to hate kare-kare. I thought it was gross. It’s a stew of peanut butter and pork, for God’s sake, and I assure you that if God ever went to a Filipino party He would have it out of politeness, but still wonder where He went wrong. Even the vegetables in it – the squash, the green beans – turn brown. The whole thing is literally brown sludge.
But you eat it – you take a piece of jiggling, winking pork in your hands, and you slide it into your mouth, and the fat and the peanut buttery sauce slides down your chin – and everything changes.
It’s not sludge. It’s manna.
And at the end of the Filipino party, after God has had His fill of the stuff, He does not resist when your tita hands him a Tupperware of it. He blesses her. He says, salamat po. He goes home and He does not share with the angels. He eats it in one sitting.
(On the eighth day, God created the best cuisines of the world, and made sure only those whose ears He whispered into knew the recipes.)
vi
For a long time I used to hate having to explain who I was. I thought I was gross.
I was a stew of unrelated countries, for God’s sake, and I assure you that if God ever had to look back on what He’d done with me, He would have been like, “I don’t really know what happened there.”
What happened is that I found that my love for food spilled over into a realization that I knew exactly who I was, I just hadn’t been digesting it. The magic I’d found in simple ingredients and ingesting different cultures through spices and leaves and batters and broths had transformed into my identity in a way I wasn’t expecting. To me, eating is some kind of unabashed and joyful experience that goes beyond nutrients. To me, it’s finding a place in the world. It’s connecting all the parts of me I didn’t think had a common thread for.
Eating kare-kare is all about my cousins – Angelie and Regina and Erika and Andrew and Derick – and me sitting around a table, our hands slick and greasy, quiet but for the mad chewing as our moms and dads, our aunties and uncles, talk around us, about us. Every nabe-style hot pot I put together reminds me of surviving razor-sharp Tokyo cold snaps with Massiel and how we have been tightly bound together for the past eight years with nothing but memories of eating and drinking and planning our lives around food. Avocados, heavy in my hands, bring me the lightness of remembering college, of the time Lucy and I tried to ripen one in an oven when we had just become friends.
I try to plan for the future, too. I ask my parents how to make adobo so that my someday-children will know the taste of a home that I don’t really know myself, but have still come to cherish.
Every meal I have is just another grain added to my food pyramid of a lifetime decorated with bowls and spoons and peppers, culture and bay leaves, chopsticks and rice cookers, people and places and names and hearts and hands and hearths.
vii
We end where it always does: with the child. I’m twenty-eight now and still hungry. I eat less to survive and more to figure out how to get my tongue to send a message to my heart, one that says whatever is on my plate at that moment is a keeper. My eating habits are not so much about nutrition, as they are a representation of my history and all the places that I’ve chosen to call home.
The Philippines I know exists on a plate, and in my family. The Japan I know exists on a plate, and in my heart. The America I know is a long supper table with many chairs, all immigrants and children of immigrants, with the most dressed-up, glittery, jazzy roasted chicken for everyone.
This is my life. It’s brewed with spices and sauces of a different nature. Knows where it comes from, but sings differently on the tongue. Is quiet, but tangy, with a language that isn’t quite English, Japanese, or Tagalog. It knows it can never go home in quite the same way, but that’s fine. I’m already at the table, eating my mother’s adobo and all the other food I love, and so I am already home.