What Am I - Chopped Suey?: Belonging and the Ambivalent Taste of American Exceptionalism

This paper analyzes the stories of movement and displacement told through iconic Chinese and Jewish “ethnic” immigrant foods that have become part of American cuisine. Jewish and Chinese immigrant groups exemplify the American “model minority” myth. The ways in which some immigrant foods have been embraced or adapted into Anglo-dominant American culture reflects complex histories of their creators’ migration and assimilation. Immigrant foods complicate efforts to define a common American cuisine. When, if ever, do “ethnic” foods become “American”? Yet trying to identify “American cuisine” smacks of “American exceptionalism”— the superiority-tinged idea that the United States differs from all other nations and is intrinsic to how we have defined our national cuisine and differentiated it from its global influences. There is an inherent dissonance celebrating hyphenated American foods without acknowledging America’s history of Asian exclusion, Native American removal, colonial conquest and exploitation, and the transatlantic slave trade. Though we share a national identity and the cultural facets that come with that, ethnic-inflected American foods and tastes remind us of the diverse histories of people becoming American. We, the Jewish-American authors of this paper, find affinities between our food stories and those of Chinese Americans, which embody the displacement, nostalgia, and loss that come with our so-called “model minority” status. To illustrate the complexity of histories and identities in creative American ethnic fusion foods, we focus on a couple of foods from Chinese American and Jewish American immigrant cuisines: sweet-and-sour batter-fried dishes like slippery shrimp, and chocolate babka and rugelach.