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Tourists in the Kitchen: Asian American Culinary Travelogues

Food has historically been an important but ambiguous form of visibility for Asian America. On one hand, food has offered an economic means of support to a minority group whose access to other forms of labor has been intermittently blocked; it has been a vehicle for assimilation; and it has been an empowering and consoling means of expressing identity, both personal and communal. On the other hand, anti-Asian racism has frequently seized on Asian food as a marker of unpalatable otherness. Explorations of the pleasures, power, and public conspicuousness of food saturate Asian American cultural production. This essay explores Asian American participation in an important aspect of contemporary food media: culinary tourism, or leisure travel with the express purpose of retracing foodways and cooking and eating in a cuisine’s place of origin. I examine three recent narratives of culinary tourism by and about Chinese American women who travel to Asia to learn about food: Jen Lin-Liu’s Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey through China (2008), Ann Mah’s Kitchen Chinese: A Novel about Food, Family, and Finding Yourself (2010), and Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan’s A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family (2011). I propose a perhaps counterintuitive commonality underlying these texts: while all three are narratives of cultural education in which women recover what they feel to be a lost part of their heritage, ultimately, the authors are more preoccupied with the Americans reading their books than they are with the Asians encountered within them. In other words, all three authors engage with Asian food in a way that deepens connections with other Americans and implicitly distances them from the Asians from whom they learn. Culinary tourism is an important industry niche with a considerable cultural footprint. The basic narrative of travel undertaken to explore a cuisine that is “placed” (within a nation, region, or city, for example) has taken on a range of inflections across many media platforms. For the Asian American writer, food tourism necessarily engages a fraught legacy of exclusion and appeasement. Asian Americans who have written about Asian food for a broad readership have had to contend with the charge of having produced what Chinese