Written for JOUR-457: Food of Our Families

The food of my family is…

Heartwarming. With every sip of a rich, flavorful broth, or a bite of a tender strip of pork, the food of my family strikes a chord on every part of the human body it comes into contact with, down to the last cell of the large intestine.

Culturally transcendent. Food serves as a love language that connects older generations with the young. In a world that becomes more racially, ethnically and culturally diverse every day, the connections formed through the vessel of cuisine as a tool keep our unwritten familial and friendly relationships afloat. 

Pho. A gateway Vietnamese dish and a staple of Asian cuisine. One of my first memories of truly savoring what I was eating (which didn’t happen for a long time) was over a bowl of my grandmother’s special pho, which she would usually make for special occasions. After realizing how much I enjoyed her pho, she started cooking it more often than not.

My grandmother and I rarely talk. We literally cannot communicate on the same level; she speaks fluent Vietnamese and fragmented English, and I, vice versa. Still, the lifeline that ties me to our Vietnamese heritage is our shared unspoken appreciation for our Vietnamese dishes. 

As I’ve grown older, the moments we shared during my childhood in the kitchen became more infrequent, but on the days she does return to her favorite place in our home, she knows exactly what my stomach yearns for, just through glances and reiterations of the dishes I mispronounce. In our kitchen, few words are exchanged between my grandmother and I, but her cooking more than compensates for the lack of dialogue. It is a whole other language altogether. 

Attending college across the country made me realize how much I’d taken homemade meals for granted. As a child, I viewed the human necessity of eating as a chore. My parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles would take turns sitting atop a wooden stool next to me at the dinner table, hours after everyone had finished their food, trying to convince me to finish my by-then cold soup. When I decided to go to USC, I knew it would require a new level of independence that I’d never known. I slowly but surely started teaching myself to cook meals. But somewhere along the way, I’d lost the joy I had when I would come home from school or a long swim practice to a hot, fresh and homemade meal, made to my taste and with my family’s love. 

Sure, I’ve tried a few pho places around the USC area, and even ventured down to Westminster, or, more colloquially known as “Little Saigon.” Still, nothing beats my family’s pho. Though my cultural dissonance as a second-generation Asian American is my own ongoing internal struggle, food is the lifeline to who I am, who my siblings are, who my extended family is, the people I have never met and the people I will meet in the future. 

I feel a sense of belonging and pride knowing that though my cultural connection to Vietnamese culture is lacking, I have the power to take the recipes I’ve savored my whole life from my grandparents and my parents, and pass them on to my kids. I feel joy in the fact that I have the power to learn recipes that have been worked, reworked and passed down for generations, and share them with people I love, family or not. Most importantly, I feel privileged in my life’s path to have the opportunity to contribute to the narrative of food as a means of cultural preservation, and to elevate people with similar experiences to mine through storytelling.