street fear treat fair

I'd say I'm generally a pretty fearful person. 

I'm afraid of conflict. I'm afraid of walking alone, especially at night. I'm afraid of heights. I'm afraid of being a bother. I'm afraid of falling through sidewalk grates. I'm afraid of not having stability. I'm afraid of biking in traffic. I'm afraid of too-quiet buildings, especially at night. I'm afraid of receiving bad news about my brother. I'm afraid of unknown sounds, especially at night. I'm afraid of any situation that I could seriously injure myself in (but I do it anyways and my brain is just on high alert the whole time).

Some of these are standard. Some are definitely standard for being a woman.

I am acutely aware though that I've never been afraid of possibly being harmed/murdered due to my race (no, just as a woman).

This is not to say that Asian Americans haven't been a target for any reason since coming to this country. It's just to say that I was raised to keep my head down and stay in my lane and succeed and I will be rewarded with the bullshit American dream because the world is fair. But the world is not fair.

I passively listened in all my history classes as we learned about slavery, the Trail of Tears, Japanese internment camps, these big ticket black and white right and wrong events of racism distilled of all its nuance... and then all bundled and tied up with a pretty little ribbon by the end of the school year. Today, America is a shining example of a beautiful melting pot. Look. How. Far. We've. Come.

Last year, I was acutely aware that I've never been afraid of possibly being harmed/murdered due to my race, and that difference was what made me unable to completely understand despite supporting and reading BLM material. I saw all the calls to show empathy by checking in on your Black friends and considering that "productivity" might not be at the front of their minds. To be honest, I didn't really reach out to anyone. For some reason, any combination of words felt disingenuous. What did I know anyways? I was raised to buy into the [White] American dream with a nice helping of race-based-self-hatred. I'm second gen East Asian from one of those that immigrated here for education and so I was also afraid of academic failure. I was afforded some amount of privilege - the kind that I now recognize is orchestrated from model minority rhetoric - so I grew up apathetic to a lot of the issues that didn't seem to affect me. It's almost disappointing to think that I might be a different person had I not moved to Oakland several years ago. Last year, a lot of processing and reframing and revisiting memories happened. Still what did I know anyways? The state of the country just seemed hopeless, and I felt helpless. Teetering between that and rage. It's more of the same today, but I'm balancing more fear. It's definitely a new experience - to be wandering around my neighborhood in broad daylight and wondering if someone is just going to jump out of nowhere, throwing unprovoked punches. It's also a new experience to have friends be checking in on me - how can something make my heart feel so full and so drained at the same time? Is this what it feels like to everyone? Gratitude for receiving this kind of love and despair that it is even necessary. 

In more ways than just this, I am thankful for my local friends who inadvertently allow me to process complex issues through the medium of food. 

 

For Joyce's one year anniversary since launching Sohntaste, we celebrated with a street food fair party. Everyone bring the street food of your heritage. I think a lot of us have been obsessed with this question of heritage and identity. I am particularly obsessed with it because it reminds us that food is at once simple and complex. To take just one personal aspect - when I think about blending my Chinese heritage with my American upbringing, I think about access, assimilation, and appropriation. Access to ingredients that are familiar and remind our parents of home. Assimilation of school lunches to avoid ridicule (we definitely all know this story). Appropriation of our flavors and ingredients for profit by White curators. It took me years to get to this point of pride after spending most of my childhood actively sticking my tongue out at Chinese food. This point where my friends and I now find any way to celebrate it.

This bebe wasn't part of the menu, but if I had the time and energy to make them again, I would've.

Because these scallion pancake brioche donuts would be a perfect street snack. Savory and handheld.

The dough is loaded with five spice powder, scallions, and sesame seeds.

Which was not enough because they were then filled with fluffy five spice sesame chili oil cream cheese. And topped with more sesame seeds and scallions. Perfectly reminiscent of scallion pancakes with just the right amount of heat that sneaks in at the end.

Except that I still need to work on my donut dough so that there is enough give to actually fill the filled donut.

Instead, I used my fryer to make Taiwanese popcorn chicken (not pictured) and an oyster mushroom equivalent. Not my heritage technically.. but I'm the one with a deep fryer (tyvm Joyce and Debbie for this phenomenal we-gift).

The chicken pieces didn't turn out as crunchy as I would've liked. But these oyster mushroom pieces are headed in the right direction of craveable bingeable snack.

I marinated these guys overnight the same way I did the chicken to draw out some of the moisture. Then coated in buttermilk and potato starch to make a thin batter. Then double fried to dry out eveeennnn moreeeeeee of the moisture and sprinkled with white pepper + Sichuan peppercorn. The end result was something like... if a piece of jerky had a vegetarian baby with a piece of fried food. All I gotta say is... yum.

My actual heritage street food snack would be these candied strawberry skewers. I unlocked this memory when I was actively thinking about the last thing I remember eating from China. The first is just roasted sweet potato. Like a cart that straight up just peddles roasted sweet potato, those intoxicatingly sweet roast-y smells hanging in the air alerting me to their existence before the sight of the cart does. The second is 冰糖葫蘆 (bing tang hulu). I haven't had these since I was sixteen. At some street market I think. My dad handed me one like "Try this, you'll like it," and dammit I did. Amongst the many snacks that I gorged on as a kid, haw flakes were definitely a favorite. I think it was because I could put down like 10 of those rolls that remind me of coin rolls and not feel disgusting afterwards. I should've known that fresh hawthorn berries would be magical. Sadly, I have no idea where to find these things in the states, so I dissolved a pack of haw flakes in water and made a sugar syrup with that to coat Joyce's leftover strawberries. They almost took me back to being sixteen and overwhelmed, then finding my center when Dad handed me that hawthorn skewer.

My centerpiece is take two of a cake I made for Chiravann last year that didn't turn out very aesthetically pleasing, but I was obsessed with the components.

Mango sticky rice cake.

Sponge base. Sweetened condensed milk soak. Coconut and black sesame buttercream. Toasted rice custard. Toasted rice crumbs. Fresh mango.

Love our people like you love our food.