Miranda Brown Wants You To Eat Chinese Food Cooked By Mexicans
(This interview was transcribed and edited)
Hi Miranda. What do you do? And what do you say when people ask you, ‘where are you really from?’
I’m from California. It may not have a particular resonance in the UK but in the United States it’s a special sort of place. California is very central to America but also a peripheral state and figures heavily in elections. We’ll talk about ‘things’ that happen in California. I’m from San Francisco, which is maybe even more controversial, especially right now.
Since 2002 I’ve taught at the University of Michigan as Professor of Chinese Studies. About seven years ago, after my daughter was born, I shifted the focus of my research away from the history of medicine and classical China to focus on the history of Chinese foodways, especially before the 20th century.
What caused that shift?
It was multi-factorial. One is that after you have a kid, your life changes and you’re thinking a lot about food and how to preserve certain family traditions, especially since my mother died in 2003. The other thing is I started teaching Asian food and drink and that got me to take a step back and reevaluate a lot of my assumptions about Chinese food, questions around authenticity and so forth.
Authenticity! Love talking about it. We’ll get to it later.
How did this shift come to the fore in terms of your practice and teaching, since it’s clearly been a personal journey for you?
For Asian Americans, and this is probably true of many members of the Chinese diaspora in the English-speaking world (Canada, Australia, UK) - food is really important because a lot of immigrants get their first stronghold in that adopted homeland through the food industry. Many people, including myself, have family members who work in some kind of restaurant business. On top of that, Chinese food is how mainstream America interacts with the Chinese population and Chinese culture. So it becomes an object of identification, and something that people struggle with. People are very protective of it, and in many ways food is central to the identity of diaspora in a way that it isn’t for other groups. Of course, there are other groups that get involved in the food industry - in the UK there are the South Asians, and in the United States there are the Mexican Americans and there’s probably a parallel story there. But if you’re German or Russian it’s not quite the same kind of thing.
It’s also important because language fluency and literacy in Chinese is something that disappears almost as soon as people show up. The 1.5 generation - people that grew up from age seven to 10 - often feel the connections breaking down, while genetics and names don’t translate into insider status in the homeland of the parents. So I think that’s why food is so important; it’s that connection to something that is easy to lose.
So what’s your Chinese heritage?
I’m half Chinese, but it’s complicated by my mother being born in Singapore, which was part of Malaysia back then, and she returned to China when her father… well, it’s even more complicated than that! Her mother was the child of immigrants from mainland China, her father was an immigrant. They returned in 1952, or rather were deported by the British who dumped around a million ethnic Chinese in China during the Malayan Emergency. He lasted there for about eight years. She lasted there for 10, and then spent a decade in Hong Kong before coming to the United States. It’s a very Chinese story that people don't realise: there’s this history of moving a lot before they even come to the UK or the United States.
Same with my family. Every generation keeps moving.
So you’re particularly interested in recipes. What do they tell us - or not tell us?
It depends on the recipe. They’re not all the same but I’m interested in cookbooks because you don’t expect to find these interesting details of everyday life. I spent the first 15 years working as a classicist and you’re used to reading what the very elite people think, and how they’d express themselves, but you learn less about people’s everyday life - the flavours, textures and smells. This gives you a much more intimate feeling - it’s a level of connection that I never felt before.
Any interesting cookbooks you’ve come across?
Too many. There’s one I’ve written about from 1504, by Song Xu. He was a descendant of the Song imperial house, living in Songjiang, a suburb of Shanghai. He records his mother’s recipes and there’s lots of cheese in it. There are these other popular household manuals that have huge recipe selections and are reprinted a whole bunch of times between 1271 and the 17th century and in print editions that go to Japan. Those are really interesting because you have recipes for mock meats, Muslim foods, recipes for beer making.
Sounds like these cookbooks already challenge a lot of assumptions we make about the history of Chinese foods, right?
Yeah, and you somehow expect that what you ate as a kid projects backwards because it's the association of family with things that don’t change. But the [Chinese] diet looks and tastes very different if you go back 500 years.
In the article I read where you talked about the dangers of calling a salad ‘Asian’, because it becomes a racialised salad. How much of this racialisation of food penetrations our everyday interaction with ‘ethnic’ cuisine?
I think it’s in everything. We don’t refer to hamburgers or hot dogs as ‘white’ meat! I want to be clear that there are things that I think are very problematic right now - like the violence against Asian Americans and immigrants, which is right now a major problem in the United States. There’s the FBI initiative or witch hunt on Chinese scientists, a lot of the war cries that you see in the media and Congress has helped stoke those fears. I think [the racialisation of food] is more of a persistent insensitivity that we could live without, but it doesn’t rise to the same level as these other problems.
Do you think it’s part of the bigger picture of dehumanising or as you say misrepresenting Asian-ness?
I think it speaks to the outsider status that Asian immigrants continue to endure in the United States and, I assume, in Western Europe, who are often denied full citizenship. With that you have to come back to having our citizenship and humanity recognised.
German food is all over the place in the United States. But is it marked as ethnic German? Do you think of a hotdog as a German food? No. It’s obviously the largest ethnic group in the United States, but it’s an invisible one for a variety of reasons. One is numbers, some of it’s also World War One and some not so nice things that happened to German Americans - which is one part of my family.
Do you think there will come a point when Chinese food is naturalised or fully considered an American or even regional American cuisine?
If you ask me 10 years ago, I would have said yes, we’re definitely on the way, because of the intermarriage, integration and so on. My concern right now is because of the politics in the United States, where people try to distinguish their feelings about China - America’s main competitor right now - from their feelings about people who look Chinese, I just don’t think that has been very successful.
To that end, what do you think of the label Asian? You guys are having very different conversations in the US to what we have here. We created ESEA (East and Southeast Asian) a few years back, and you have AAPI.
It’s a complicated conversation. On the one hand, ‘Asian’ is important for Asian American identity, even though there’s a big push to disaggregate. There is a concern that when you aggregate populations, then various groups end up not getting the assistance or care that they require because they're being associated with Chinese and Korean immigrants. So there’s that conversation about disaggregation being necessary for social justice aims. Then, for a lot of Asian Americans, ‘Asian’ is important for thinking in terms of solidarity and common experience. Even though their parents don't really recognise that label.
As somebody who’s in her upper 40s, when I was growing up I wasn’t treated like an Asian American because of the way I look. In some ways I felt pushed out, marginalised even, by that community.
There isn’t a single answer; I think it really comes down to asking what are we trying to do at any particular moment? I can see an argument for aggregating, an argument for disaggregating. I can see an argument for more granularity and also thinking about the mixed race experience, which is a huge issue facing the community. A lot of people are marrying ‘out’ and how do we think about their membership in the community, when they may not be marked as ‘Asian’ physically, or through name.
Have these questions arisen more within you since you had a child?
Previously I didn’t want to dwell on the autobiographical. But when you have a child, you’re thinking to yourself, I don’t want her to go through that. I don’t want her Asian credentials to be questioned because of the way she looks. So all of a sudden you’re remembering things that you normally consider too trivial. Honestly, I have a good, first world life. I don’t have a lot to complain about. It’s always felt bad to say, ‘wow, I felt marginalised’, when we have people stuck at our border or children are separated from their parents and put in terrible conditions, or we have poor people harassed by the police and so forth.
I think I’ve had a bit of discomfort with reflecting too much on this sort of experience of growing up with ambivalent feelings.
What have you found in your Chinese cookbook research about cabbage?
Cabbage is interesting because in Chinese it’s just 白菜 (báicài). But there’s different kinds of báicài. It’s locally driven - we find recipes for preserved cabbage, preserved mustard, which I think is horribly underestimated and undervalued. There are many recipes with cabbage. Personally, the ones that I really like are about putting shredded cabbage into dumpling filling because of the juice factor and it makes a huge difference. I want to encourage everybody to use cabbage that way because it’s a powerful tool to bring back a lot of the flavour to lean meat, which we in the Western world love to eat. It’s harder to find traditional fatty meat because of the way that pigs and cows are bred at this point. The juice, the soupiness… I can’t say enough good things about cabbage.
Americans do have a problem where it’s like, I need to eat a veggie, I need to eat a protein. And then the eating of the veggie becomes a chore. But if you learn how to integrate it, then, you end up with more of the things that you need in your diet without having to work so hard to try and enjoy it.
Who would you invite to eat your cabbage-filled dumplings?
I’ve only met her online, but I would like to sit down with Fuchsia Dunlop because I respect her work so much - the writing, the recipes.
What will you serve with your cabbage-filled dumplings?
Greens!
Who used to cook when you were growing up?
My mother. She was an adventurous home cook and I don’t think she cooked a lot before she got to the United States, like a lot of immigrant mothers. A lot of it was from her imagination or from talking to other people, because her pathway was so interesting. It wasn’t like, here’s what my mother taught me to cook. Her attitude was that you should stay out of the kitchen, go study and get into Harvard and then we can hire a staff, right? They don’t want you to be a domestic - that’s what your poor aunts and uncles have to do because they’re immigrants and their English is not good. They suffered so that you guys can enjoy life!
My mother was also not a great cook, she just came up with what I call ‘Chinglish’ meals. She herself had moved all over the place, because she’s Malaysian Chinese but also lived a long time in Hong Kong where my dad was from.
What was her last name?
Her last name is Lau, so was my dad’s.
That’s actually pretty controversial. Same characters?
Same characters but different countries. I think it’s fine! What was your mother’s maiden name?
Dong. And her mother was Dong. So she’s the same background, Malaysian Chinese, Cantonese speaking.
Actually, my mum is Fujianese, Hokkien speaking!
OK, that’s a different tribe in that part of the world.
Exactly. But I understand when you said, Oh, it’s a long story. I get it. When you introduce yourself to someone, you’re like, how long do you have? I have to tell you the backstory first!
I have an aunt who was adopted on the Dong side. I think the cousin had hooked up with one of the Straits Chinese or somebody who had a small amount of Malay or Thai DNA - one of the earliest 17th century settlers. And my grandfather’s family came later in the 20th century. They didn’t mix with the locals at that point, but I think that there was a discomfort with that mix, even if it was a small amount, and so they moved the kid into another part of the family to cover it up. So she got adopted and the Chinese do do these things - they adopt girls, which people don’t realise. They’re very generous with their families.
You mentioned earlier this notion of authenticity: how do you explore that in your work?
My family background is so jumbled - not just my parents, which obviously presents on my face - nor just my daughter’s face (her father is from Mexico). To examine the history of how Chinese foods came into being, we should think hard about all the different kinds of hands that were involved over so many generations.
Especially if you’re in Malaysia, where the cuisine is quite different from what it will be in China or Taiwan. Most are descendants of Chinese who came at different points, but again, that is quite different from say Hong Kong, which has a different colonial past. You know, English food is pooh-poohed but actually English food made southern Chinese cooking very different and in some ways very interesting. People in Hong Kong are very proud of their local interpretations or hybrid dishes. A lot of that ended up coming to the United States because much of the immigration is Hong Kong driven, especially after the first 20 years after the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was lifted. The first people to come were from Hong Kong and Taiwan because mainland China had an exit ban on outward immigration. And these people came from special spaces where what they’re cooking is cuisines that have been marinating in influences from the outside world.
If you go back in Chinese history, for example to the Tang Dynasty, almost 15% of any major city in the north would have been foreign - reportedly hundreds of thousands of Arabs and Persians were living there. Chinese cuisine has always been marinating with foreign influences. I think that’s what makes it such a great cuisine: there’s so much range and possibility. Chinese cooks are like our mothers! They didn’t think about whether this is Chinese or not. They just thought about whether it worked for them.
So that openness is something I want to bring to the conversation on authenticity, where so much of the conversations are about ‘this is not right’, ‘it’s distorted’, ‘it’s a mongrel food’ - which I think is a highly racialised term but often applied to Chinese food in the West.
I’ve not heard that word used to describe Chinese food.
It’s horrible. It’s the kind of thing that you would hear in America, of course. But this idea that we need pure Chinese food to represent our culture missed the point, which is that the food has always adapted when it travels. Look at Chinese American chop suey - British Chinese have a history of it too. It’s part of this larger journey and history of exchange.
Who are those gatekeepers of authenticity?
Yelp reviews, online forums. The history of Chinese food in some extent feeds off of that narrative. Like restaurant reviews. One thing I’ve seen when we talk about the ‘new age’ of Chinese cuisine, starting in the 60s is they often talk about Cecilia Chiang, who had the famous restaurant, the Mandarin and how she taught American real Chinese food as opposed to chop suey.
I have an article on chop suey, it’s an interesting dish - there’s actually a version of it in Taiwan. There’s a dish today still in the north of China called yáng zá suì / 羊杂碎, which means ‘lamb chop suey’. I mean, has it changed? Of course it has - it’s been 130 years.
Are you interested in the way Chinese cuisines are being explored and expressed in different public and private space? There’s the restaurant space, which has all the commercial pressures of bricks-and-mortar market demands, then there’s private home cooking, which is obviously being expressed or performed through public digital and social media. Then I see this third space of pop-up chefs, small makers, that are a bit more fluid and flexible, that kind of thing. Have you observed how they’re all having a conversation on authenticity?
These are integrated spaces, right? In part because social media is very powerful in the food industry. You make a mistake and Instagram blows up. These spaces are definitely in conversation with each other, like with that whole Gordon Ramsay debacle.
I’m also interested in how diaspora communities incorporate new ingredients and how those interpretations return to Asia. It’s something I thought was really recent since the 80s, but of course that’s not the case. If you go back to my grandfather’s generation he brought back durian, like all the overseas Chinese that returned from Southeast Asia. It’s a common theme that’s been happening since the 19th century. One of the things I didn't realise is that when Chinese men came to work in the New World, many of them wanted to go back eventually once they had enough money. And sometimes they would not go back, but they'd go back and visit because they weren’t allowed to bring their wives, or didn’t have enough money to do so. They’d spend a few months catching up with the kids that they didn’t raise, or even getting married because the US law prohibited people - the “Mongol race” - from marrying whites, so if they wanted any kind of progeny they’d have to find a local wife. And then some people just left, especially after the Anti-Exclusion Act, returning by the tens of thousands. That happened in Mexico as well.
So what we discover is that some of these people were working as domestics in private homes and they brought food, like ketchup, mayonnaise salads, back with them to Asia. And in many ways I suspect that that's one the inspirations for these Hong Kong style diners and the foods that you find because there are American dishes, like spaghetti, not just British, like British ‘curries’. In fact, if you go to Hong Kong, there are these Chinese-American restaurants. So that’s something that is very interesting to me, thinking about the journey back, and sometimes back again. But it's an ongoing process - the diaspora moves back and forth. People don’t stay put and recipes are the same.
I think of that dialogue as almost taking place in suitcases that we load up every time we go back home, with friends and family requesting certain items and it’s all sort of under the radar.
You know, people are putting YouTube videos up like ‘how to make Chinese American crab rangoon’ or ‘how to make General Tso’s chicken’, and then a big chef will take it up. Something I’m exploring in the last part of my book is the way that happens. It’s not that they’re like, ‘oh there’s America and the food is icky. It’s more like, what are they doing there?’ When you go to Beijing and Shanghai, there are all these Californian salad and juice bars, and people tell me they can’t get decent granola. I’m like, why the hell would you want that?
I had a friend who wanted to open a pilates studio. After she finished college her father was like, I sent you to Canada, so you can open a Pilates studio?! But one of the things I love about Chinese culture is that there’s endless curiosity and openness. People are adventurous with their palates. They’re not orthodox about it. Americans can be this way, but not the Chinese.
Sometimes you hear this contrary opinion about the homogenisation of global culture, like the same coffee shop aesthetics that pop up all over the world, but it feels far from homogenised in China… what do you think?
No, no! The Chinese take things in their own way. They take it and run with it. Like the pork floss bun, the durian cake, the ice cream flavours… I don’t worry about homogenisation.
The other day I saw a century egg cheesecake in Penang. I was like, no. Even I would not eat that.
15 years ago I was sitting at a Shanghai restaurant, and they had these baozi and they put whipped cream in them. It’s this fiddling around with complete lack of conservatism about Chinese food that I really appreciate. It’s not standardised like in other countries like Italy and France, where there’s more pressure. I’m not saying there’s no innovation there, but there are establishments that look at this stuff a bit more carefully. In China the kitchen is the Wild West - the kitchen is the freest place in the world.
And yet it’s still catering to a capitalist model because if the diners don’t like it, it’s dead in the water. It has to taste good - that’s the ultimate criteria!
Are there any restaurants in the States that you think are doing interesting takes on Chinese cuisine?
I’m going to be in California next week. I want to go back to Yank Sing, which is a very well regarded Hong Kong style dim sum place with a James Beard award. I hear they put crab rangoon on the menu 10 years ago and now they’re doing a twist on it, like a cream cheese wonton with shrimp and curry powder in a nod to that Hong Kong style diner. Basically a riff on an American riff of the wonton.
There are a lot of American Chinese dishes that are also very foreign to us in the UK.
How’s your chop suey? I’m curious because I had it when I was a kid there in the 90s.
I’m not sure if it’s still on British Chinese takeaway menus. Well, I live in London which has some of the most amazing, high end Chinese restaurants in the world. But probably if you lived in a provincial part of the UK, it would be on the takeaway menu.
But yesterday I had conversation a with a guy who works in the Chinese catering trade. He was saying how there are 8,000 Chinese restaurants in the UK, of which 6,000 are takeaway restaurants. And that chunk is dying out really fast because the chefs are closing down shop and don’t want to pass it onto their kids. His theory was it’s going to be very damaging to the reputation of Chinese cuisine as we understand it, because there’s no new talent. This is outside of London, of course. Those shops would then just be bought up and turned into something else.
Well, people have been predicting the end for a while but one development that I’m excited about - and I know some people have misgivings - is that if you go to a Chinese kitchen in the United States, it’s the same thing - the kids are no longer working there. But increasingly, people from Central American Mexico are there who’ve been working in Asian cuisine for some time. That’s why you get these wonderful bulgogi burritos.
I think this is going to complicate the conversation about authenticity since this is not a dominant group appropriating the food of others. Also Mexican cooks are these enormously talented, hard working chefs who are going to be changing the Chinese food scene. I’m not just saying it because my husband’s from Mexico, but I’m more attuned to it! There will be people who say ‘they’re not doing it right, we’re losing something’, but things move on, things change. Who knows what we’re going to get next.
What’s your hot take on cultural appropriation?
It’s still being discussed around Chinese cuisines. I’d like to change the way we talk about it. For me, the real issue is whether we can make sure that everyone gets a fair share, because a lot of the time the controversies about appropriation are about larger things that are harder to fix. It’s not about poor Stephanie Izard making the mint bulgogi, it’s about the fact that a lot of Asian American or British Asian cooks feel like they’re invisible and don’t have any opportunities.
I’m also more concerned about the way that restaurant workers are treated and how they have a complete lack of safety net, especially in states that don’t have universal health care. These people really suffered during the pandemic and they’re often working for below minimum wage. This is all connected to race, citizenship, class. And there’s a lot of pent up issues on this topic. To deal with appropriation you have to deal with the bigger issue of inequality in society, those superstructures.