Introduction
When people define themselves as “third-culture” kids, they’re usually referring to their experience as the children of immigrants or expats—those of us who grew up both in the culture of their parents’ country (in my case, Hong Kong) and the culture of the adopted country (US and Canada). As a third-culture kid, I grew up neither fully here nor there—I didn’t feel completely accepted as American or Chinese. Personally, I see “third culture” as being something that is inclusive and full of possibility. It has had a huge influence on art, literature, fashion, and design, and I would argue that it can also apply to food. I would describe my culinary style as American Chinese, or Third-Culture Chinese, and really what does that mean but to celebrate my own expression of cultural diversity where I live now? The American Culinary Renaissance that we saw in the 2010s brought a great affirmation of many countries’ diversity to what would be called New American restaurants. It was just the American acceptance of the ingredients of many of its cultural communities in one place (usually a place with lots of Edison bulbs). My third-cultural Chinese and New American Chinese food brings that mentality into the base of cooking that I know. It’s that same celebration of diversity in the food I taught myself to make and the food that I love.
I’m far from the first person to discuss this idea of third culture, although I wasn’t aware of anyone applying the term to food and cooking when I started doing so. When I began posting TikTok videos a couple of years ago that dealt with the topic and how it influenced the way I cooked and thought about food, I noticed that sharing that part of myself really resonated with people. One comment on a video I posted for a pasta dish seasoned with traditional Chinese condiments sticks out in particular: “This felt like watching my Italian mom and Chinese dad conceive me.” And while the comment itself was a lesson in how very overfamiliar people are willing to get online, it showed me that many people can relate to this notion of expressing ourselves through food in a way that not only reflects our complicated identities but also affirms them. These were topics I sort of innately understood for myself, but it wasn’t until I started getting those kinds of comments on social media that I realized many people wanted a name to assign to those feelings and to legitimize them. If you’re gonna be a metaphor, you might as well be a delicious one.
Nostalgia really does so much in shaping our understanding of what good food is and in some sense what our cultural foundations are. When I think of the cuisine I grew up with I think of the crispy panfried noodles we ate at the family-owned Chinese restaurant at the local strip mall in Toronto (the one with the arcade game I got to play when I finished my food), or the hearty Hong Kong borscht I ate after school in Hong Kong. There were grilled cheese sandwiches served with canned cream of chicken soup, crispy Shanghainese pork chops, macaroni casserole with flecks of charred broccoli, stir-fried spaghetti with hot dogs and tomatoes, gently steamed green vegetables laced with garlic, Spam-and-egg sandwiches, steak with cream of mushroom sauce and a side of rice, and extra-crunchy chicken wings, marinated in savory fish sauce and white pepper and lightly tossed in baking soda before frying, so the skin crackled when it hit the hot oil and shattered when you bit into it.
These foods might not resemble the expected definition of “Chinese food” to some people. Or what people may eat in a Hong Kong household. And while I might not be able to express all the intricacies of my identity and culture in words, I can do my best to cook you a dish that captures my story—and it’s just as much cream of chicken soup with grilled cheese as it is congee.
As long as I’ve been cooking professionally, I’ve been on a path to deepen my relationship with Chinese food. Not only to learn more about certain techniques and methods but also to really expand the notions of what it can be. The food I make at my pop-ups and on new media (and now with this book, traditional media . . . la-di-da, look at me) evokes nostalgia, inspires me, and allows me to reconnect with ingredients I grew up with but never fully appreciated. And for all I have learned about Chinese cookery, I will always feel like a student. The cuisine is so immensely vast and varied that there’s always more to learn. China might be a single country, but saying you want to master Chinese cuisine is closer to saying you want to master European cuisine rather than that of one of the countries in Europe. I used food as a means to explore my own identity, only to realize that there was more to it than I initially thought. Therapy would have been a more efficient way of going about this, but therapy doesn’t come with fries.
One important thing to keep in mind: Chinese cooking is not a monolith. The dishes I grew up with and the way I prepare them are going to be very different from the dishes and cooking styles familiar to other Chinese people, especially since a lot of the time I’m just cooking with nothing more than my childhood memory to guide me. This is the only time you’re going to hear this kind of disclaimer from me—I’m not trying to be authentic to anyone but myself here.
When you consider how broad the Chinese food experience can be, you start to see that the techniques of Chinese cooking are a good lens through which to look at other cultures, and finding connections and illustrating similarities in cultural foods are what I love doing. Once you free yourself from the strict dogma of “traditional cuisine,” you’ll become excited by new recipes instead of being intimidated by trying to perfect them, and you’ll find inspiration in unexpected places.
One example is an American Chinese dish that’s beloved here in Michigan, where I live now: almond boneless chicken. It’s battered and fried chicken cut into thick slices, laid over a bed of iceberg lettuce, and topped with a mild brown gravy, toasted almonds, and a sprinkling of scallions. It’s a local icon, and despite being very old-school, some newer restaurants will take a stab at their own interpretations of it.
While no one can pinpoint exactly where the dish originated, the fact that on older menus it’s sometimes called war su gai—a Cantonese name that means roughly “wok-seared chicken”—might offer a clue. It’s likely that the dish has its roots in Taishan, a region of Southeast China where many of the first Chinese Americans came from, and that, over time, it was adapted to white American tastes (the chicken deep-fried rather than stir-fried and the toasted almonds added).
Almond boneless chicken evolved in a similar way to other American Chinese dishes such as chow mein and orange chicken and, more broadly, Chinese immigrant cooking around the world: Take a traditional Chinese dish, adapt it with new ingredients for new tastes, and sell it to non-Chinese consumers. Every wave of Chinese immigrants brought their own regional influences, resulting in dishes such as kung pao chicken from Szechuan and General Tso’s from Taiwan. The most familiar examples are staples like beef and broccoli, cashew chicken, sweet-and-sour pork, and crab rangoon. But this Chinese culinary inventiveness wasn’t limited to the United States. It’s in Peru. India. Australia. Each immigrant community invented new takes on traditional Chinese dishes that reflected their third-culture experience—taking a beloved dish from home and re-creating it based on available ingredients. It could be something as simple as fried rice made with Mexican chorizo or a stuffed scallion pancake seasoned with Malaysian curry spices. It’s food that’s not limited by physical borders or meaningless rules of authenticity. It’s resourceful, it’s inventive, and it’s in line with the way so many Americans cook in our homes now.
So why is “fusion” a dirty word in culinary circles? In the early 1980s, Wolfgang Puck started fusing Asian flavors with French and Californian cuisines at his LA restaurant Chinois on Main, and while his trailblazing work was thoughtful, creative, and playful, soon every nightclub with a kitchen hopped on the fusion train and smothered everything from wings to pizza rolls in teriyaki sauce and spicy mayo. The result, thirty-plus years later, is that nobody wants their food labeled “fusion”—which is funny, because that’s what most American chefs cook, myself included. At the end of the day, my cooking is a kind of fusion. And if I admit it, if we all admit it, maybe we can make it less of a dirty word than it used to be.
This new fusion that I’m referring to as “third culture” takes a more thoughtful approach to the genre. It was so apparent back when it was an eighties fad that it mostly comprised Western chefs slapping on an “exotic” ingredient without any real care for whether it worked. It was a one-sided exercise really meant to be enjoyed by one community. Third culture embraces each side as equal, drawing from a lived experience that is immersed in both or multiple cultures, once again taking the mentality of the American culinary renaissance that came around in the 2010s and granting the rest of us the ability to take part in it. Because what was that food anyway but white American chefs realizing they could take part in the diversity of the communities around them? What’s stopping us from doing the same?
Copyright © 2023 by Jon Kung. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
