P.S. I finally also created a dedicated page on my website to organize all my research findings. So if you want to dig further, you can check that out above!

The Preservation Paradox

Singapore’s Hawker Centres as a Case Study in Cultural Food Policy

I first visited Singapore in 2015 and immediately fell in love with its hawker centres. I’d never seen anything quite like them. Unlike the shopping mall food courts I’d grown up with in the U.S., filled with chains like Auntie Anne’s, hawker centres are typically made up of independently owned, often family-run, stalls offering prepared foods from noodles and flatbreads to chewy pancakes and fresh soymilk.

Yet they are all housed in permanent, open-air structures rather than parked streetside like the vendors I’d eaten at across Asia. But it wasn’t just the rows of good food that drew me to hawker centres, but the clear level of state investment, oversight, and sustained attention to this style of public dining. As far as I have experienced, such depth of investment in a public dining infrastructure is unprecedented anywhere in the world.

I spent that first trip bouncing from centre to centre, eating with both my eyes and stomach. From well-known favorites like poached chicken rice and nasi lemak (coconut rice, typically served with fried chicken and pickles) to lesser-known dishes like lor mee (a noodle dish in sticky beef gravy) and mua chee (a sweet and savory soft mochi), every meal held the excitement of unwrapping gifts on Christmas morning. I still remember eating a bowl of handmade fishball noodles at Hong Lim Hawker Centre at 7:00am, slightly feral from being jetlagged and awake since 3:00am, thinking: Mark my words, I’ll be back soon.

And I was. I returned in 2023 as a Fulbright Scholar and National Geographic Explorer, supported by a fellowship to research hawker centres with the National University of Singapore. After two years of fieldwork, which included semi-structured interviews with 21 hawkers across Singapore, I found that the city-state has been actively intervening in its hawker trade since before the country’s formal existence. The government deliberately took on the task of first registering and licensing its roving street vendors, then relocating them into permanent centres in the 1960s and 1970s to improve regulatory, health, and sanitation measures. Yet, I still couldn’t find the answer to one lingering question:

If hawker centres were built to both feed and offer a means of livelihood for Singapore’s working class, whose interests do today’s preservation policies actually serve?

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Form vs. Function: A Question About Policy Priorities

In 2020, Singapore became the first country to earn UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage recognition, specifically for its hawker culture. It was an important milestone, serving as a formal acknowledgment that these spaces operate as community and social infrastructure, not just public dining halls. However, the formal recognition did not fundamentally address the priorities for preserving what the Singaporean government repeatedly calls “hawker culture.”

Today, the median age of a Singaporean hawker is 59. Stall after stall is shutting down due to persistent issues such as high costs and younger generations’ lack of interest in taking over their family businesses. In today’s economy, being a hawker no longer pays like it once did. Nearly every hawker I spoke with expressed some version of the same frustration: being celebrated as a cultural steward while struggling with the necessary labor flexibility and financial protections that would make the trade more sustainable and lucrative as a career. In fact, many anticipated that a near-total collapse of the hawker industry would occur within ten years.

I find it useful to evaluate these hawker centres’ looming collapse through two lenses: “form” and “function.” Form is what we can see, touch, and smell—open-air layout, communal tables, compact stalls, and a particular ambiance at each centre that gives it a special place in locals’ hearts (and stomachs). Function is what the hawker centre does—providing affordable meals, enabling accessible entrepreneurship, and serving as a third space that is free to enter and conveniently located for all between home and work.

Yet, these two lenses are not always compatible, and policies that try to serve both without prioritizing either often end up producing contradictions. For example, in an effort to keep hawker prices low enough to serve as what one official famously called “good quality meals at almost Third World prices,” hawkers have struggled to offset rising rents, ingredient costs, and fees for cleaning, digital payments, and delivery platforms.

As the government continues to build new centres and renovate older ones, streamlining operations such as stall buildouts and centralized dishwashing can mean trading in some of the unique aesthetics of each business that contributed to the sense of character for each location. The result is a preservation effort that, in trying to protect everything, risks losing what made these centres Intangible Cultural Heritage in the first place.

Read the full piece at NYC Food Policy

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Memes of the Week

Personal Stuff from This Week

Listening: Nothing too exciting, just my routine fencing playlist

Watching: About to start Pursuit of Jade to understand what everyone is talking about!

Reading: Saving Time by Jenny O’Dell

Eating: All the kaya jam from Chin Mee Chin

Drinking: Tisane made from chuan bei and snow chrysanthemum flowers that I purchased in Jiu Zhai Gou!

Nice thing I did for myself: Bought a fan and a standing shelf on Carousell so I can keep making my apartment cozy and comfortable!

I’ve wanted to write something, I really have. I have many, many uncompleted tasks in my Notion To-Do list to prove it. And yet, I’ve also felt somehow both undeserving and fearful of unobstructed time to just…create. Between a divorce, several friend breakups, a crushing PhD rejection, a psychotic and controlling roommate situation that caused me to move not once, twice, but three times in the span of three months, and (on a happier note) a new relationship, I’ve been struggling to figure out who I am again.

Perhaps my ba zi chart is right; it tells me my weakest element is Earth, which “suggests that translating inner richness into external expression takes more conscious effort for you than for others.”

In that case, I’m hoping that returning to China next month (to Chengdu) finally allows me to complete a piece about diasporic identity that I’ve been ruminating on since my November trip to Shanghai, titled “I went back to where I came from.” It’s in part inspired by this:

As alluded to by the cheeky “cut fruit” callout, the idea of the shared culture that binds us in the diaspora is in many ways a fantasy, a projection of yesteryear, a nostalgia that reinvents itself with each generation. My mother’s image of China is still one in its Tiananmen Square era, a stark contrast to the “free” speech in America. To her, it’s unfathomable for Shanghai to be hosting a natural wine festival (which I attended last year), full of young people drinking and openly discussing politics. For my peers and me, the memes of cut fruit and op-eds on lunchbox moments (of which I am also guilty!) are endless. Certainly, these characterizations are true of our counterparts in the homeland, too?

Both of our imagined Chinas hold certain realities, of course, but they are also obvious in their falsehoods and generalizations. Interacting with Chinese people on the ground last year reminded me that it would serve us all well to remember that the diaspora is its own context — and the idea we have of “our” culture rarely moves in lockstep with its originators.

Living in Singapore these last few years has also added curiosity and color to my understanding of diaspora. There is, on the one hand, a widespread clinging to old-time practices, such as (what feels like) near-constant burning of joss paper. Adhering to such traditions is often described as an important way for multi-generational Chinese Singaporeans to connect with their ethnic heritage — even if Chinese cities themselves have moved to ban the practice. This same dated “Chineseness” is also often used to justify what are locally specific behaviors. (See: religious-based homophobia, which is particularly obvious to me as I move through public spaces with my girlfriend.)

However, there’s also the complicating factor of Singapore’s immigration and naturalization policies, which shape how “Chinese” identity is regarded. While the earlier wave of poorer Chinese immigrants to Singapore created a sharp class division in which local Chinese Singaporeans sought to distance themselves from “Chinamen” (a term frequently used here, much to my American shock) — including denouncing the features of “China face” — the new flood of ultra-wealthy Chinese nationals able to secure citizenship through large-scale business investments has shifted both financial and social capital towards the whims of China in increasingly unsubtle ways.

I have much, much more to say on this topic, including the major ripple effects of Chinese money flooding the food and beverage scene, but I need some more time before those thoughts are fully coherent. In the meantime, I’m sharing a new piece I wrote for my friends at Best Food Blog, a new digital food media outlet. An exclusive, slightly longer-form introduction of my piece is below, and the full piece is linked at the end for those who want to keep on reading.

Thanks to everyone for staying patient with me. I appreciate you all.

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Optimization Culture is Eating Us Alive

“Welcome back, what do you remember me saying?”

I’m in the basement unit of a pre-war apartment building, elbows on thighs, hunched over with my bangs in my eyes. I remember getting off the F train at 2nd Ave, buzzing in to the unit, adjusting myself on a couch. Did I close my eyes before or after the hypnotherapist started speaking? Did I sway my body as she asked? Did I even tell her what I came here to fix?

I’ve no idea, so I shake my head. Her mouth twitches, but I’m not sure if it’s in a good or bad way. “Are there any words that you think you recall?”

I stare blankly into a corner. “Um, something about rain?” I am guessing, and she can tell. Somehow, an hour has passed since I sat down, and she began to garble. I remember her monotone voice. I remember not registering any of those noises as intelligible. I remember thinking, “How could this possibly stop my binge eating?” And then…

The hypnotherapist unlocks her phone and registers my payment with a slight hum. “Thank you,” she says, standing up from her chair to usher me out. “You should feel better now. Please do come back if you need a refresher.”

$250 gone and not even a word to show for it. As I walk back to the subway, I’m unsure whether to berate myself for yet another impulsive buy or celebrate the supposed end to a year-plus of disordered eating. I had already optimized myself into a calorie deficit — and now I was attempting to optimize my way into a cure.

Optimization culture today tells women there is one right way to be: thin, pretty, productive, cheerful. And I am far from the only one to sacrifice my health and well-being for that elusive ideal. The socially sanctioned male archetype, on the other hand — big, strong, rich, loud —is typically the result of addition rather than reduction. Most recently, “looksmaxxing,” a term originating in the incel community, has soared in popularity on platforms like TikTok.

Either way, the language of optimization is buried deep within our psyches — and consequently, everywhere in the food system. It shapes how we eat, how we work, and how entire economies are designed. What we live with today is a cumulative butterfly effect of various generally misguided attempts to optimize human life itself.

All of this was centuries in the making. In the 1830s, European chemists isolated and identified the compound we now call protein. Soon after, German scientist Justus von Liebig erroneously concluded that protein was the only nutritious element in food, making its availability and intake a major concern – especially for the likes of factory owners and military leaders who relied on legions of “energetic, flesh-fed men,” writes Nicola Twiley, in Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves.

Though we now know food is full of good stuff beyond protein, the ambient pressure to eat more of it is stronger than ever. As one TikTok video jokingly proclaimed, “I’ve faced more peer pressure to eat protein in adulthood than I did to take drugs as a teen.” With protein intake having morphed into the thing to optimize, the nuance of it quickly fades away.

Optimization isn’t concerned with whether the protein is ethically sourced, if the labor conditions creating it were fair, or how much is actually necessary for your particular body type and lifestyle. It forgets that a protein-rich diet needs to be complemented with fiber, that different sources are not always interchangeable, and heavily fucked-with products — like protein popcorn or plant-based “meats” — still have the same issues as other ultra-processed foods.

What optimization is concerned with, as psychotherapist Eleanor Tan told me, is the seductive promise that “the more I do and the better I do it, the happier, healthier, and more successful I will be.” Optimization culture is fundamentally an “overcompensating coping mechanism for stress, depression, anxiety, existential dread, or low self-worth.”

Read the full piece on Best Food Blog

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Memes from the Last Few Months

Personal Stuff from This Week

Listening: Lots of Lady Gaga, my girlfriend’s favorite artist

Watching: Lesbian Space Princess

Reading: Against Technoableism by Ashley Shew

Eating: Hollz Kitchen — our fencing club just put in a big order for our Coach’s 60th birthday!

Drinking: Amphora Project — founder Bao has excellent taste!

Nice thing I did for myself: I finally got my Eat Cheese and Sin tattoo! (IYKYK)

I call it my personal PSA — public silent announcement. I was deeply insecure about my bisexuality, so I was searching for something queer-coded to soothe myself. TikTok came to my rescue. Within a matter of weeks, I leveled up from fake septum rings off Amazon to a gloved professional jabbing me with a thick needle.

And it worked. Queer women got the message. But the septum also marked something else I hadn’t considered: a visible deviation from the standard, male-approved preferences for femininity.

Very quickly, a new type of commentary emerged through my social channels. Comments like “Stopped taking u serious after seeing ur septum” and “Who’s this girl with a septum to tell me anything” (I’m paraphrasing; I typically block these people, so I can’t quote word for word) quickly outpaced their racist, sexist, or ageist predecessors.

Now, I’m no stranger to hate mail. When my piece on cultural appropriation for Eater* went live in October of 2020, I was lambasted so hard that I had to set all my socials private for a few days, turn off Twitter notifications, and deliberate if some of the death threats I received were credible. But even at that terrible hour, the vitriol directed at me rarely bothered with my specific features (unless you classify “dumb bitch” as a custom insult just for me).

In conforming to the dominant, socialized standards of beauty — a conventionally attractive enough cis woman with small facial features, long hair, and feminine clothing — I had inadvertently been shielded from a particular type of dismissal. Maybe what I said (or wrote) was threatening, but how I looked? Not so much.

But now, something had changed.

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As I read this new slew of comments, I began to feel a tension I’d never needed to confront before. Was I doing myself and my work a disservice by looking the way they expected of a “feminist” or “social justice warrior”? There is no shortage of men online who feel utterly confident in invalidating the carefully-honed points of women by saying, more or less, your arguments stem from the fact you “look like that.”

“That” is clearly not a physical trait, as I’ve seen this comment hurled at every type of woman. It’s a thought-terminating cliche that posits the only women rising against sexism, misogyny, and patriarchal norms are those who are not considered attractive (and salty about it). And why should we listen to these bitter hags? It’s brilliant circular logic: any woman who challenges the status quo deserves to have their little personal vendetta dismissed. It’s not a far cry from “crazy,” which comedian Tina Fey defines perfectly in her memoir, Bossypants:

“Crazy is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore.”

If I wanted my points considered, need I continue to make myself socially legible as “pretty” — thereby proving I was and am benefiting from the patriarchy? Should I wear eyeliner and use the soft lighting? Study my angles and put on an appropriate top based on color theory? Once I performed femininity to their standards, would it be possible to slip past their defenses and open their ears?

Should I...weaponize my compliance with patriarchal beauty standards to fight patriarchy?

It was hardly the first time I’d noticed myself performing femininity for an audience I couldn’t even see. A year or so prior, I’d begun thrifting clothes. Inside those often chaotic stores, faced with unending styles to choose from, with no one policing who was shopping in which gendered section, and no leggy models to sell me on via aspiration, I had to make decisions about what I wanted. Was I the type of gal who would rock a mesh crop over a collared shirt? Or was I meant for baggy black tunics with Neo-like sunnies? (I’ve since learned the answer is neither.) The question was not a simple, What do I like? But rather, What do I allow myself to like?

What I learned to like, who I learned to be, was whatever kept me safe. That was the first rule I learned from my mom about existing as a woman in the world: Safety is an ongoing negotiation, and every single thing you do is up for discussion. Better to feel small than be dead.

But my septum piercing was different. I hadn’t carefully weighed its normative pros and cons, filtered it through a calculus of social acceptability. It was impulsive, desperate. I was thinking about the desires I suppressed my whole life, the community I longed for. For once, I had centered myself.

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Roxane Gay writes that “tensions arise when others transgress boundaries of space we have not fully realized and have not voiced, but are created simply by existing in a social society.” In putting some titanium through my nose, I had inadvertently transgressed. I had made visible to a certain subset of people that I was taking up space they did not allocate to me.

The backlash, I realized, was not just men feeling that their views were being challenged, but that their comfort was no longer the only and key consideration of others. The assumption that their needs came first had become so normalized, so second nature, that women choosing to look at themselves through their own eyes seemed like oppression. In something as seemingly minor as a septum ring, the whole facade came crashing down: not only were they now conscious of their preferences being far from universal, they were hearing that those preferences had no right to have been prioritized in the first place. That, I fear, must have been ego-crushing.

Things escalated further after I cut my hair. Very short.

It was as if I’d donned an invisibility cloak; I could feel eyes skim across me without further acknowledgment. I was seen, but not evaluated. Even if I was still subject to the social conventions of being a woman, my short hair served as a PSA that I didn’t exist for public scrutiny. In experiencing this strange new freedom — or was it exclusion? — I could now retrospectively understand my femme-coded looks had been, unbeknownst to me, invitations for judgment.

The performance of gender is not just about whose desires matter, but also about who has the authority to be the judge and jury. Centuries of men controlling every aspect of women’s lives had turned presenting femininely into an act of becoming public property, opening oneself up for the discourse and assessment of all.

When I was still agonizing over the idea of compliance for the greater good, my friend Soleil Ho had warned me over a glass of wine, “It’s a trap, don’t fall for it.” They were right. Performing femininity in hopes of softening others to my message was not strategic nor subversive. If anything, I would be fueling the existing rationale that the merit of a woman’s thoughts is to be based on her appeal in another’s eyes.

With my hair so short, it was too late for eyeliner to curb the tide of comments online. “Ofc you look like that,” one person wrote on my TikTok. Another heartily replied in agreement: “All of them have crazy eyes, septum, chopped hair.”

Here was the confirmation I had both been dreading and expecting. When I first came home with a piercing, I thought what had changed was my looks. But I had it backwards. My looks had changed because I had changed. I had learned to like myself enough to trust in what I wanted. To disabuse myself of the notion that acceptance could offer me safety. To finally occupy the territory that unsolicited judgments had carved out of me.

Playing with femininity is a choice I can make on my own terms, not as a hedge against potential indictments of my value. Septum or not, short hair or not, makeup or none, doesn’t matter — what does is that I’m finally visible.

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*I’m happy to report this piece also earned me a Notable Mention in Best American Food Writing 2021.

Memes of the Week

Personal Stuff from This Week

Listening: EMDR Binaural Beats (thanks to my friend Christine for sharing!)

Watching: Foil fencing from the recent World Championships

Reading: The Shallows by Nicholas Carr

Eating: Sardine curry puffs, one of my favorite hawker snacks!

Drinking: Homemade cold-steeped fresh mint tisane

Nice thing I did for myself this week: I fell ill so I simply stayed in bed for a day, didn’t hold myself to the same levels of productivity, and didn’t feel bad about it!

I originally published this overview via the Institute of Culinary Education blog a few years back alongside a Reels/TikTok breakdown. I truly believe that becoming more comfortable with spice blending will take your cooking to the next level, so I’m republishing today, complete with PDF versions of the spice charts. Please enjoy!

There are hundreds upon hundreds of spices in the world, which can make them feel daunting to categorize effectively in your kitchen. Understanding how and where they fit in relationship with one another can be difficult: How do you describe cinnamon in relationship to, say, mustard seed? How do you know which spices to pair together? In what ratios? For what applications?

My method for the last few years has been through notes (hence the punny title of this post, heh heh). Specifically, tasting them and mentally shuffling spices into top, middle, or base notes. Much like the notes of a song, I think of spice notes as something that layers together to make the whole more than the sum of its parts.

Top notes are the aromas and flavors that will hit your nostrils and tastebuds first — they are typically very bright, juicy, occasionally tart — and stay at the top of your senses while eating the entire dish. They balance out hefty meats, like braised lamb, and also complement heartier root vegetables. I find top notes are often underutilized for their ability to contrast rich and fatty flavors and textures. In addition to utilizing vinegars and citrus, consider spices like sumac, coriander seed, and pink peppercorn. These can be just as zingy while adding flavor to a spice rub or marinade.  

Middle notes are those that contain a hint of brightness but mellow out to something slightly more neutral and warm. Because they provide structure and balance to the dish, almost every dish contains at least one spice in this category (often in the form of black pepper), if not several. Middle notes shine especially well when accented with top and base notes, which can come either in spice form or a different type of ingredient (e.g., ginger or chocolate).  

Base notes are often the flavor that lingers in your mouth as you finish a dish. They smell and taste warm, toasty, hefty, sometimes smoky, and sit heavier on the tongue. They build up the foundation of the dish, round out the flavor of the main ingredient, and prop up the top and middle notes. While the American palate seems to enjoy piling a lot of base notes together (see: pumpkin spice mix), I personally think it’s very important to pair base notes with lighter accents to avoid a dish tasting “damp,” thick, or cloying.  

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My favorite part of using this system of notes for spices is how accessible it is to then confidently make spice blends. If you’re still getting familiar with combining spices, I recommend trying out two ratios as a starting point. A 1:1:1 ratio of top, middle, and base spices will provide a nicely balanced and versatile blend for most applications, while a 3:2:1 or 1:2:3 ratio allows you to accentuate top or base notes for a specific dish. Once you’ve created some blends and understand how to suit your taste, experiment with different ratios to find what you like! You can also use these ratios to even out your spice collection the next time you go shopping: Take stock of what category your current spices are clustered in and try to add spices of different notes to complement them.

I encourage buying spices whole when possible and grinding them in small quantities for spice mixes, as pre-ground spices tend to go stale much faster. All spices (ground and whole) lose potency over time and do expire, so make sure to refresh your spices roughly once a year if you don’t use them frequently.

To get started with this system of categorizing spices, please refer to the two charts provided. They are not exhaustive but will give you a good set of all notes so you can begin to mentally chart spices for yourself. Remember that this is an absolutely subjective exercise, and you may also categorize spices differently from mine. That’s okay, and in fact, great – go forth, customize, and maximize everything from your spices!

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Chef Jenny Dorsey Spice Notes Chart

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Just one meme this week, because I am tired

Personal Stuff from This Week

Listening: Carpetman

Watching: No Other Land

Reading: Travels in Hyperreality by Umberto Eco

Eating: Kampong chicken soup with old cucumber, a hawker favorite I now make at home

Drinking: Homemade soymilk with black sesame

Nice thing I did for myself this week: I thrifted a cute dragonfruit plushie as part of a Cloop swap, simply because I like plushies and it’s okay to have things that don’t serve a bigger purpose in the house

In 2014, the year of our first drive, I would describe our interactions as quietly hostile. In one notable incident, we pulled into a gas station in rural Iowa to take shelter from a thunderstorm, only to be greeted by three siblings glowering at us with their firearm propped up on the cashier counter. We turned tail and sat in the car until the rain stopped.

By 2017, our third drive, Trump had taken office, and things had become outwardly hostile. I was not allowed outside the car unless I really had to use the restroom, in which case my partner would stand guard nearby. Strangers stared openly and walked too close. “Don’t,” my partner would mutter under his breath when he could sense me tensing up and becoming combative. So I exploded in the car instead, at the injustice of having to make myself small, silent, and scared in the place I grew up.

This time, I went into the trip with my hackles raised and pepper spray ready. Knowing the bulk of the miles were in solidly red territory, I steeled myself for things to be even worse than I remembered. I expected a smugness in people’s eyes as they looked at me, maybe a taunting curl of their lips as they asked where I was coming in from — not from the area, right?

I was prepared for the vast emptiness of the landscape. The long stretches of highway flanked by cornfields, cylindrical then rectangular hay stacks, and industrial feedlots. Roadside fruit stands and magnificent rock formations that I would want to stop at to buy a watermelon and enjoy the view (but never did). The seemingly never-ending evangelical billboards begging you to find Jesus (the yearly ad spend of 83-For-Truth could probably feed a few cities), punctuated by ads for Little America and Fourth of July fireworks. Trump 2024 bumper stickers.

Indeed, many of my predictions were warranted. We did drive by plenty of Trump banners, including one that proclaimed, “Trump was right about everything!” But in many other ways I could not have predicted, the drive was a series of contradictions, bold challenges to the logic of America I had in my head.

In the loneliest and smallest town we stopped in — Gothenburg, Nebraska, population 3,398 — I ordered some (unexpectedly fire) Chinese American takeout from an auntie named Lisa. Her restaurant looked like a deserted house with an “Open” sign, replete with an overgrown garden outside and dusty photos inside, presumably of family members and their children. She told me she is the only Chinese person for miles. Been that way for decades. I asked her why she decided to stay here all alone. She answered because she felt safe. I had half a mind to ask her if she’d watched any news recently, because how “safe” can someone like her be this deep in Trump country? But then, what did I know of her life? I bit my tongue and thanked her for the meal instead.

Later that day, when we pulled into our hotel, tired and hungry, the front desk attendant fumbled repeatedly over my passport. As she held it upside down and attempted to flip to the photo page from the back, I stared at her openly, slack-jawed and judgmental. When she saw my face, she became even more flustered. “Sorry, sorry,” she apologized, “I’ve never seen one of these before.”

It was not my finest moment. I had been so prepared for micro (or macro) aggressions aimed at me, I’d forgotten how capable I was of doling them out myself. Just a few days prior in Lexington, KY, I was dining al fresco with my friend Sam Fore at her Sri Lankan restaurant when an older white woman approached her and asked for menu recommendations. I initially assumed it was because she knew Sam owned the place; turns out, it was just because Sam is brown. I had rolled my eyes and made several underhanded comments. And yet, just two states over, I would be on the other side of that equation.

Was this a reflection of how I’ve changed, now that I’m part of the ethnic majority in the country I reside in? I never before understood the sense of entitlement white people seemed to exhibit all around me growing up, walking into a space and demanding it operate the way they had played out in their heads. How affronted they were at minor inconveniences — not being given a fork immediately, needing the menu to be translated by the server, having only Styrofoam options for takeout. This is my country, their every action seemed to establish, you’re just living in it. I remember how I would internally bristle at this insinuation, not just because it felt unfair but because it felt true. This time back stateside, I wondered if I had learned to carry myself in the same way. If that front desk attendant felt my energy even from behind her thin-ply desk. Who are you, my silence asked, and what are you doing in my country?

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When we go on these trips, we always stay at La Quinta because it has the cheapest dog policy. (Typically $25 versus a whopping $125 at Hampton Inn.) If you’ve ever been to one, you know it’s not exactly a fancy, cosmopolitan hotel. And yet, a room is now $150 or more per night before the pet fee. I was flabbergasted when I saw the pricing, vaguely recalling that it had cost under $100 when we drove in 2022. My partner, who works in vacation rentals and follows the changes in travel lodging, advised me to pay attention to how many La Quintas and other chains in their category (e.g., Comfort Inn) have undergone renovations since our last visit. It was true — our drive was littered with their grey, angular attempts at chic hotel architecture. “Their original clientele can’t afford to travel anymore, so they’ve had to position themselves for slightly higher-end travelers and business travelers.”

Indeed, I saw far more worn, black briefcases tucked onto the handles of carry-on suitcases than couples and starter families on a domestic vacation. Who needs a U.S. passport then, if one can’t even travel to the next state over? But some things stayed the same — namely, the breakfast. Every day we woke to watery coffee (which I must admit, I oddly enjoy), the small fridge with definitively and only cow’s milk offerings, the waffle machine that always smelled burnt because someone could not follow instructions and overfilled the batter.

But no eggs.

A small sign informed me that biscuits and gravy would be offered in lieu of eggs — indefinitely. At the grocery store, I was greeted with barren shelves in the refrigerated section. UNFI, the country’s largest organic food distributor, was hacked earlier in the month and subsequently forced to shut down its entire network. According to an industry friend who uses them, there have been no updates for weeks, and no end is in sight. I silently debated with myself the most appropriate label for a country where even powdered eggs are unavailable for the masses.

While I was already aware of the skyrocketing cost of eggs, somehow I didn’t register that this would cause reverberating sticker shock in everything I ate. In Aberdeen, NC, I paid $15 for a cold hummus and vegetable sandwich — you know, the soggy kind found at the bottom of a bad catering order when HR remembers vegetarians exist. In Caldwell, ID, my quinoa salad with no toppings cost nearly $18 with tax and tip. I was astounded. Who in these areas could reasonably afford to eat in these establishments?

Apparently, not a whole lot. We were frequently one of maybe four or five people at any given place. The busiest location we dined at was probably Best Tacos y Burritos La Paz in Cheyenne, WY; it was one of our more affordable meals too, perhaps because it is also a bodega. In addition to a large group of locals loudly deciding what to order — “It’s my first time here, yeah, crazy, I live here though,” one of them repeatedly felt the need to announce — several teenagers came in to buy Jarritos and chips. When I attempted to order menudo (it was the weekend), the cook stared at me like I was speaking an alien language. Or perhaps just one of privilege, blissfully ignorant of the fact that most of the menudo-eating clientele were no longer around to patronize the shop. “No menudo,” she said, without explanation. Same for the lengua, tripa, and cabeza. She gestured to a short English menu behind her, updated with options like Cowboy Burrito. “Just this.”

Oregon was the first blue state of our trip, and I breathed a sigh of relief pulling into Portland. (Also Piggy’s new home.) But even there, a sense of quiet trepidation remained. It was Juneteenth when I took a morning spin class, surrounded by sweaty, fit women with color-matching Alo sets and Stanley tumblers. The instructor hyped us with low lights, loud music, and a “Who’s off work today??!”

Most of the room enthusiastically raised their hands and whooped.

“And who knows why they are off work today??!”

Arms faltered.

“Okay, well, I really need you all to look up why you’re off work today if you don’t know,” she continued, clearly taken aback by the shift in the room. “Even if you don’t consider yourself part of that community, okay? As a white person, I feel I need to say something.” The word “Juneteenth” was not uttered.

I had expected a lot of silence on the trip, but not this kind of silence. After crossing the country six times together, my partner and I had settled into an easy quiet in the car, only putting on an occasional podcast (What Now? and Philosophize This! were our picks this time) or music jam between our conversations. I know it sounds loony, but it’s genuinely nice only listening to the methodical hum of the engine and the rolling snores of a dog. But outside our car was a resoundingly different quality of silence, an emptiness of everything left unsaid.

I could only guess the reasons: maybe from fear and self-censorship, knowing that politics aren’t always worn visibly. Maybe from the hopelessness that seemed to exude from every empty parking lot or boarded-up restaurant, the fading memory of what America was supposed to be like. Sometimes, there was also a pointed silence, as if the locals wanted to prove my presence was no big deal to them. Look, it seemed to say, I’m not how you think I am.

All around me, “they,” the people I so often lumped together and trotted out to blame for destroying the country, shared in my confusion at what was happening to their home. I had never before felt that I had so much in common with Americans, yet felt so far removed from America. For maybe the first time, I felt like an immigrant. Not the “ABC” or American Born Chinese as I’m often called (even though I was technically born in China). Not the Chinese American with lots of opinions about the dynamics of being Asian in America. I felt like a stranger, visiting a home I no longer knew, trying to remember the person I no longer was. Perhaps this is how my parents felt when they first arrived in the U.S., stranded and longing for the home they had been so determined to leave.

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By the time I arrived back home to my parents’ house outside Seattle, WA, I was feeling decidedly not like myself. I had very little to say during dinner — although I did eat a very large helping of Rainier cherries — and preoccupied myself with getting my old, blind little dog Gwenevere ready for our post-meal walk.

The trip had filled me with confusion, but I didn’t know how to articulate it coherently to my parents as we strolled around their neighborhood, full of rabbits and cookie-cutter single-family homes. To them, America was an external place. A place that had been able to fulfill more than even their wildest dreams. Whatever becomes of it, they’ll have no regrets about coming here and making a life that has now enabled them to retire soon and travel the world. (Which they 100%, absolutely deserve.)

But I couldn’t share in their separation of being in America and being American. I can’t help wanting the country to be something else because I see myself as someone else. I missed my home, yet I was afraid of staying too long, lest I be forced to consider that my belief in America’s at least attempts to move towards progress and justice had been a lie for my entire lifetime. (According to Ray Dalio, the U.S. has been in decline since the 1980s.) What does my ongoing refusal to see the country clearly say about me? I’m not prepared to answer that — maybe because I am not yet able to see myself clearly, either.

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It’s been a while…a few memes to cry over

Personal Stuff from This Week

Listening: I’m in a podcast lull — please send me some recommendations!

Watching: All the John Wick series in preparation for seeing Ballerina in theaters

Reading: Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice by Martha C. Nussbaum

Eating: Back in Singapore and it feels so good! Just had great fish ball noodles at Hong Lim hawker centre. (See my whole Singapore list here.)

Drinking: TCM medicine…my inescapable daily routine

Nice thing I did for myself this week: I took a week plus to write this newsletter and didn’t criticize myself for taking so long. Because some things just need time.

I haven’t posted since May because I allowed myself to step back from maintaining a public-ish presence. I admitted to myself that healing is a full-time job, and I didn’t have the capacity to write a newsletter on top of doing my (actual) job and completing my book proposal (which is currently making its rounds on publisher desks). I hope you understand — I missed you all, but I had to put me first.

While fighting to heal wasn’t exactly my plan for 2024, something about moving across the world gave me the courage to finally recognize the extent of my past traumas and do something about it. Some parts of the journey I’ve been able to process publicly, like removing a tattoo I hated as a reclamation of my body or writing openly about that one creepy work incident as a small act of defiance against a mega-corporation. But for most of it, I haven’t yet found all the words.

In July, I restarted fencing after a 15-year hiatus to somatically digest the violence and pain of my teenage years, but I have struggled to explain to my (loving and supportive but worried) partner and friends why, by all accounts, I am so committed to torturing myself three times a week via a competitive sport primarily filled with teenagers.

“Is there any other way you can work through this?” one friend asks me gently after I recount going to my first fencing class, then having a panic attack while walking to the bus and taking my first private lesson, then crying uncontrollably afterward for two hours.

“No,” I respond, with zero explanation. I wasn’t withholding — I didn’t have one. All I knew was that I walked by a fencing salle in March and heard a voice deep inside: “Aren’t you tired of pretending to be okay? If you want to actually heal, you have to fence.”

I didn’t understand cPTSD then. I was unprepared for the depth or the breadth of my triggers, that any small thing in the present could bring back a cascade from the past. The smell of nylon, anti-bacterial cleaner, and sweat inside the fencing mask; the persistent, mid-tone beep of the scoring machine when a fencer is not plugged into the strip; the feeling of my foil as its tip strikes the leather of a coach’s jacket. I felt betrayed by how quickly these feelings I’d pushed down for nearly two decades suddenly resurfaced, all clamoring for my attention at once. I initially refused to admit it, but my everyday cognitive functioning was overwhelmed. It wasn’t until I paused nearly all my extracurricular activities and dedicated that time to learning about trauma and healing I began to make progress. (A major thank you to the many people who pointed me to What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo.)

The work of healing has not been rosy. Much of it has been hidden away indoors, mostly in bed. Days and weeks and months of journaling, therapy, sound baths, meditation, sobbing, screaming. In random intervals, I transformed into an absolute monster of the past, unable to sleep or find a path back home. I was fifteen, seventeen, nineteen again, hearing nothing but shame whispering to me: it is your fault, and you deserve to suffer.

But there have also been moments of pure wonder in between. For the first time, I was able to consider the possibility that I could live in a way where not everything felt like a looming threat. I learned vocabulary like gifted trauma, emotional contagion, and role-self, opening my eyes to collective experiences I’d long discounted as my problems manufactured by my inherent badness. I grappled with the unpleasant reality that I was replicating the violence and emotional immaturity displayed by my parents in my current relationship. I practiced — and failed, and tried again — the nervous system regulation, self-soothing, and behavioral change espoused by each book*. Slowly, achingly, I changed — because this was the start of the rest of my life.

So that is what I’ve been up to, and where I’m still headed into. Thank you for staying patient with me as I create at the rate that I am able. Being able to share all this here is a gift.

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*One book I found particularly powerful was Courage to Be Disliked, which is rooted in Adlerian psychology. Others I would recommend to those interested in trauma/healing are Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, Unlearning Shame, No Bad Parts, Taming Your Outer Child (with reservations), What It Takes to Heal, and All About Love.

The Politics of Food

On my birthday (November 8), I lectured on food politics at the National University of Singapore. It could be considered the extended (roughly 30-minute) version of my 8-minute mini-lecture at Harvard last year. I’ve included some excerpts below, and you can watch the entire thing at the link below. (Password: +J2@Y*JU)

Watch the lecture

“The real meat – pun intended – of my work is examining how the politics of food constructs our individual, social, and political identities, and how that goes on to impact our relationships and ultimately, our lives.

So how does food do this, exactly?

Number one. Food has long been a weapon to create “in” versus “out” groups.

Some of the most avid laws created by colonizers in the Americas were on what white settlers could or could not eat. Just consider this common saying in colonial Venezuela: “Cassava isn’t bread, and Indians aren’t people.” Food was no trite matter but an extension of one’s humanity.

For the Spanish in particular, they observed the Indigenous men as not having beards and subsequently it was believed that eating native foods would cause their men to also lose their beards, which were an important sign of masculinity and tied to one’s social standing. That’s why, to Christopher Columbus, ensuring a steady import of Spanish foods to the Americas was not just an issue of dietary preferences but of moral significance. In letters back to the Spanish crown, he promised that settlers would stop dying off in the New World once their food supply was stabilized. And when certain European foodstuffs like wheat and coffee were found to grow well in Hispaniola, this was interpreted as a divine sign that colonialism was approved of by the Gods.

These examples illustrate how food anchors the ways we make meaning of the world. When new settlers did not understand forces larger than themselves, the narratives they constructed to explain these problems away were decidedly hostile against those perceived as outside of their community.

Two, controlling the food supply is the ultimate mechanism for controlling people because food offers direct access to power.

In the Great Plains of the U.S., the American military and hired hunters were encouraged to kill every buffalo they could because “every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” Over just 20 years, they managed to nearly exterminate the North American bison population – from 8 million to fewer than 500.

As a keystone species, bison played a significant role in the broader ecosystem, and their sudden disappearance is referred to by scientists as an ecological catastrophe. This did indeed result in forcing Native populations to submit to settler rule, and many nations in the Plains were relocated to new reservations thousands of miles away. Instead of growing and hunting familiar foods of their homeland, rations of highly processed foods like flour, sugar, and coffee became the default staples. To this day, they cause adverse health outcomes in Indigenous communities.

When fostering dependency is a critical part of controlling the food supply, those who fall outside its network are also subject to backlash. In the case of Malaysia and Singapore, sociologist Syed Hussein Alatas has showcased how the “myth of the lazy native” was used to characterize Indigenous Malays as slow and backward in justification of colonial exploitation, forced servitude, and mistreatment. Whereas Chinese immigrants were often portrayed as entrepreneurial and productive due to their presence as merchants, intermediaries, and servants who interfaced with, and therefore were dependent on, the colonial government, Indigenous Malays had socioeconomic structures that allowed them to exist outside of colonial rule. Thus, it was necessary to construct an identity for them as people who were inherently unwilling to work and morally suspect.

Much of these narratives both here and around the world hinged upon food – in addition to demonizing the local diet, which we’ve seen in other examples, the Indigenous approach to agriculture based on subsistence rather than accumulating surplus was portrayed as lacking in ambition. The presence of social hierarchy, then, becomes an admirable way for those in charge to see themselves as higher-order beings using their power to improve society.

Three. Our relationship with food structures our approach to social and economic problems – so much so that it can fundamentally change what we believe the problem to be.

The uncomfortable truth is that for years now, we have been producing more than enough food to feed the entire world 1.5 times over. Yet we still have millions of hungry people because of deep infrastructural inequalities resulting from centuries of colonialism, military domination, and financial imperialism. This proves a tricky problem for world leaders who claim they want to fight global hunger, but their own countries benefit from existing power imbalances. Thus, it’s necessary to wholesale reframe the problem into something much more straightforward – that’s why we have the Calorie deficit.

A quick history and science lesson. The concept of a Calorie was coined by chemist Wilbur Atwater in the 1890s as standardized units of energy found in all foods. On the left is a photo of one of his test subjects in a respiratory calorimeter, which measures calories. While the Calorie was an important step for nutritional science, its creation turned a wide variety of foods into interchangeable widgets. As a result, hunger became a simple equation of supplying enough Calories through whatever foods necessary to Calorie deficient people.

For countries who had taken on the noble task of solving hunger, food relief through Caloric fulfillment could now take the form of any high-calorie foods they mandated as aid. Now, why was this particular food chosen as international aid? Well, it just so happens that the U.S. produces a massive glut of corn and soy. Under the guise of charity, the US Department of Agriculture has been able to create new markets for American agribusinesses in countries with little ability to say no. And once the free hunger relief had put local food growers out of business, lo and behold, another country now depended on imported foods.

You may think all this agricultural dumping would have at least eased global hunger, but that has not at all been the case for decades. So, in the face of questionable numbers, the Calorie is also an endlessly flexible unit of measure that can be adjusted to create success overnight. By simply reducing the amount of required Calories per person, a dramatic number of people can be officially calculated as no longer hungry.

Now that we’ve established how food imparts meaning to our worldview, how do we also impart meaning to food?

Remember when I gave the example of Spanish colonizers being afraid to eat native foods because they believed their masculine beards would fall off? Within this narrative is a fundamental worry that masculinity is not inherent to a person but something that must be maintained through external means. Losing aspects of one’s masculinity is accepted without question to be harmful because it would move a man closer to the lesser status of being feminine. So, for someone who benefits enormously from being perceived as masculine in such a society, the idea of potential beard loss from eating Native foods triggers a fear that is far more catastrophic than for someone without this socialized claim to begin with. As was witnessed in the robust response to bringing Spanish food to the Americas, the dynamics of influence is a two-way street.

Put plainly, how we identify plays a significant role in how we respond to the use of power. This is particularly overt when deciding how to “take care” of those in need. In the U.S., we have a program called SNAP – or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – that offers food aid for low-income families but requires extensive means-testing and verification, including employer or landlord confirmation of financial need. Even when it is approved, the resulting benefits contain limitations. Since the 1970s, recipients have been barred from buying hot (or prepared) food, like a rotisserie chicken or a warm soup, because it supposedly gave them too much of a leg up against other poor, but SNAP-ineligible, families.

This level of preoccupation with assigning deservingness between some of the lowest-earning families in the country rather than expanding the social safety net belies more than just economic prudency – especially given how expensive means-testing is. At the core of such paternalistic policies is a distrust of the poor in regulating their participation fairly and knowing how best to make decisions concerning their well-being. When being in a precarious situation is presumed to be indicative of a deeper moral failing, it’s easily justifiable to have an external being or institution take control over making decisions altogether.

Memes from…Recently

Personal Stuff from This Week

Listening: Been on a major Cardi B kick recently!

Watching: Lots of fencing! Currently making my way through all the piste videos from Basel 2024

Reading: Relax and Be Aware by Doug McGill and Sayadaw U Tejaniya

Eating: In Los Angeles this week, and oh my god I have missed the food. We started the trip with unbelievably good sandwiches from Tre Mani and not-to-be-missed blood sausage soup from Eighth Street Soondae, had a jaw-droppingly good meal at Birdie G’s, and polished off Thanksgiving with a pie from my friend Chef Mallory Cayon.

On the list before we leave are a mix of old favorites and new places: Damian, Good Clean Fun, Lodge Bread, Mother Wolf, Villa’s Tacos, Quarter Sheets, Stanley Wet Goods, Goldburger, Hama Sushi, Meals by Ghenet, Tacos La Guera (the one at York & Figueroa — arguably best street tacos I’ve had in LA), Yuchun.

Drinking: A selection of wines from Vinovore

Nice thing I did for myself this week: I chose my own peace of mind instead of overextending myself in social situations

Black faces in high places are not going to save us. Just look at the Black proponents of Cop City in Atlanta’s leadership class. Just look at the Black woman’s hand — Ambassador at the UN — voting against a ceasefire in Gaza.

That is, our Blackness and our womanness are not in themselves trustworthy if we allow ourselves to be conscripted into positions of power that maintain the oppressive status quo.

The message within these videos — that representation alone, even of intersectional identities, is not in and of itself indicative of progress or justice — is one that continually struggles to find air in Asian American discourse. Year after year, and especially in May, I see the same messages pile flood my LinkedIn feed, my Asian American leadership Slack channels, across mainstream news outlets. Did you know there are so many Asian Americans in [insert sector here]? That only six Asians have ever won an Oscar? That is why representation matters — you can’t be what you can’t see!

It is quite a dilution of the initial vision for Asian American politics. When Emma Gee and Yuji Ichioka coined “Asian American” in 1968 — through the formation of the Asian American Political Alliance at UC Berkeley — it was an explicitly political identity used as a “radical label of self-determination.” The term Asian American countered the Eurocentric label “Oriental” and was meant to foster solidarity between ethnically different students over the shared purpose of protesting racism and labor exploitation at home, war and imperialism abroad. This group of Asian American students later joined Black, Latine, Indigenous, and other student groups as part of the Third World Liberation Front to demand significant changes at their universities, including the creation of Ethnic and Black Studies departments and a halt to discriminatory admissions and financial aid.

While the original intent of the term “Asian American” was to advance a collective vision of justice from the ground up, it has since become overshadowed by its use as a racial category — even though race is socially constructed and has no biological backing*. This has allowed the significance of Asian Americans as a political identity to be co-opted by agendas that solely focus on demographic representations of success (i.e., Asian faces “in high places” ) even when such cracks in the so-called bamboo ceiling are “conscript[ing] [us] into positions of power that maintain the oppressive status quo.”

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In On Being White and Other Lies, author and activist James Baldwin wrote that for various ethnic populations** (e.g., Irish, Germans), “no one was white before he/she came to America. It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country.” This process of “becoming” white was rooted in the “necessity of denying the Black presence and justifying the Black subjugation,” and the “price of the ticket” for such a “false identity” was the “moral erosion” of “opting for safety” instead of recognizing the humanity in Black lives.

Baldwin’s criticism of manufactured whiteness bears great relevance to the selective amnesia found in mainstream “Asian American”-ness — especially in light of the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Asian American as a political identity is unequivocal in its rejection of military imperialism and the war machine. Just as multi-ethnic student protestors of the 1960s called on their universities to “divest from the defense industry or anything connected to the war in Vietnam,” so are coalitions of students across 500-plus colleges now. And yet, even as we see administrations threaten student protestors with suspension and expulsion, and police officers arrest and shoot (with rubber bullets) unarmed students, supposedly “Asian American” organizations have not come out to support their message.

Indeed, the same organizations with endless stamina to applaud “Asian American” representation in capitalist enterprises like finance and Hollywood — including the largest Asian American philanthropic organization in the U.S., The Asian American Foundation (TAAF) — have remained silent as Asian American students bravely stood up for their values. For months now, Asian American activists have been demanding TAAF to call for a ceasefire and remove Jonathan Greenblatt — the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), who has continually proclaimed “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism” — from its Board of Directors. (In response, TAAF removed commenting access on its Instagram.) This sustained partnership is particularly galling considering that Greenblatt was seen exiting Harvard University’s Interim President Alan Garber’s office the very hour student suspensions were announced.

When the leadership of one of the most influential “Asian American” organizations in the country — launched with a cool $250 million — constitutes a whole host of (East) Asian millionaires with deep monetary interests far more aligned with the benefactors of the American military-industrial complex than the student protestors camping on school lawns, we really need to reassess the efficacy of “Asian American” representation to bring about substantial change.

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Most are familiar with activist and poet Audre Lorde’s famous quote, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” However, there is a following sentence that often does not make it onto social media posts: this truth will prove threatening for those “who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”

The “master’s house” is not only built on a belief of racial superiority. It is founded on exploitation in the name of capitalism, buttressed by surveillance and suppression of resistance movements in the name of maintaining order, and reinforced through violence and punishment in the name of justice. Asian American as a movement was based on the work of dismantling this entire house, not just for ourselves but for all marginalized peoples. We cannot allow the term to be appropriated by Asian faces propping up industries that thrive on destroying the livelihoods of everyday workers, for initiatives that justify and further mobilize carceral violence against people of color, in support of a war against people our media outlets are depicting as “ungrievable.***”

Let me be very clear this is not a call to abandon efforts for diversity, equity, and inclusion. This is a plea for Asian Americans to reject the Faustian bargain continually being offered to us, of tokenism in exchange for a place in the oppressor’s army. Palestinian author Rasha Abdulhadi captured it best in her tweet:

We can notice, if we pay attention, who wants representation in empire and who is ready for another world.

I believe Asian Americans are ready for another world. Instead of seeing ourselves powerless in the shadows of influential “Asian American” leaders and their well-funded organizations, we can apply the concepts of power from philosopher Michel Foucault****: power as productive (able to create knowledge and truths), diffuse (not held only by specific individuals, groups, or institutions), and relational (constantly being negotiated through networks of relationships).

Put simply, it means it is well within our power as regular people to (re)define Asian American as a movement for liberation. Even if “Asian American” organizations like TAAF and Stop Asian Hate fixate “on ‘hate’ as a primary unit of information gathering, public discourse (common sense-making) and carceral state intervention” — as in, centering ‘hate’ in its constellation of power — we can reject this deficit- and “‘hate’ based victimization framework” to instead reclaim the Asian American identity as one rooted in solidarity, care, and activism; that sees its constituents as change agents instead of perpetual victims. We can make what Baldwin called the “moral choice” of seeing the humanity in our Palestinian peers over the façade of safety. We can, and many already are.

At a recent talk by Professor Julia Lee on her book Biting the Hand: Growing in Asian in Black and white America, I asked her how she and her students grapple with the pervasive idea that representation is social justice. She explained her use of Asian American as a political ideology to guide her in finding kinship and celebrating representation; otherwise, “I don’t claim them, and they don’t claim me.”

I deeply appreciated the sense of agency she spoke of, so I’ll end this newsletter with two questions for myself and all those reading: What do we claim as ours as we look toward a new era of Asian America? What must we leave behind to do so? For me, I think it starts with moving beyond just representation and reform to find a community willing to build anew in the name of Asian Americans who came before us.

Special thanks to Angela Bae for her edits.

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*Even though researchers and scientists understand races like “Asian,” “Black,” “Hispanic,” and “Caucasian” to be problematic aggregators, it is often “the level at which most data are collected…and [thus the] source of statistics without sampling insufficiencies.” More complicated still, the very presence and use of racial categories are what creates some of the outcomes associated with race, which then reinforces the importance of collecting racial data. As history professor Linda Nash writes in Inescapable Ecologies:

Race is a crude approximation for genetic and lifestyle factors but race is also already entangled in access to medical care, long term and cumulative exposures, and presence in certain environments [that] these histories…have helped produce race as a meaningful epidemiological category to begin with.

TL;DR: race is now inescapable as a categorization method for people, even if it does not have biological merit.

**Baldwin also wrote specifically about Jewish assimilation and allegiance to whiteness in the same piece, which is eerily apt today:

It is probable that it is the Jewish community [who] has paid the highest and most extraordinary price for becoming white. For the Jews came here from countries where they were not white, and they came here, in part, because they were not white; and incontestably in the eyes of the Black American (and not only in those eyes) American Jews have opted to become white, and this is how they operate. It was ironical to hear, for example, former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin declare some time ago that “the Jewish people bow only to God” while knowing that the state of Israel is sustained by a blank check from Washington.

***An excerpt from Judith Butler’s The Force of Nonviolence about the politics of grievability:

A life has to be grievable – that is, its loss has to be conceptualizable as a loss – for an interdiction against violence and destruction to include that life among those living beings to be safeguarded from violence. The condition under which some lives are more grievable than others means that the condition of equality cannot be met.

…Thus, the unequal distribution of grievability might be one framework for understanding the differential production of humans and other creations within a structure of inequality, or, indeed, within a structure of violent disavowal. To claim that equality formally extends to all humans is to sidestep the fundamental question of how the human is produced, or, rather, who is produced as a recognizable and valuable human, and who is not.

****Foucault has been making the rounds on social media for “Foucault’s boomerang,” even though it is not his concept but Hannah Arendt’s. (He never claims it, it happens to be associated with him because he references it in a speech.) Foucault is a brilliant philosopher, but let’s be more careful about perpetuating the erasure of women in our social justice work.

Memes from This Week

Personal Stuff from This Week

Listening: Nothing (again) because I need silence when writing. The book proposal will be going out to publishers soon!!!

Watching: Sour Grapes and Anatomy of a Fall

Reading: The Force of Nonviolence by Judith Butler and On the Inconvenience of Other People by Lauren Berlant (thanks Sara M. for the rec!)

Eating: A whole lotta cài fàn 菜饭 or “economy rice” (i.e., rice with side dishes) that I buy at my downstairs kopitiam, inhale, and keep writing

Drinking: Iced teh o kosong (iced tea without sugar or milk)

Nice thing I did for myself this week: I haven’t quite done it yet, but I think I’ll spring for a feet/neck massage since I am achy all over

I know I have a problem celebrating what Gen Zs call “Ws” (wins). My parents grew up in the shadows of China’s Cultural Revolution, where being poorly perceived by others — perhaps as a little too aligned with the Four Olds of ideas, customs, culture, habits — could be a matter of life and death. It was an enemy so vague, outfitted with a government directive so violent, seemingly anyone could be seized into a ‘struggle session’ and subsequently tortured to death.

Maybe you were branded as too erudite, prioritizing intellectual pursuits over practical ones. Or too fashionable in hair or dress, distracted by capitalist whims. Or too successful, a class enemy in one of the Five Black Categories. The gruesome outcome cared little about the reported transgressions, real or imagined. (Recently, the opening scene of Netflix’s adaption of the Three Body Problem depicts a ‘struggle session’ and has immediately received some…heated responses.)

I know these hushed stories, graphically transcribed through mostly oral retellings, still burn in parents’ minds. Even today, my mother warns me that talk of the Cultural Revolution is permissible, but nothing of the incident in 1989. “It’s still a sensitive subject.” (Meaning, the government denies its existence.) “It might trigger a background check because [the CCP’s] check is keyword based. Better not touch since we still need to go back to China sometimes.” In such spaces, to speak of oneself with the intention of being perceived by others — that is an act with a near-callous disregard for danger.

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I can’t really fault my parents for translating their traumas onto my upbringing when they received no support to heal from them. The value system Mom and Dad lived into was one of safety: don’t upset others, don’t make a fuss, don’t brag. Stability was the biggest and most important reward one could ask in return for competence. Anything even borderline adjacent to self-promotion was not just risky, but an invitation for harm.

It doesn’t help that women in the U.S. have every reason to be terrified of being perceived the “wrong” way by others. From family and friends, colleagues and randos on the internet, to the very institutions tasked with protecting us, victim blaming offers a trove of explanations for anything unsavory that has ever happened in our orbit. (This includes from other women, too. Most fittingly, I received precisely such a comment on my last newsletter about consent.)

Professor Barbara Gilin describes victim blaming as a misguided attempt to wrestle away responsibility from broader unknowns. “It helps them feel like bad things will never happen to them [so] they can continue to feel safe.” Despite my own, intimate understanding of this defense mechanism, I spent most of my life applying exactly this logic: obsessively attempting to control everything about myself and my surroundings to avoid “misunderstandings.”

Cue years of disordered eating, a teenage suicide attempt, a series of toxic relationships where I disappeared into my partner, being too afraid to come out until my 30s…the list goes on. The gears of damage control constantly churning in my mind were endless generators of self-esteem issues. I think this is the enduring trauma response of feeling powerless. When I observe others, I see similar patterns of self-flagellation: desperate delusions that we can indeed ensure things always go according to our plans. For my particular industries — food, academia, DEI — I don’t think I need a clearer example than seeing former Harvard President Claudine Gay be ousted by billionaire Bill Ackman to be reminded that, at any moment, the career I’ve dedicated my life to can be snatched away if I am perceived unfavorably by too powerful a person.

When even the Harvard Business Review admits that “success at work depends on being—and being seen as—both competent and likable,” but “women…are penalized more heavily when they boast,” speaking even quietly about my accomplishments has seemed a double-edged sword best avoided. Part of this has been a healthy disregard for things like titles and awards I now understand are fueled by nepotism and tokenism. But an equal part of it remains a paralyzing fear of publicly saying, “I did a thing (well)” on the off chance someone I don’t know and cannot anticipate just so happens to not like that very much.

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That was a long segue to…I’m taking an uncomfortable step to celebrate something today.

For a while now, the Official Avatar the Last Airbender Cookbook I wrote back in 2020 (published 2021), has been a certified Bestseller on Amazon and #1 in the Animation Graphic Design category. It also holds a near-perfect 5-star rating (!) with over 3,300 reviews.

I want to extend a big, heartfelt thank you to everyone who has supported this book from its inception through its launch, and even now, years afterward. Thank you to all the wonderful people who cared deeply and spoke loudly about this book, even when I was too insecure and nervous to do so. Who sent me messages of enthusiasm, ideas for recipes, memories of their favorite scenes from the show, and even clips from the comics as reference material; answered my questions about cultures and traditions unfamiliar to me; wrote reviews across many different platforms; cooked the recipes and tagged me on social media; set up my ATLA fandom page (!); interviewed me about my process; and created UGC (user-generated content) about the book to expand its reach. (Recently Inga Lam posted her 24-hour marathon of only eating foods from the ATLA book!)

Another reason I’ve kept somewhat quiet about the this cookbook is that I have a lot of mixed feelings about this particular project. I’ve previously written about being a commissioned cookbook author — a process that is anything but rosy — and the ATLA cookbook was no exception. The pay was poor, the timeline short, the responsibilities enormous. Except this time, there was the promise of an extensive, built-in fan base — in exchange for the potential downside of drawing their ire.

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Ideating, researching, testing, styling, photographing, and writing all 60 recipes (with headnotes) for this book in 3 months was one of the most out-of-control things I’ve ever done.

Even though I was well-versed in recipe creation (having been a popup chef for 6 years), reasonably seasoned at food styling and testing, written for plenty of food media, and won an IACP award for my food photography, doing all of those together with no team, little-to-no editorial direction, limited time, and a budget so low I needed to dip into my personal funds was a whole new kind of challenge.

To start, I had to fight to receive royalties for my work. The publisher first offered me a contract for an advance sans royalties, which no author should ever sign. I finally agreed to a meager royalty percentage alongside my already-low advance, which I hoped would pay off given the significant fanbase and rumors of a forthcoming live-action (now streaming on Netflix). Last October, I posted an IG Story that, after 2 years out on the market, I finally received my first royalties check.

Next was the battle for a food and props budget, which I eventually received but did not nearly cover the costs of all the ingredients, much less the dozens upon dozens of props I purchased out-of-pocket. I’m talking everything from vinyl, fabric, stone, and wood backdrops to earthenware, glass, porcelain, wooden, and agate plateware to an array of glassware, flatware, and miscellaneous little touches (e.g., fresh flowers, a honey stirrer, coasters).

I’ve always prided myself on being scrappy with props, but this book pushed me to new heights. I was in my backyard digging in the soil to create a suitable landscape for the Mudslide smoothie; random cement blocks in the neighborhood became an artistic ledge for Aang’s Favorite Egg Tarts; branches and leaves from my / friends’ houseplants made numerous appearances, like in Nurse Song’s Roast Duck (recipe at the end of this newsletter for paid subscribers).

Then came the recipes. And gosh, did I cry over them.

The reality of recipe development on a tight budget and rapid timeline is that the first time a recipe turns out as intended, you mark it as ‘complete’ and move on to the next.

This is not the best way to develop or test recipes, because there are a myriad of still-unknown factors that may impact the replicability of that recipe for end users.

For example, the meat grinder plates my butcher utilizes may not be the same as yours, which could cause volume discrepancies in a meat filling. Perhaps I’m buying a very potent type of garlic because I’m testing in Los Angeles with California produce, thus only needing 1-2 cloves, while you require 4-5 for a comparable flavor. Maybe you’re using a different brand of flour or a fresher/older set of eggs, both of which impact the final texture of the product (through its protein content and moisture level/leavening ability, respectively).

This is before we even get into factors like the environment (e.g., relative humidity, elevation), widely differing quality of equipment (e.g., ovens, stoves that may run hot, cold, uneven), and smaller wares (e.g., pots, pans, sheet trays that may be bigger, smaller, thicker, thinner, constructed of a different material), and of course, the final user’s familiarity and expertise with cooking.

(Some mishaps can also simply be developer errors. I scribbled a “9” that I later mistook for “0.” I started my timer a minute late. I turned up the heat halfway through a recipe but forgot to denote that step. It happens — especially when you’re scrambling to finalize 3-4 recipes per day — and is why retesting is so critical.)

The mark of a high-caliber professional is someone so attuned to these minute variables that their recipes account for most of them. But even stellar recipe developers need the structural backing of their institutions to maintain recipe quality. Places like the New York Times, Serious Eats, Cook’s Illustrated are some of the few remaining outlets where dedicated time, people, and resources are deployed to test and retest recipes so inconsistencies are caught before publication. At Serious Eats, where I’ve written for, all recipes are cross-tested. That means after I finish the version I feel confident in, it is sent to at least another person on the recipes team (if not more) to evaluate in a totally different setting. From there, tweaks always arise. Instructions are clarified. Sometimes, recipes that can’t seem to be replicated across kitchens are axed. (See my shrimp chips recipe that was cut for this exact reason.)

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Even now, I am haunted by the fact some of the recipes in the book haven’t been thoroughly tested.

I knew the recipes would be evaluated as if I had spent 2+ years developing and testing them — that being the average amount of time allocated to a cookbook author. It wasn’t as if finicky recipes would be contexted with a callout box of my sob stories. So when the book was published, I lost sleep compulsively reading the reviews and blaming myself for every problem listed therein.

I was glad to learn this morbid desire to know how I was perceived by total strangers with only an initial for a last name wasn’t confined to just me. In a conversation about the book’s release, The New Yorker staff writer Helen Rosner told me she used to regularly type her own name into the Twitter (now X) search bar and hold her breath as the results populated.

“It’s like she’s never cooked in her life.” “Clearly she knows nothing about baking.” “Whoever hired this person should be fired.” Amazon reviewers don’t hold back, and even the arguably silly ones sting — like when folks complain the ingredients are “too Asian” for the Asian-inspired show they enjoyed enough to buy its cookbook. To date, my favorite is still a review griping there is too much water (1.5 gallons, or 6 quarts) allocated in a recipe for stock.

The ATLA cookbook is not perfect, and that is ok. After years (of therapy), I’ve made peace with the fact that I did the best I could with what I had.

Back when I was still hosting popups for a living, I was possessed by the idea of a “perfect” service. Call it conditioning from my fine dining days, where any type of abuse was pretty much permissible if it brought the restaurant closer to “perfection,” and unhealthy obsessions were heralded as “being a visionary” instead of potential signs of being mentally unwell. Regardless of the circumstances, I had it in my head there was only one kind of service deserving of recognition.

Not just that, “perfect” was the only type of service I was allowed to be joyful about. I robbed myself of so much deserved self-appreciation — for building a working kitchen on 4 plastic foldup tables, with 3 induction burners and a fryer, to serve 50+ people a 6-course tasting menu and 3-course cocktails, all paired with virtual reality art or poetry — because I had a singular idea of success I stubbornly held onto. When service invariably failed to be “perfect” because we kept moving locations every other event to new cities, new climates, and with new staff, I found it my fault for not predicting the future.

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If “perfect” is indeed real, I think it only exists in the context of inner peace.

A few weeks ago, I watched the documentary Opus, where the late maestro Ryuichi Sakamoto plays piano solo for nearly 2 hours. Many of his greatest hits, like Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, are featured. These are compositions praised as “perfect” by critics; yet during what he likely knew would be his last public performance before death, I watched as the man continued to iterate on them, tinkering as he talked to himself, refusing for his work to be denoted with a period when he was placing a comma.

I bawled the entire film.

Akin to the debate if “authentic” is real, characterizing something as “perfect” seems to me an act only available in context by the creator. It is being able to answer “yes” to the question, “Did I do this in a manner true to me?”

Perfect or not, I did that for the ATLA cookbook. The show was a meaningful part of my young adult years, and I am genuinely proud of how much care I took in applying both my culinary skills and sociology / anthropology eye to consider the ingredients, techniques, compositions, presentations, and backstories, understanding how much (very real) cultural weight was held in these fictional people, places, and dishes.

Even still, I know I missed things. Just as it is infeasible for a chef to be an expert at cooking everything (even if there exist cookbooks with such a name), it would be profoundly arrogant to say that speed-reading through several dozen articles and books transformed me into an expert in pan-Asian geo-food politics. What I gave my best effort was to be respectful of the threads I did pull on, such as:

• Utilizing culturally-, climate-, and regionally appropriate ingredients. In the Water Nation, for example, animal fats (or other primarily saturated fats) are used for cooking (as an ode to seal blubber used by Inuit and Yup’ik peoples, but is not commercially available), and maple syrup replaced cane or beetroot sugar. No hot-climate vegetables (or dairy) are used. Across the vast Earth Nation, mostly based on China but also parts of Mongolia and Central Asia, recipe profiles harken to regional preferences, like cumin in the Northwest, Sichuan peppercorns and pickled mustard in the Southwest, and butter in the Southern island.

• Staying true to regional cooking methods. For example, Foggy Swamp dwellers are unlikely to use dry-cooking methods, instead opting for techniques like stewing and steaming. (A little Easter Egg for those reading: check out what makes the “swamp water” in the Foggy Swamp Chicken special!)

• Building from timelines congruent to the show. For example, the Fire Nation’s Fresh Jang Hui Clams are only available after our foursome departs and the polluted river is thoroughly cleaned. The Water Nation’s Kale / Blueberry Cookies and Spirulina Noodles, which include dairy and flour (respectively), are only available due to inter-nation trade resuming post-Hundred Year War.

• Addressing underlying geopolitics in the region. There is a reason the Fire Nation recipes freely use ingredients from virtually anywhere. Read the headnote for Misty Palms Special Rice, and you may notice some parallels to current, real-life incidences of state-sponsored violence…

My editor and publisher could not have cared less about me spending limited recipe development time doing this, and the same could probably be said of much of the readership. But this book is not for them. I committed months of my life — and unknown years of my mental health — to write in between the lines. Because I am not the first, nor the last, person to see how much ATLA reflects the duality of our world.

I hope readers with a spidey sense of it will find those parallel messages in this book. That destruction of tradition is a genocide in its own right. That a desire for comfort can be weaponized to absolve ourselves of responsibility in the face of others’ oppression. That militaries may retreat, but colonialism and imperialism scar a land and its people in ways forever unraveling. And in the face of all this, community is possible. Love matters. Power to the people.

Three years after the release, it feels bittersweet to see the success of something I created, fully knowing its exploitative origins.

If I were given the same terms to write this book today, I would not accept them. But all the heartache of my younger self was not for nothing, and I am glad I can call myself the author of this (bestselling!) cookbook. I will go ahead and mark this as a “W” for the records — give myself permission to be joyful, let my accomplishments take up space, and release the fear of being perceived.

Thank you all for being my village.

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Meme from This Week

Just one since this email has gotten aggressively longer than I anticipated.

Personal Stuff from This Week

Listening: Nothing. I’m one of those weird folks who needs total silence when writing certain things, and I’ve been totally absorbed in my book proposal (more details soon!) the last few weeks.

Watching: Three Body Problem

Reading: Rituals of Dinner by Margaret Visser

Eating: Frog claypot porridge, specifically requested by my parents for their Singapore trip. (They had a wonderful time in Singapore & Kuala Lumpur, and returned to the States on Monday!)

Drinking: The Koong Woh Tong version of Ya Sei Mei 廿四味 (24 Flavors Herbal Tea). Every night for digestion and immunity!

Nice thing I did for myself this week: I rested the whole week after suffering from a nasty bout of foot capsulitis while also bleeding from my second tattoo removal treatment.

For paid subscribers, a special recipe from the ATLA cookbook:

Nurse Song’s Roast Duck

Iroh: I’ve never had roast duck like the one prepared by Nurse Song’s mother. What a rapturous meal that was! I keep requesting the chefs of the Fire Nation palace replicate it as a special dish to accompany National Tea Appreciation Day, but they keep stalling on me. Something about the ducks being different here. I guess I’ll just have to reserve my roast duck-eating for when I’m back at the shoppe in Ba Sing Se.

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CW: Brief mentions of revenge porn

In recent months, memories of my creepy encounter with N 15 years ago have bubbled aggressively to the surface because I started the process of having a tattoo removed. Sitting on a gray microfiber pad while a heavily tattooed man shoots lasers I cannot see at my raw skin from a massive, chest-sized machine has been, in every way, quite an impetus to think about what has led me here.

(Yes, the process is as horrible as news outlets describe. Yes, it is significantly worse than getting tattooed. The best I can explain of the pico laser is like a tiny, burning needle ripping into your skin at high speed. Even after applying a local anesthetic and aggressively numbing the area with ice, the pain is barely tolerable for the duration of my session — all of maybe two minutes.

It doesn’t end just with the needle’s burn, however. There’s also the smell. Smell particles activate more intensely in the presence of water and heat — hence why we often hear of “hot garbage” — so in between the hot laser repeatedly hitting the little bones of my spine, and me sweating while gritting my teeth with all my willpower, the scent of seared flesh is nothing short of morbidly discombobulating.)

The tattoo in question is a lotus in the middle of my back, with the text “while daring greatly.” It isn’t hideous. I wouldn’t even classify it as ugly. It’s not profane, and the message (if asked, once explained) is decently meaningful.

All that it’s not, however, is overshadowed by what it is: a physical reminder of how empty my consent is in the world I live in.

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I’ve had this tattoo since 2011, when I first moved to NYC to find my way. The words are from Theodore Roosevelt, quoted at my college commencement, which I eagerly submitted alongside my favorite flower (a lotus, for strength) to a high-SEO-ranked, well-Yelped shop in the Lower East Side.

On the day of my appointment, my designated artist — a random white man whose name I’ve long forgotten, or maybe he never told me to begin with — started our encounter visibly irritated. Unbeknownst to me, a scheduling mishap had occurred with my appointment, leading him to accuse me right off the bat: “You canceled last week.”

(The system did not update his calendar after I rescheduled. But even if I did cancel, does that matter?)

A tense explanation later, he informed me we were working on a compressed timeline: “I drew up something, but I threw it away already.” Only a few words, but the message was clear: you lost your chance for revisions.

I remember waiting in full view of the shop’s glass doors as he disappeared to resketch my design. Only a meter or two between my feet and the exit, but thousands of reminders of why standing up would violate a pact between me, my body, and the universe.

That might offend him, and he is already upset with you.

It’s your fault he’s in a bad mood. You have to accept the consequences of your actions.

Best you can do now is appease. You don’t know what might happen if he becomes angrier.

I cannot pinpoint who these voices belong to. They are not just of my mother, who has been rendered responsible for my dad’s emotions since she married him at 21. Hypervigilance is a woman’s duty, she likes to remind me; if I know what bothers my partner, I shouldn’t ever let those things happen.

There is some tenor of aunties, past and present, eager to offer advice on how to remove any conflict from daily life. It’s simple, really — do not impregnate conversations with your own bothersome emotions. No man enjoys such histrionics.

There are definitely inflections of others’ parents, teachers, and acquaintances, their gleeful gossip in response to my own (and millions of other exes) spreading revenge porn being, “That’s on her. She should’ve known better.”

Seeing my body as an instrument to either be surveilled, managed, or used in service for men is something I absorbed not just from the impositions of men, but the rationalizations of women. Without fail, I hear their voices overlapping daily: diversions created by those unwilling, or perhaps unable, to recognize the fact that power rests not in what you can do, but in what you can get away with doing.

I can’t recall how long it took for that tattoo artist to sketch the foundation of my self-hatred for going on 13 years.

Was it five minutes? Ten? I doubt it was fifteen.

What I do remember is when he brings the final reveal, everything in his design is wrong. Instead of soft petals with dainty lines, the lotus is sharp and pokey, like Bart Simpson’s hair. The aggressive shading makes the entire flower look leaden. And the font? It’s chicken scratch, something I imagine a prepubescent boy would dig into the dirt of his school’s baseball pit after he’d been benched.

I hated it with every ounce of my being. So of course I said, in a voice so small and pathetic it still haunts me with shame, “Yeah, okay.”

My tattoo artist friend Michelle Neo tells me there finally exists discourse — albeit limited — in the tattoo community about this kind of empty consent. Even in the presence of words that technically mean “yes,” the tattoo artist should not proceed to, as she calls it, “physically brand another person” without enthusiastic consent. This lens acknowledges consent as a structural consideration, instead of diagnosing it on an individual basis disconnected from the broader systems we live in. It holds especially true for clients with overlapping marginalized identities, most aware of how much their bodies are still viewed as sites of contested ownership.

I try my best not to obsess over how things would’ve been different had she taken his place that day. Her calm, measured follow-up questions the antithesis of his shrug and a beckon to the back room. In the present, Michelle writes me after I send her a draft of this piece to review, “Above my station, I have a print of these client affirmations. I hope it can serve as another reminder for you, too.”

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If you notice a slight edge to how I write of my tattoo encounter, that isn’t your imagination. I walked into that shop, hoping with my whole body for a chance to forgive myself. This cool place with electric rock music and vintage AC/DC posters, it was engaging in resistance against a society that promotes and rewards a man happy to mock my agency with an ice cream bar, right? These body artists, in their ripped denim vests on lug-soled black boots, surely they didn’t view women with the same entitlement as my ex over private photos — mere collateral damage in a quest for status.

This was the height of my Lean In era, even if the book had not yet hit shelves. My reconfiguring of consent was on the same wavelength as Sandberg’s feminism: individualized change for large-scale results. If I could shift how I saw myself — from a scared little intern and violated ex-girlfriend to an empowered, black-shift-dress-wearing, big-city professional — it might just be reflected back in how the world treated me.

I bought into the lie of white counterculturalism because I wanted to believe there was a space where I mattered. My heart was tender. I was unprepared for its veneer of social defiance to wholesale collapse because a man felt slighted.

I reckon it must’ve been inconvenient, a woman’s desires complicating their narratives of ‘radicalness’ and ‘allyship.’ Impossible, even, to reconcile the reality that, much like white dominant culture, practicing counterculturalism absent intersectional analysis is ultimately unconcerned with liberating anything beyond its constituent’s own egos.

The fact this incident has certainly been long forgotten in this man’s mind, but literally and metaphorically scarred me for over a decade, is more than just a little ironic. Especially within a self-proclaimed “safe space,” it is a testament to how much a woman’s safety is still predicated on a man’s consent.

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I never refer to this tattoo as “my” tattoo. It is not, no matter how long I carry it on my body.

Nonetheless, it is the gift that keeps on giving: when I arrived for my tattoo removal consultation, I was told in classic Singaporean fashion — that is, somewhat unceremoniously — this tattoo artist was as unqualified as he was nonchalant. That day, he had gone too far into my skin with his ink, and the tattoo had developed keloids all over.

“Too deep. Cannot fully remove,” the store owner, Mark, assesses with a tsk. He is a fast-talking man, good-natured enough to publicly call himself a Boomer on TikTok, and not in the least delicate with his delivery. “I can lighten it though.”

I gape at him. “What’s even the point then?” The accusation comes out before I can form it more diplomatically.

Mark wasn’t done explaining — the point of lightening up a tattoo is that it can be better covered by a new one — but what my brain immediately heard was: forever.

Forever sullied by this random man, but of course not vice versa; just as we hold women captive to the man* of their first sexual indoctrination, no matter how insignificant or traumatic, but never vice versa.

In the face of paying four times the price of my tattoo to have it partially beamed off, I wondered if this was a sign that I ought to take the route of many others. After all, it was my fault, was it not? It was I who was the coward, who didn’t dissent properly, who gave up my opportunity to be free of this. You have to accept the consequences of your actions. Perhaps the best option now was to never speak of this shame again, in hopes that living in silence would allow me to outrun it.

In her essay, I Spent My Life Consenting to Touch I Didn’t Want, Melissa Febos writes that she’d kept mum about a non-consensual sexual encounter for decades because:

I felt deeply embarrassed, not only for myself…but also for him, because I knew he had done wrong. But somehow, it was his wrongs that embarrassed me, as if it were rude of me to remember them.

I, too, felt embarrassed by my long memory. My ongoing pain over something everyone else so readily accepted as nothing. Indeed, my insistence on a full removal was a fantasy of reversing time, of amnesia. I did not want to admit that I had come in for this consultation under the same false pretense as the tattoo shop that scarred me: a desire to pretend disguised as resistance.

What would it mean to make amends, then? To lift my internalized blame for being too weak to stand up for myself in the moment and “complaining” later? To receive my whole self against the backdrop of this country — with 31 states that indoctrinate bodies of 16-year-old girls as legal, even if the rest of her is not?

The same Melissa Febos writes in Body Work:

The resistance to memoirs about trauma is always in part — and often nothing but — a resistance to movements of social justice.

Those who benefit from the inequities of our society resist the stories of people whose suffering is in large part owed to the structures of our society.

To write this series has been my small act of reclamation. To put my needs above others’ expectations of my feelings and give myself the permission I long looked to others for. To affirm both the women who intuitively understand this story as well as those who dismiss and reject it: I see how you’ve learned to live, and it is valid.

After the last newsletter, I received a flurry of emails from other women. “I, too, ate the ice cream,” one writes me.

My heart twinges reading her note, and I reach out to instinctively touch my back. My skin there is rough and scabby now, the tattoo — still bruised but healing — just a bare shade lighter than before. I marvel at us strangers, processing our grief in parallel, each at our own rhythm, and I hug myself for doing the work of remembering who I am. Someone who can not only do hard things, but has already done the hardest thing: to keep going.

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P.S. I now work exclusively with women of color tattoo artists. At a recent session, I hesitantly asked if we could try a different placement of my tattoo (a white rabbit in candy form on my left shoulder, an ode to my Chinese heritage and The Matrix). I was still so nervous to request a change. It’s hard to describe how it felt to have her nod easily and respond most graciously, “You’re welcome to move it however many times you want.”

*Queer women are subject to this bind in their own unique way, with their orientation often being called into question if they do not have a sexual experience with a man, or only experiences with men cast as “real” sex.

P.P.S. A video update of my second pico treatment below:

Memes from the Last Week

Personal Things From the Last Week

Listening: Ryuichi Sakamoto, maestro like no other. (His final film, Opus, had me bawling for 2 hours straight. RIP.)

Watching: Sense8

(Re-)Reading: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which never fails to pull me out of despair and give me hope

Eating: Bak chor mee and pulut tai tai, two of my favorite things in Singapore so far

Drinking: Sugarcane juice, truly nothing like it

Nice thing I did for myself this week: I cleared my schedule when I needed to rest and recover from jetlag without feeling guilty

CW: Sexually charged workplace harassment

Note: Names and other potentially identifying information have been changed and/or removed for legal protection

When I was 18, I interned in Central Accounting at a massive tech giant for half a year. As my last internship before graduation, I had specifically tried to avoid this department — for the plain fact I was a Finance major and not part of my university’s Accounting cohort. Despite this, I was relegated to busying over 10Qs and 10Ks because, as a classmate later informed me, “all the cute girls go to Accounting.”

As it turns out, one of the main sponsors of the internship program — a Senior Manager I’ll refer to as “N” for this piece — headed up Central Accounting. In exchange for presumably greasing some budgetary wheels, he received his pick of the litter with every new class of interns. Even if my male counterparts had all but failed our school’s entry-level Finance 350 course, they were welcomed into “sexy” departments like cloud computing; meanwhile, I and a few other women were off to Central Accounting, none the wiser.

To make matters worse, as the newest and lowest-rung intern, I was tasked with coming in intermittently at 5am to upload encrypted data to Asia. (At least, I think that’s what I was doing.) No busses ran direct that early in the morning, so my best option was to wrap myself in as many puffy jackets as I could find, board a 4am bus that deposited me a half mile away, and walk across the bridge to the company’s HQ while politely declining offers for cheap drugs.

But even a shit sleep schedule and daily, mind-numbing Excel gymnastics were no match for the unwanted attention I received from N, encapsulated in a roughly hour-long exchange halfway into my 6-month stint.

It all began under the guise of a performance review.

I was, in all terms of the word, plodding along when I received a notice to expect an in-person retrospective. This seemed entirely standard. What was surprising, however, was that this would take place with N, a person I only met once or twice and saw from afar. My daily directives came from a manager I’ll call “B,” a round-faced, stubbly-chinned, and even-tempered man who understood I was uninterested in pursuing a career in accounting and left me to job hunt in peace.

Now, if there was one upside to Central Accounting, it was the predictability. Audible tidying-up started every day at 5pm, laptops confidently folding shut with a ffffmph by 5:15pm, backpacks zipped and out the door by 5:30pm. This was my routine, too — with the exception of 5am days, when B generously allowed me to leave at 2:30pm — interrupted abruptly by an email from N: Performance review. Today, 6:30pm.

I had never stayed in the office past 6pm, and I certainly didn’t have enough assigned work to justify it. My coworkers all knew this, each giving me a quizzical once-over on their way out but refraining from asking. I’ll never know why they didn’t; it could’ve been just coincidence, or maybe a well-intentioned attempt not to pry. But the effect of multiple people passing me by, doing something obviously out of the ordinary, contributed an eerie sense of secrecy to this impromptu meeting.

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I am several rounds deep into cover letters for jobs I don’t care for by the time 6:30pm rolls around. The office is deserted. At several points, I wondered if N simply forgot he emailed me and left too, only to catch a small head movement in his office behind those blurry glass panels.

A few minutes past the half-hour, he silently arrives at my cubicle. “Let’s go,” he announces, startling me.

I stand up hastily, very aware of my open screen on a Word document. “Oh—”

“Would you like some ice cream?” he asks, cutting me off.

I’m confused. Why would I want ice cream in the middle of the winter? At 6:30pm, when has the sun already set? Before my performance review?

“I’m okay—” I begin, but N cuts me off again.

“Let’s get you some ice cream.”

Something in my stomach tightens at his tone, keeps squeezing as we make our way downstairs. The cafeteria is near-closed by the time we arrive, a lone cook wiping down the last remnants of spilled vinaigrette off the salad bar. I can barely hide my relief.

“I think they’re closed,” I squeak to N, my tone relaying obvious eagerness to go back upstairs and get the whole thing over with. “It’s okay, I really don’t need the ice cream.”

As soon as the words leave my mouth, I panic: what if I just offended him? I reflexively lean into a tried-and-true stereotype as a lifeline: “I’m trying to watch my weight anyway…ha ha.”

(I phrase it as a joke, but it isn’t. I’d just begun my years of disordered eating, and even contemplating an unanticipated addition of several hundred calories into my diet for the day was sending me into a tailspin.)

If N hears me, he pretends not to. His eyes clock the room and laser in on a chest freezer at a faraway station. “The ice cream is in that freezer,” he instructs, far more familiar with the cafeteria’s staging and inventory than me. It is not a mere invitation.

As we make our way over, I begin mentally bargaining with myself. An ice pop would have the fewest calories, I calculate. I don’t have to finish the whole thing. I can eat one of the lighter Lean Cuisines for dinner when I get home.

But there are no ice pops. Instead, there are popsicles: flat ones and tubular ones, single and multi-flavored, even one colored as an American flag and shaped like a rocket.

Even without any formal analysis of patriarchy or power dynamics, my freshly “adult” brain had watched enough food-laced porn to know these were bad choices. I pause too long as N slides open the freezer cover for me, waiting.

“Can’t decide?”

He makes no movement to select an ice cream for himself, and I debate if it’s possible to salvage the situation by refusing on account of his not joining in. Before I consciously decide one way or another, my arm betrays me, reaching out to snatch a chocolate-covered vanilla bar — the only non-popsicle in the chest.

He smiles slowly. “Okay.”

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N’s office is cold, unlike the rest of the floor, which was prone to variable heating spurts. As I take a seat across from his desk, I keep a sizable distance between the ice cream and me, its wrapper out of his line of sight, hoping he might forget it’s there.

He takes a moment to settle into his ergonomic chair. I notice it’s nicer than B’s because it doesn’t creak as it holds him up, alongside a string of other distracting thoughts. Those shoes don’t seem very comfortable. Where does he keep his office badge? Does N also play on the Accounting sports team with M? Has C (another intern, also an Asian woman) also been here?

“Are you going to eat?” N’s question snaps me back to my seat.

“Oh—” I start, flailing for an excuse, “I’ll save—”

“Eat your ice cream before it melts.”

I obey, eating the ice cream so fast I feel an immediate brain freeze. No matter — I plow through the frozen milk whole and unchewed. I never lick, I never look up, and I never open my mouth any wider than absolutely required. It takes three bites until my teeth hit the wooden stick, its cardboard complexion the most welcome flavor of dessert I’ve ever tasted.

“You really liked it, huh,” N says, staring at me wolfing down the bar without blinking. “Didn’t you?”

Somehow, both “yes” and “no” seem like the wrong answer, so I just smile at him hesitantly, my lips tight over my teeth.

He looks bemused now, and I have a sinking feeling he has been here before, that things are unfolding exactly as he intended.

“You have chocolate all over your mouth,” he says with a practiced vocal fry that is positively alien against his face. He does not offer me a tissue, nor are there any on his office table.

I visibly inhale. “Oh,” I hear myself saying again, as if it is the only word in my lexicon. My own voice sounds unbearably idiotic. I hoist my bottom teeth over my upper lips, attempting to remove all the melted chocolate in the most unflattering, Gollum-like way possible.

Time moves past me. At last, N seems satisfied and clasps his hands together. “Your review,” he says with a long-suffering sigh, as if he’s the one reminding me that’s why we came here, as if I were the one who has been dilly-dallying his time. “Your manager B tells me you’ve been doing well. He even said you’ve been coming in early to upload reports. Is that true?”

I’m not sure if the question refers to the first or second statement; I nod regardless. My fingers are gripping the ice cream wrapper, my sweat melting the remaining bits of plasticky chocolate coating the popsicle stick.

N readjusts himself in his fancy chair.

“Do you like this internship? I want all the interns to be happy.”

“Yes…” I mumble. “I’m learning a lot.”

“So you’re glad you were placed in Central Accounting?”

I have no idea what to say to that, so I nod, again.

He stands up and moves from behind his desk towards me. The room has never felt so small, or the office floors so big and far apart.

He comes to a stop right beside me, still standing, leaning his lower back against the desk and crossing his legs. I fix my eyes somewhere away from him, imagining just how many sexual harassment trainings he’s clicked through wearing that same awful, bemused expression.

“That’s good.” He takes his time with the next words. “You can go.”

I don’t move. My body is freezing.

A moment passes.

“Unless…there’s something else?”

Somewhere inside, the same voice from earlier tells me not to bolt out of my seat. It might offend him, she reminds me carefully. Stay professional.

Professionalism is the difference between the person who climbed the ladder on their own accord and one who didn’t. Professionalism wards off unwanted advances and resulting whispers. Professionalism is what will protect you.

I stand up, still clutching the sticky wrapper. “Thank you,” I manage, desperate not to be so flustered, so unprofessional, as I try to compute an exit without turning my back to him.

“Let me help you with that.” He reaches out his hand.

I look at him, stupefied, one last riddle I can’t seem to solve. I feel my breath quickening, panic welling into desperation in my chest.

“The wrapper.” He gestures to my hands.

I all but fling the ice cream wrapper at him, turning my body a sharp 90 degrees so I can leap for the door. I glue my back against the door handle and hold it closely as I say goodbye, see you tomorrow, have a nice night, and oh thank god, I’m gone. Racing down the hallway I feel the first traitorous prickle in my eyes, my fingertips still smelling like sweet cocoa as I reach up to forcibly push any unfallen tears away.

I take my phone out to call someone, then almost instantaneously put it back away. Who would I call? My parents, who would most certainly see this as frivolous complaining? My business school friends, who liked to remind me this was a killer internship? My ex-boyfriend, who remarked girls in finance have it way easier? If I were to mention the interaction to HR, what would I report, exactly? My senior manager bought me ice cream and gave me a decent review?

So I say nothing, shrinking inwards as I board the bus and ride it home in silence.

N never talks to me again, and he doesn’t need to.

In that short-but-horribly-long hour, his existence had psychologically shifted the way I noticed people in power at the workplace.

There are people like N everywhere, sometimes latent but always present. These are the people for whom exerting reactive power is not enough. Open ridicule, or even public firing, are mere table stakes — flexes they are naturally entitled to in a world under patriarchy, too commonplace to be thrilling. To his ilk, satisfaction comes from devising new opportunities to see themselves as the ultimate marionettist: not just from denying a subordinate like me agency, but in soaking up the weaponized safety of my implied consent.

When I think back to that day almost 15 years ago, I wonder if it was his smugness that thickened the air between us, knowing my answers to society’s line of questions before they are even asked.

Did he force you? No.

Did you resist? No.

Did you say no? No.

Then nothing really happened, did it?

This presence of what we collectively accept as my individualized, “legal” consent would have been, I imagine, quite the rush for people like him. To watch a young woman cling to a facade that she is person enough to consent to what happens to her body, even as her skin crawls in his presence. Even as she allows something in her body she doesn’t want, speaks something she doesn’t mean, thinks something she cannot say — all the while agreeing that she liked it.

Or perhaps he still sees himself as benevolent, a feminist even. The kind of manager who championed women by “uplifting” them from the intern pool into his department. Who, if ever accused, could rally a legion of male interns willing to go on record that they never had such an interaction with him. I imagine they could utter, “All the cute girls go to accounting” and “he would never do anything to make anyone uncomfortable,” all in the same breath without a hint of irony.

These two possibilities sound diametrically opposite, but in the context of women and consent in our society today, they are the same: irrelevant. When we choose to individualize consent based on another’s “intentions,” we erase its relationship with institutionalized violence. We ignore the fact that for women, consent is a rigged game of chicken. When our bodies are indiscriminately sexualized, it does not matter how well we paper over them with collared shirts and loose slacks in an effort to project “no.” When modern society’s basic economic, legal, and social structures do not treat us as full humans with agency over our bodies, any degree of consent we give is little more than an echo of our oppression, warped to fit as words on our tongues.

If I say “no,” I lose my job. I’m difficult and unemployable. I’m uptight and ungrateful. If I say “yes,” by the account of not saying “no” or actually verbalizing “yes,” I have no legal grounds for complaint. I am making something out of nothing. I’m someone who can’t handle my own regrets and bad choices. I’m a flaky and emotional woman who can’t be trusted.

I know all this, as do millions of women when they consider what it means to “choose your words wisely” when the onus of prevention is on them. So do millions of Ns when they ask women like me, “Would you like some ice cream?”

This is just one story in a statistic so widespread, it’s pedestrian. So while I know nothing of quantum physics, of time travel or alternate realities, something, somewhere in my gut tells me another Jenny — in some other place, in some other life — she didn’t make it out of that office quite so easily.

P.S. Part Two now here.

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Memes from the Past Weeks

Personal Things from the Last Few Weeks

Listening to: Healing singing bowls playlists on Spotify

Watching: Lighting Up the Stars and Extrapolations

Reading: Just finished Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom, now on No Bad Parts by Richard C. Schwartz and Body Work by Melissa Febos

Eating: Lots of East Carolina favorites while I’m in the U.S. moving my doggie to his new foster home

Drinking: As many bottles of Topo Chico I can get my hands on (as they aren’t distributed in Singapore)

Nice thing I did for myself this week: Taking a purposeful break from my field research and interviewing people to work on my book proposal

I mean, of course not: I’m literally living in it. I can’t even access the nearest subway station efficiently without traversing not one but two stories in the local mall near me, Bugis Junction.

Unlike the last three cities I’ve lived in (NYC, Boston, LA), where it was exceedingly uncommon for me to even enter a mall, here in Singapore, I’m reminded malls are not just shopping spaces. Open late and often buttressed between a grocery store, subway station, and (several) food courts, these are nothing short of a conglomerate manifestation of that illusive “third space,” expanded from the size of a Starbucks to multi-floor mazes. (I do not mean this remotely metaphorically: some malls boast over 360 shops!!!)

In a country smaller than the size of NYC, there are over 170 indoor malls as of 2020 (with plenty more under construction). Anything you may find sprawled across a strip mall has been consolidated into one: global chains like Uniqlo and Paris Baguette, yes, but also the alterations auntie who fusses over the neckline of my dresses, the thrift shop where I browse for 70s-era pants, the acceptably average yakitori stall I’ll frequent before boarding the train, the local outpost of TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) empire Koong Woh Tong where the shop uncle still brews each batch of 24-herb tea in-store.

The concept of “going to the mall” offers a lot more than an air-conditioned escape from the constant humidity (or, during the monsoon season, afternoon thunderstorms). It is the place where routine acts of consumption unfold; and in them, how we learn who we are to each other, and where we fit within our communities.

This is true no matter what time of day I go. Once I pass those very hygenic, touchless glass doors, I find myself navigating an ensemble production of daily lives just like mine: colleagues sipping kopi-o (sweetened black coffee) and sighing over the news, couples browsing sunglasses with a McFlurry in hand, familial debates over monthly spending at one of the (many) homeware kiosks.

To consume has become the prerequisite to full participation in today’s society, be it through material goods or edible ones. Malls, then, serve as critical sites for identity construction, offering countless opportunities for us to transact as the person we desire to embody. Every purchase allows us to be — for just a moment — the main character, the hero, in a society where the will of any one person is becoming less and less central to the plot.

(You know, like societies where no number of calls to legislators seem sufficient to halt military spending on a genocidal war.)

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The accelerating demand for these sites of consumption shows it is working, too.

The more powerless I feel, the more I find myself anxiously prowling through the mall on makeshift errands when, really, I have no business being there. I use the word “prowling” because it is impossible to merely walk through malls. With or without premeditation, the space between the glossy floors and onslaught of signature scents shapeshift into a setting where I begin looking for something.

I suppose that actual thing depends on what I believe myself most deficient in. Consumerism has moved far beyond selling the idea we don’t have enough; what it promises now is a chance to be enough. This manufactured satisfaction isn’t far away, either: I can conquer any illusory enemy with just the swipe of my credit card.

When the government itself has proclaimed eating and shopping as “national pastimes,” it’s only fitting that, here, this psychic war would be characterized as a form of hunger. Thus, its battles are enacted through literal consumption. From display shelves brimming with pastries promising an ‘around the world’ flavor adventure in carb form, to the not-quite-rhythmic ttttssing tsing tsinggg of ten teppanyaki chefs cooking up ‘executive’ lunch sets for middle managers during mid-day rush, malls are overflowing with acts of ego soothing.

At once fantastical and indoctrinating, every bite is advertised as a chance to eat my future anew.

In the downstairs concourse, 22-carat French gold egg tarts assure me nothing short of joy at four for $22.80. I imagine touting them at a party, plucking each pastry from its custom seat, feeling both opulent and different in my purchase to fit in.

Even countercultural boldness is consumable here. I’ve long yearned to have a lightning wit that never misses, and for under $5 I can. All this against the backdrop of heritage yore, boasting of its own staticity since 1944 — despite the minor fact that this shop has since expanded into 120 franchised stores in 10 countries.

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Ads are like funhouse mirrors to spaces we know, turning topsy-turvy our perception of a place to be into one with the intention to do (that is, consume). The same kopi-sipping colleagues at (another) local coffeeshop take on new meaning when silhouetted against a giant poster announcing, “Let’s Meat Up.” I look at the tables, packed until 10pm every night, and wonder if eating their combo set could distract me from the reality that I don’t yet have friends to meet up with.

Once unleashed in a mall, I can’t unsee these ads, can’t unhear their noisy commentary augmenting my reality. In effect, ads are no longer aspirations but reprimands. We are not supposed to be happy until the little asymmetrical machine has beeped green on our purchase, our triumph enshrined in tissue paper and a box for others to see and yearn for.

Within today’s cultural current, our consent to consume is never asked and repeatedly manufactured.

It’s taken for granted that physical — tangible or edible — relief is both possible and sufficient for our psychic woes. To that end, malls no longer require any further context to explain their existence. They are a “third space” now recognizable anywhere, relevant everywhere — as natural as the instinct to want “more” from life.

I wonder if this isn’t the physical manifestation of social media’s virtual “context collapse,” where giving differentiated attention is no longer the norm. I find it eerily intriguing to characterize a physical place in this way, where once inside, we are treated as interchangeable, mechanical replicas, shepherded using the same rotation of insecurities.

What is the toll of perpetually seeing ourselves as somehow broken or deficient, of treating our lives like a match on constant offense, chasing down a shifting target to find and “fix” what maims us? Consumption sees happiness and peace like a one-time match, an all-or-nothing instead of an internal practice. With our bodies becoming the latest battleground, we’ve become so entrenched in devouring metaphorical victory after victory it seems incomprehensible to consider: we have no need for an enemy.

Enemies always serve a purpose. The war relationship is a symbiotic one in which the enemy on one side serves some need within the enemy on the other side, even while both protest this fact and claim they only fight because they have no choice.

-Troy Chapman, I Have No Need For An Enemy

Like everyone else, of course I want to be the protagonist. The great irony is that attempts to fulfill my need to feel in control, which possesses me to prowl around the mall, is also what invites me to be less and less in charge of my own lived experience. To see beyond enemy lines, then, means to stop reviewing myself as impotent, useless, insignificant, and instead, to begin looking at myself with attention*.

I long thought I lived my life along a simple principle: I matter.

But as I force myself to struggle past the smell burden** and overlapping noise pollution of two dozen-plus stores on every floor in pursuit of mythical validation, it dawns on me that, perhaps, I never really believed that statement to be true.

‘I matter’ is not some sort of fractional concept, dependent on a base context — “to my partner” “to my family” “to my industry” — for meaning. ‘I matter’ is an integer*** meant to withstand my spectrum of self across contexts. Enacting ‘I matter’ does not require me to “do” anything the way these ads implore — it is not a winnable trophy offered at Bugis Junction. ‘I matter’ is already very much alive, waiting for me to be quiet and still enough to feel it: a deep sense of compassion for being such a frustratingly contradictory human.

This year, I’m challenging myself to no longer fall prey to manufactured enemies on my road to peace. I’m slowing my pace to decipher what my needs are, not those presented to me as the next obstacle to sustained self-esteem. Come November, when I leave Singapore, I think I’ll know I’ve made some progress when the mall can be a site where I can eat, but not be consumed.

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* Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing is an excellent read on what it means to pay attention to attention.

** One of my professor advisors here at the National University of Singapore, Audrey Chia, calls the sense of overwhelm by too many smells in one place its “smell burden.” She typically works in hospital settings where that term refers to a very different set of smells, but nonetheless I found it also very relevant to malls.

*** Fun fact, the non-math definition of an integer is “a thing complete in itself.” Poetic, isn’t it?

Memes From the Last Few Weeks

Personal Things from the Last Few Weeks

Listening to: Troye Sivan

Watching: Films at The Projector; most recently The Persian Version and Boy and the Heron

Reading: Inheritance by Balli Kaur Jaswal and Messy Roots by Laura Gao for two separate queer book clubs!

Eating: All the local specialties in Kuching, East Malaysia, where I went for a short vacation this week.

Drinking: Soy milk and grass jelly everyday, baby!

Nice thing I did for myself this week: Taking some time every morning to write leisurely in the Journal of Radical Permission while drinking my mushroom coffee, even when I’m feeling anxious to start working.

This year has honestly been too much, in every sense of the phrase. The fact that May graduation seems like three decades ago but feels like yesterday is a good indication I haven’t emotionally processed most of what’s happened so far.

I officially came out publicly this year, and am still finding my little feet in what that disclosure means as a queer person in a heterosexual marriage.

I returned to New York after nearly 4 years apart, quickly falling back in love with the city for being the same (electric and unabashed) while hating it for being the same (capitalist and blithely unequal).

I listened to friends, family, and peers as they entered new stages of life — postpartum depression, divorce, a mid-life crisis — and struggled to adapt in how I could show up for them as the Jenny of today, not the jerk with a veneer of “tough love” of my 20s, or the judgmental social justice warrior of my late 20s/first years of 30s.

I began an (extremely unelegant) polyamory journey where I’m learning the difference between being considerate of others’ feelings versus accepting responsibility for someone else’s feelings.

I saw the collective hush that fell over the world as genocide began in Palestine, the true lack of safety in the promise of “free speech.” I had never before understood gaslighting at this scale, 9/11 having been only a background reality of my early teens.

Being overwhelmed living abroad for the first time (but wait — do I even get to call myself an expat?) has been too easy of an excuse to avoid these awkward and uncomfortable transitions. When faced with minutiae of on-the-ground difficulties — like being unable to download the app I need to get into my apartment because I can’t change the country of my iPhone to “Singapore” because I don’t have a credit card issued in the country because I can’t open a bank account yet because I’m waiting for my medical clearance to receive my work visa — I’ve so far been too able to sidestep the (necessary, terrible) action of sitting, feeling, witnessing all that is unfolding.

Perhaps that’s the reason I haven’t written in so long. I’ve been embarrassed, feeling that so much has happened, yet I have pathetic little to show for it. When I compare myself to yesteryear, my old pieces seem so much more meaningful than my stagnant anxiety of today, the latent self-doubt from feeling reborn over and over. I’ve so desperately wanted to perform growth without actually growing, every time I sat down to write after a long procrastination, that stench — of self-protection, of avoidance, of dissonance — has overwhelmed my attempts.

So. This was a long-winded way to say, I’m trying to get back. Back to what, I don’t know exactly. A feeling of being myself in new contexts? A gentleness to allow myself to express what I feel, and enough forgiveness to let that expression be imperfect? Nostalgia winks that I had “all of that” once, but is that true? All I know is that for now, I feel ready to write again. I feel ready to give myself permission to not go anywhere perfectly or quickly, but just give myself space to move.

I’ll start today by revisiting the heart of what I teach, which is food (of course). This is a mini-lecture I’m really proud of and have not yet shared with anyone outside of those who attended in person. I do hope you’ll enjoy it (and maybe learn something too).

An Introduction to Food Politics

Hi everyone, thank you all for having me today. I’m Jenny Dorsey, a professional chef, author, and the founder of a nonprofit food think tank called Studio ATAO.  

Today, I’ll be talking about how the politics of food are all around us, quietly influencing our worldviews and shaping the trajectory of our lives.  

Our relationship with food has never been one based on passive consumption. Food continues to actively drive changes in human behavior and shape our society as we know it, because our relationship with food fundamentally informs who we believe ourselves to be, and how we should act in relation to other people. 

How? 

Number one: Food has long been a weapon to create “in” versus “out” groups. 

Some of the most avid laws created by colonizers in the Americas were on what white settlers could or could not eat. In this way, food became an extension of identity and morality. For example, it was believed that eating Indigenous foods would cause Spanish men to lose their beards and, thus, their masculinity and social standing.  

As historian Rebecca Earle captures succinctly,

“Food, in other words, helped distinguish Spaniard from Indian.

‘Indians aren’t people and cassava isn’t bread,’ runs an aphorism from colonial Venezuela.”

To assert dominance and rationalize colonial rule, Indigenous diets, which were primarily plant-based, including ingredients like nopales, as you see on the left, were forcibly replaced with European diets high in meat, wheat, and sugar. This remains the global norm today, a reminder for all of us that colonialism lives on through our everyday actions.

This use of food to ostracize groups of people is not some relic of the past. 

Consider the bat soup video that went viral at the start of COVID. Even if it was later debunked, its implicit messaging about the Asian diet – and thus, Asian people – created a narrative of danger and unwanted foreign influence at the height of pandemic fears. And the results speak for themselves: in 2021, hate crimes against Asian Americans rose 342%. 

Two: Controlling the food supply is the ultimate mechanism for controlling people, because food is a direct throughline to power. 

In the Great Plains, white settlers were actively encouraged to exterminate buffalos to starve Indigenous people of their ancestral food supply. In the span of just 10 years, the buffalo nearly went extinct, and Indigenous nations were forcibly relocated to new lands and subjected to eating rations of highly processed foods like flour, sugar, and coffee — which has had lasting, negative health implications on reservations.

When I speak of control, I don’t mean just physical – it is also mental, by controlling the narratives through which our society is built. And what is more core to the mythos of America than Thanksgiving? 

Every year, we actively lie to our children about some idyllic Thanksgiving between the Pilgrims and the Indigenous Nations that never happened. This is no accident: post-Civil War, our government desperately needed a political tool to regain control of a divided America. Thanksgiving became the perfect solution to not only project an image of unity, but quietly reinforce who exactly “America” was meant for.  

Three: Food structures our approach to social and economic problems. 

If I asked everyone here, “What is hunger?” we would probably have 50+ answers. Everyone has their own experience with hunger, so who can classify others as “hungry,” and what is the “right” solution to alleviate that hunger? 

Eliminating hunger is massively complicated, so the U.S. government has opted for something much more straightforward: filling a Calorie deficit. The concept of Calories were coined by chemist Wilbur Atwater in the 1890s, and subsequently turned a wide variety of foods into interchangeable widgets that do, technically speaking, stop hunger.

Pictured here is a popular international hunger relief tool, known as corn-soy blend or CSB, that is made from — you guessed it — corn and soy, and tastes like ashy cardboard.

Fixating on Calories allows our government to cognitively distance itself from addressing the larger systems that enable hunger, like poverty. Along with rejecting culturally relevant food as being less “efficient” for hunger relief, these are shining examples of the deeply engrained paternalism in how the U.S. responds to social problems.

Capitalism plays an important part as well. The U.S. just so happens to have a massive agricultural surplus of corn and soy, turning hungry people abroad into a new market opportunity. Domestically, programs like the Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP) allow giant agribusinesses to “donate” mass-produced foods made from these crops to low-income mothers, children, and the elderly in exchange for a tax write-off.

This abdication of responsibility by our government to ensure an accessible and nourishing food supply for its citizens has long been a fixture in American politics. As President Nixon famously said,

“Instead of government jobs, government housing, and government welfare, let the government use its tax and credit policies to enlist the greatest engine of progress ever developed in the history of man — American private enterprise.” 

From these examples, I hope it’s clear how much food informs some of our most basic structures in society: it organizes our social hierarchies, the development and enforcement of our laws, and the design of our economic systems. Food shapes our identities by telling us what version of ourselves is “right,” and what perspective we are meant to use when looking within, and at one another.  

These hidden messages behind our food mirror the “hidden curriculum” we often talk about in our schools. As educators, we have an opportunity to teach our students the very real power of food every time we think about food, read about food, talk about food, consume food, and share food with one another. It is our responsibility to acknowledge, embrace, and grapple with the influence food has had, and will continue to have, on how students engage with the world for the rest of their lives. 

So I’ll end with this quote from legendary Representative John Lewis, which I hope sums up the key points from this presentation:

“Food is not just fuel, it's information. It talks to your DNA and tells it what to do. Food can be a weapon of mass destruction, or a tool to create peace.” 

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After months of keeping mum about this, I can officially announce that I am one of the 5 National Geographic Explorers for the class of 2023-24!

Especially since this is an incredibly competitive program, I’m sharing my Nat Geo application (which is separate from my Fulbright application) for those interested in this fellowship for next year.

If this has been helpful to you, please consider supporting my time in Singapore next year with a donation!

A special thank you to Grant Stream-Gonzalez and Matt Kamibayashi for their edits on my application.

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National Geographic Grant Level I Application

Title of Project

Impact of State Interventions on Food Security: Investigating Access Via Hawker Centers & Wet Markets

Brief Project Summary

My research in Singapore will analyze two government-backed systems that address food access and security: hawker centers, open-air centers that house prepared-food vendors; and wet markets, markets that sell fresh produce, meat, and other raw ingredients. These centers are widely recognized as a meaningful part of the country’s “heartland heritage,” but their continued existence is threatened by shifting consumer attitudes and diminishing economic returns.

In the face of these challenges, I will study the impact of government actions supporting these two institutions since the country’s founding in 1965, and how they have influenced business outcomes for its vendors and food security for local residents. I will focus on three centers in ethnically, socioeconomically, and developmentally diverse areas: Tekka Market, Geylang Serai, and Tiong Bahru.

For National Geographic, I will utilize photo essays, written interviews, audio clips, and short-form videos to document the lived experiences of vendors and local residents. This will culminate in a set of 12 multimedia stories: 6 of hawker center or wet market vendors, and 6 of local residents. The National University of Singapore (NUS) has agreed to include these artifacts as part of their libraries’ permanent digital archives, available for students, faculty, and researchers in the future.

Through this project, I hope to expand awareness of the changing dynamics of Singaporean food, people, tradition, and governmental policy beyond academic circles into public consciousness.

Please describe what skills, attributes, and/or experiences make you uniquely qualified to implement this project.

As a first-generation, Chinese American chef with a diverse background in food service, I can relate firsthand to the joys and challenges of defining success as a food worker and entrepreneur with the vendors I’m hoping to build relationships with. As a food stylist and award-winning photographer who developed and executed visuals for 6 cookbooks, I possess the tactical skills to execute my proposed photo essays. I am also well-versed in short-form videos as a verified content creator on social channels such as Instagram and TikTok.

As part of my Master of Education, I was able to hone in and practice my application of critical theory as part of my nonprofit’s existing research methodology. Critical theory is a multidisciplinary approach to analyzing and challenging power structures that integrates qualitative and non-traditional research methods, including visual-forward ones like photography, to better understand how research subjects understand and relate to existing social hierarchies. Critical theory will inform my framing, design, execution, synthesis, and distribution of this project and its deliverables.

During my time at Harvard, I also worked with the Harvard Food Law & Policy Center to write several memos that will be used to shape future legislation. This experience strengthened my ability to understand and navigate food policy at all government levels, and will be instrumental in contextualizing my research on Singaporean food systems for a global audience.

Please describe your career goals over the next 5 years and tell us how receiving a grant from National Geographic will help you achieve them.

In the next 5 years, I hope to be in a leadership position within a public federal agency that oversees food and education-related Task Forces like the one on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health. I will apply my 11 years of experience advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion within the private food sector to transition into a public servant role that spearheads the implementation of new food-related interventions at a federal level.

I will leverage Fulbright’s non-competitive eligibility for federal positions to secure a role at an agency foundational to the U.S. food system, such as the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) or the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). My goal for researching Singaporean wet markets and hawker centers is to inspire new approaches to food justice. Given that the U.S. already has stateside versions of hawker centers and wet markets in the form of food halls and farmer’s markets, I believe there are many opportunities to learn from Singapore’s proactive approach to state interventions in the food supply chain – rooted in equity and self-efficacy – and adapt them for the American context.

My project with National Geographic will bring alive and make particularly urgent the need for wholesale food systems change in the U.S. While the core issues underpinning my research – inequitable food access, unsustainable margins for small food businesses, lost knowledge due to an aging entrepreneurial population, gentrification compounding the housing crisis, etc. – are not new, they are often alienated from the mainstream through academic texts, political news, or inaccessible reports. My project’s use of narrative storytelling will make these issues relatable and personal to a broader audience and spur renewed interest and enthusiasm for participation in food policy at the local, state, and federal levels.

I see my National Geographic project as a public proof of concept for expanding the type of research expressions at the future organizations I lead. To me, social justice is a concept that must be rooted in people and their relationships. Research methodology and deliverables aimed at improving social good should then magnify and highlight the humanity and beauty of its subject matter. I see this project as a way to introduce meaningful aspects of community building through storytelling using photo essays, first-person interviews, audio samples, and short-form videos as part of a holistic research process. I believe these integrations can provide vibrant new possibilities for the American government to approach food justice in personally attuned ways that more accurately reflect the varied lived experiences of the people within our shared food ecosystem.

Please provide background information and context about the issue your project will address. What is unique or important about your project and how is it different from previous work on this topic?

Detailing the changing dynamics underpinning Singaporean foodways offers an intimate glimpse into the tensions inherent in its broader society. Today, Singapore has 83 wet markets and hawker centers (with over 6,000 stalls) regulated by the National Environmental Agency (NEA) or its partners. Hawker centers are officially recognized by UNESCO as heritage sites, and wet markets by the National Heritage Board as a core part of Singapore’s “heartland heritage.”

Even in 2023, prices at certain hawker stalls remain below $1 Singaporean dollar, and wet markets offer more affordable fresh foodstuffs than most supermarkets. These impressively robust structures for food access and security reflect the government’s proactive planning. Shortly after the country’s founding, street hawkers were consolidated into centralized stalls for public health purposes; rent was subsidized to incentivize hawkers to stay and keep prices low. Many wet markets were explicitly built alongside public housing developments, to ensure residents of all income levels had reliable outlets for fresh food. In recent years, the state has also invested in efforts to upgrade facilities, digitalize wet markets, and improve the nutritional composition of hawker menus.

Yet, the future of these spaces is threatened by shifting consumer attitudes within an increasingly fast-paced and globalized society. In 2018, 38% of Singaporeans had not visited wet markets in at least a year, instead opting for the convenience of modern supermarkets with set hours and pricing. At the same time, vendors and hawkers are aging out; the median age is 59, and younger generations are more apt to join the white-collar workforce and sell the family business, instead of taking over.

Add onto this the pressures of being a small country with limited agricultural land, where the need for food security underscores policy focus and direction. The Singapore Food Agency (SFA)’s approach of the “three food baskets” to protect against food insecurity – focusing on diversifying the food supply through innovative solutions locally and abroad – raises questions if technological leaps may leave behind traditional wet markets, alongside the vendors and consumers whose livelihoods depend on them.

The ongoing evolution of hawker centers and wet markets in Singapore mediate a larger conversation about cultural preservation in the face of modernity, weighing legacy against socioeconomic mobility, and solidifying food security while maintaining equitable access. For my multimedia project, I will utilize photo essays, one-on-one interviews, audio clips, and short-form videos to showcase the lived experiences of vendors and local residents engaging with these spaces in uniquely personal ways. Food is a vessel for the stories of humanity; ensuring a future of food justice requires us to first understand our shared history to collectively create environments where the people and culture behind food can adapt and thrive.

There already exists important works like the book Wet Market to Table, guides like Makansutra, and research projects like On Hawker documenting the lives and knowledge contained within hawker centers and wet markets. My National Geographic project will contribute to this conversation through an ethnographic combination of visual, auditory, and written storytelling with concrete historical research and qualitative fieldwork. I aim to express the intersecting lives contained within Singaporean food culture and its full range of struggle, triumph, and perseverance against the backdrop of existential change. That way, my project can offer a path to both protect an intangible wonder of the world, while also taking part in actively improving it for generations to come.

Please provide a bulleted or numbered list of the objective(s) of your project with a short description of each, and how progress towards each objective will be measured.

Objectives should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound.

The final deliverable for this project will be a set of 12 multimedia stories (6 of hawker center or wet market vendors, 6 of local residents) in the form of photo essays, written interviews, audio clips, and short videos. In addition to being part of National Geographic’s portfolio, these stories will be displayed at NUS and permanently archived within their digital libraries. To achieve this, I will:

1.    Determine the progression of state interventions in hawker centers and wet markets (3 months)

I will work closely with my 3 professors at NUS to search its own institutional library, art and research databases, government archives, and public food-related collections to conduct appropriate background research. This will likely include in-person interviews with government officials from the NEA, National Heritage Board, and other food-related government agencies.

I will track my progress by working with a digital illustrator to concurrently create a visual timeline of the development of current hawker centers and wet markets. This is meant to offer a digestible, at-a-glance insight into how these spaces map onto the country’s origin story, immigration patterns, and cultural identity development. I will conclude this segment of work with a written literature review of publicly known information on the impact of state-sponsored interventions to date.

2.    Identify 2 vendors and 2 local residents per market center to be featured as part of my qualitative research (2 months)

I will leverage my local connections to connect with as many vendors and local residents at my research sites as possible. I will also set up a table stand at each center and spend dedicated time developing trusting relationships with vendors and residents. I aim to have signed memorandums of understanding (MOU) on their participation in the research process at the end of 2 months.

3.    Capture portraits, food photos, behind-the-scenes (BTS) photos, videos, and conduct in-person interviews (6 months)

I will focus on 1 vendor and 1 resident per month to deep-dive into their story and everyday life. I anticipate spending 5 hours to conduct 2-3 lengthy one-on-one interviews that will be recorded by video and audio. I will also spend 5-10 hours a week with each person to capture 3-5 portraits, 10-20 food photos (i.e., plated food for vendors, finished meals for residents), 20-30 BTS photos (i.e., process shots for vendors, lifestyle imagery for residents), and 1-2 hours’ worth of supplemental footage (b-roll) to be cut into 2 short-form videos up to 3 minutes long.

4.    Compile, synthesize, edit, and finalize research materials: 2 months

I will organize all the raw materials I’ve collected, then collaboratively review and curate them with my research participants to develop an accurate and engaging multimedia portrait of their relationship with hawker centers and wet markets. In particular, I will pay attention to if/how these interactions have been impacted by state interventions, and how they have changed over time. I aim to showcase their lived experience through the lens they want it to be told, versus my interpretation of their story.

I will use Otter.ai to transcribe interviews and student researchers to translate between languages. I will personally edit the interview audio clips and videos in Adobe Premiere Pro in tandem with executing the last month of step #3 above.

5.    Present findings at a public archival exhibition

I will work with NUS Libraries to host a public-facing event to showcase my research outputs from Fulbright and National Geographic. I will be inviting representatives of all government agencies I connected with, and they will build relationships with my research participants to hear and act on their needs. The exhibition will also be available online, with the videos being proliferated on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok to create bridges across generations.

Please provide a timeline and description of the activities, methods, tools and/or storytelling coverage plan you will implement.

Explain why you think these are likely to achieve your objectives, and describe any potential ethical or safety risks to your project and how you will mitigate them.

For the first three months, I will conduct a literature review to shape my own lens of research analysis. I will start with the government archives and NUS libraries, then ask my professors to connect me with local experts, like Kf Seetoh, and academics, such as Lily Kong and Vineeta Sinha (co-authors of Food, Foodways, and Foodscapes: Culture, Community, and Consumption in Post-Colonial Singapore).

Next, I will conduct vendor and resident outreach. I recognize that food security, access, and business viability are vulnerable topics that necessitate trust. From my work in community outreach for my nonprofit, I know that repeated exposure is an essential first step to normalizing a research presence within a new community. I will contact the NEA for approval to host a table at each research site to familiarize myself with the community (and vice versa). I hope to build trust by explaining my project goals through a values-based lens, focusing on the significance of using narrative storytelling to display the lived realities of people behind the otherwise abstract idea of cultural foodways.

Given the diverse ethnicities of the places I’m studying, I will utilize student interpreters in instances of language barriers. I also anticipate spending several months navigating the International Review Board (IRB) process with support from NUS before starting fieldwork.

From March to August 2024, I will interview, photograph, and video-record the stories of 1 vendor and 1 resident per month. I will approach my interviews with semi-structured questions, and have begun reviewing my questions experts to ensure cultural relevancy.

I will use portraiture, lifestyle, and food photography as well as audio clips and video as a kind of ethnography to convey how individual histories and perspectives impart their own contours on the Singaporean foodscape. Every human has an inherent, embodied knowledge of food, identity, and culture, and I hope to showcase these internal and external dynamics in uninhibited states. I have seen how different environmental contexts can alter a subject’s willingness and creativity in on-camera expression, and will collaborate with my research participants to curate intentional spaces for photo and video footage.

I have considerable experience in food styling and will continue my style of highlighting natural, small details in the frame to convey context and add nuance with minimal staging. For local residents, their routine diets will be captured as composed “dishes,” and their portraits and lifestyle snapshots a symbolic meal of emotions, to reveal the dynamism of food on individual identity.

I will combine my experience developing short, analytical explainer videos on food politics for my nonprofit with my experimental background in extended reality (XR) to script, storyboard, stitch, and edit video footage detailing the origin stories of vendors, and the corresponding influences demonstrated within the products or finished dishes sold at their stand.

From June to October 2024, I will compile, organize, and synthesize collected data, using emic coding to organically draw out themes and patterns. I will draw upon the tenets of critical participatory action research (CPAR) by inviting my research participants to co-design the qualitative data review process, and engage in consensus-based decision-making on how the results will be displayed and used.

Finally, my awareness campaign for the project debut will be rooted in community-centered preservation. I will likely host the exhibition in tandem with grassroots partners to build cross-functional coalitions supporting the longevity of hawker centers and wet markets.

Please briefly describe your stakeholders, how they are involved in the project, and whether you have existing media or dissemination plans with any of them.

We define stakeholders as anyone impacted by your work, such as local communities, professional networks, public/private sector, media outlets, students, or audiences. To help us evaluate the outreach component of your proposal, please add links to any websites, social media accounts, public engagement platforms, or other mechanisms you will use to engage your stakeholders.

1.    National University of Singapore professors, students, and Library

My Fulbright research proposal is co-signed with 3 professors at NUS. I will be meeting with them on a bi-weekly to monthly basis to refine my research plan, review findings, and adjust when needed. These professors each have their own focus areas that I hope to incorporate in some capacity: environmental policy, business leadership, and inclusive citizenship. In addition to acting as advisors, they have agreed to support my work by finding potential grants, offering the support of their student researchers, and providing access to NUS libraries and other physical resources.

2.    Singaporean Government

I will conduct interviews with government officials in the National Environmental Agency (which oversees hawker centers and wet markets), the National Heritage Board (which publishes research and reports on these centers), and the Ministry of Health (which has engaged in healthfulness campaigns with hawker vendors) to understand how they see these spaces integrating into the national agenda for the future. I will leverage my network to connect with these representatives. For desired interviewees that I do not have warm introductions to, I will conduct cold outreach through email, phone, and in-person meeting requests.

3.    Hawker Center & Wet Market Vendors

I will initiate cold (in person, via email) and warm (via an introduction from local peers) outreach to vendors I’m most interested in interviewing as part of my project. For those open to hearing more, I will set up times to meet, introduce myself, and walk them through my research proposal, objectives, their time/energy requirements, and compensation. My approach is rooted in collaboration and mutually beneficial engagement, and I commit to altering my research or documentation methods based on their feedback.

After a formal memorandum of understanding (MOU) of their consenting to be part of the research process is signed, I will spend approximately 5 hours a week, for a month, with 6 different vendors to capture all needed collateral to convey their story. I will ensure they can access all final collateral, invite them to the project exhibition, and promote them on social media (e.g., my own Instagram/TikTok, NUS, Fulbright, and National Geographic accounts). I hope vendors will see this project as a way to publicly preserve aspects of their legacy and connect with their local community.

4.    Local Residents

I will set up a table at my three research sites with a sign inviting local residents to learn more about and/or participate in my multimedia project. After telling each person about my research proposal, I will offer them several ways to engage: a 5-minute survey (manual or digital, unpaid, unlimited spots) about their interactions with that center, a 30-minute to 1-hour long interview (in-person or virtual, paid, unlimited spots), or the entire multimedia documentation process (5 hours a week for a month, paid, 6 spots total). Like how I approach relationship-building with my selected vendors, I will collaborate with residents to design a documentation process that feels values-aligned and consistently include them in this project's promotion, dissemination, and archival. I aim for my project to validate residents’ lived experiences, highlight their concerns and ideas, and model positive community engagement for future research efforts.

5.    Broader Singaporean Food Community

I have begun outreach to leaders and organizational / community hubs within the Singaporean food community. So far, I’ve met Tse Wei Lim, a former restauranteur writing a book featuring home recipes of various hawkers, and Angela Wu, owner of the local cocktail bar Nemesis. Others I’d like to connect with and ask to be my project's informal (but credited) advisors include Pamela Chia, the folks behind Everyday Tour Company, Kf Seetoh, Luke Tay, Khir Johari, and the academics I previously mentioned.

Describe all of the expected results of this project, its predicted impacts, and what success means for each stakeholder.

Results are defined as the deliverables that will be created during this project (e.g., academic/white papers, photographs, lesson plans, etc.). Impact is defined as the specific changes you hope to achieve (e.g., behavior change, greater understanding of an issue, improved management of a resource, etc.)

1.    Selection of 12 multimedia interviews (6 of vendors, 6 of local residents)

My goal is to bring alive the interviews I conduct with each person as a rich multimedia gallery comprised of 30-50 photographs, audio clips, short-form video, and printed quotes. These stories will be available digitally (via National Geographic and the NUS archive) and analog (via an in-person exhibition).

I view this project as an ethnographic snapshot of Singaporean identity today, told through people’s dynamic relationship with their food environment. Success would be conveying to the audience that food is a vessel for storytelling: by understanding what, how, where, and why Singaporeans eat the way they eat, we can more accurately address the power structures and social pressures inherent within every society. To my and my professors’ knowledge, a project of this nature does not yet exist.

2.    Series of 12 short-form videos (2 per vendor)

These mobile-native, 3-minute-long vertical videos will be part of both the multimedia exhibition and the online launch strategy. Each vendor will be featured in two videos: one will focus on their stall's origins and evolution, while the other will center around a dish or ingredient that represents who they are. Woven through their stories are reflections of their place in Singapore’s future, contextualized within the government’s stated national priorities.

These videos are meant to bridge the divide between academic research and mainstream engagement. By leveraging platforms like Instagram and TikTok, these videos offer audiences domestically and internationally a glimpse into each vendor’s personality, history, and sociocultural perspective. They are not documentary-style videos, but instead positioned as a casual conversation between community members. I hope this intimate, yet playful, celebration of vendors and their legacy can fuel continued public interest in preserving these cultural heritage sites.

3.    Literature Review & Visual Timeline

The first written component of my research will be a literature review of the Singaporean government’s interventions in hawker centers and wet markets and their impact on vendors and local residents. I will work with a digital illustrator to depict these efforts via a visual timeline. This timeline will be used as a starting point to introduce visitors (digital or in-person) to the rest of my project.

4.    Research Paper

My Fulbright deliverable will take the form of an academic text, analyzing the impact and efficacy of state interventions in hawker centers and wet markets on the axes of food security, access, and business outcomes. I hope my research can lend insight into potential strategic changes for the Singaporean government to direct funds and resources in ways that support the sustainability of vendors and local residents.

5.    Public Exhibition

To debut my research project’s inclusion in the NUS Libraries, I will host a public exhibition at the university in collaboration with a local grassroots organization to gather featured vendors and residents, their friends and family, government officials, project advisors and researchers, as well as the broader Singaporean food community to participate in a physical “gallery walk” through the multimedia artifacts. Success means that this event deepens relationships between the featured vendors and residents with key stakeholders in Singaporean society. I believe this exhibition and resulting discussions will foster a spirit of collaboration and mutual aid long past my departure from the country.

As a professional chef and social justice advocate, I know that mapping the interplay between food, individual/cultural identity, and politics is critical to understanding the trajectory and implications of human development across history. I believe my research will clarify the transformative nature of how humans relate to food for many more generations to come.

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Recent Meme Roundup

Personal Stuff from the Week

Listening to: Trip by Ella Mai

Watching: Princess Agents and it’s so cringe and yet, I’m still here

Reading: This intriguing piece about taste, recommended by

Eating: A beautiful spread of Chinese food made by my friend Helen!

Drinking: Watermelon juice as watermelon season comes to an end and all the melons are too soggy for plain eating

Nice thing I did for myself this week: Spent dedicated time just playing with polymer clay strictly for fun so I can have hobbies that don’t turn into semi-professions

Almost immediately into the process, I realized how woefully inadequate our current ideas of “mediation” are when evaluated with the principles of TJ. (If you’re unfamiliar with TJ, the most succint explanation I’ve found, paraphrased, is to address harm without enacting more harm, while building systems to prevent future harm.)

Our existing models of conflict mediation and/or resolution tend to fixate on responding to acute conflicts: it busies itself with identifying the what and maybe the why of the situation (versus the people involved), and measures success through creating some resolution all parties feel satisfied with (versus long-term growth of the people or relationships). This is by no means a knock on conflict mediation, but rather a learning moment for me that what I wanted to build was a framework for healing within the context of a conflict.

I’m still agonizing over what is the best language to describe this project. So far, I think “conflict transformation” comes the closest, though it’s not exactly that either. The term is currently being used to examine the structural process of moving away from destructive conflict systems and structures to creating ones rooted in peace and collaborative relationships. Whereas I hope my project can support in that larger goal, my focus in this work is about proactively caring for the individuals involved in conflict so they can heal in ways that allow them to avoid (or at least engage in differently) the same conflict in the future.

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Too often, I’ve found that we externalize harm as a specific behavior(s): something done to us, or something we do, instead of recognizing it as an extension of how we care for ourselves. When I am still hurting (even if it’s not outwardly visible) and I either don’t know how to or refuse to heal, I am bound to harm others. For example, a BIG trigger of mine is when someone says they are “disappointed” in something I did. I have lashed out and ended relationships, personal and professional, over the use of this word in contexts I did not believe were appropriate, without so much a warning to the other party.

To me, TJ cannot be realized in conflicts if there is no guidance for those involved to heal themselves, distinct and separate from the conflict. For me, a necessary part of healing is to understand and honor how my responses have served me in the past, while allowing myself the space to reconfigure them for the future.

In sharing this Guide, I hope it can nudge everyone reading to reconsider the conflicts that come into your life a little differently. Please know this is very much a WIP, because my learnings of conflict and TJ and the spectrum of life in-between is (and always will be) extremely incomplete. I welcome your ideas and thoughts on how this can be made more useful, or examples of your own that could enrich this process.

Finally, a note that conflict transformation doesn’t mean you are not allowed to have boundaries, and certainly does not condone violence in the name of committing to relationships. You are always the best judge of your needs, and sometimes that includes turning away from others to love yourself.

Overview

If you’ve never seen the desert, you might think there is little to no life amidst the dry sand and rocks. But those who live there have learned to recognize all the many different kinds of life that exist in the landscape. They have learned…to find water in many different forms — forms that are not always recognizable to others.

— Small Seeds, Mia Mingus

This Guide to Conflict Transformation at the Workplace is designed specifically for small teams with some baseline knowledge of restorative and transformative justice. It addresses interpersonal disagreements, frustrations, and tensions that can be transformed into opportunities for relationship-building — not personal or structural violence.

This guide is intentionally named Conflict Transformation, not Mediation, because it seeks to transform how all participants in conflict relate to themselves and each other — not just to resolve the acute conflict. Too often, mediation fixates on the logistics of conflict but not the feelings, harm, or trauma it brings up in people. Instead of helping, this prolongs the conflict into perpetuity because the underlying reasons why the conflict has prompted these emotions are never addressed.

Instead, this guide is about healing for all affected by conflict so that the disrupted relationship can be repaired and, hopefully, improved. Here, the focus is not on what transpired (although that will be addressed within the process) but its impact on each individual. The work we’ll do together is to care for ourselves and each other so we can heal, and thus be able to reevaluate the conflict through different eyes and find ways to grow through it.

This guide is deeply rooted in the spirit of Transformative Justice. Watching the below video is highly recommended to establish a shared context for the rest of this guide.

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🌞 Theoretical Grounding

What Is Conflict?

Conflict is the spirit of the relationship asking itself to deepen.

— Malidoma Somé

Conflicts, broadly defined, are interactions between people that result in negative feelings. Conflict disrupts and deregulates us on several levels: mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually. All types of conflict are meaningful and worthy of our time and energy to understand deeply, and engage in fully.

We are socialized to avoid, ignore, minimize, or “just move on” from conflict due to the discomfort it brings us. This discomfort is not born of conflict itself, but the fact that most of us lack practice in recognizing and acknowledging how we are responding to conflict, and moving through conflict with love.

Conflict brings up our most painful emotions: fear of abandonment, fear of annihilation, rage, panic, depression, isolation. Conflict also brings up our unprocessed traumas, structural and personal: ways we have been disconnected from ourselves, or parts of ourselves that have been made to feel unloved.

— Turning Towards Each Other, Jovida Ross & Weyam Ghadbian

This guide is meant to offer us tools to untangle conflict from the myriad of feelings it stirs up, so that all parties can more thoughtfully engage with conflict as an opportunity to practice self-love, compassion, and model how to nurture a continued relationship through conflict.

Conflict is a gift, if we allow it to transform us.

Conflict is not a problem, nor the result of something we’ve “done wrong.” It makes visible interpersonal dynamics that were not previously addressed in the ways they needed to be.

What Is Harm & Trauma?

Harm is both an action and a response.

• We can cause harm by undertaking behaviors — either intentionally or not — that result in others feeling negative emotions, such as fear, guilt, or shame.

• We have been harmed when certain actions — done by ourselves or others — prompt negative emotions in ourselves.

Conflict does not inherently need to result in harm. However, it is challenging to separate the acute conflict from the negative emotions it stirs up in us. As we continue to practice transforming conflict through radical love and acceptance, we can also grow to be more able to accept and engage with conflict without causing harm, or being harmed.

Trauma responses are mental, emotional, physical, and/or spiritual responses we engage in to protect us against extremely negative experiences. When a particular event overwhelms the healthy coping behaviors we know of at that time, our trauma response is enacted to shield us from threatening feelings like extreme pain, fear, hopelessness, and loss.

Trauma is not inevitable in instances of conflict, and conflict does not need to cause trauma in order to be taken seriously. Too often, conflict becomes traumatic because more harm is allowed to occur due to how the conflict is being managed.

Harm is especially prone to be turned into trauma when we engage in moral binaries in conflict: that there is a “correct” or “incorrect” way, a “right” or “wrong” person. Quite the opposite, we humans are fluid and messy, and being in conflict with one another does not deem us unworthy of love and growth.

What if we could see ourselves less as innocent, but as harmed and harming, more or less honest, more or less able to be conscious when triggered, more or less manipulative, more or less willing to take responsibility for our own change, more or less caught in patterns.

— Letting Go of Innocence, Prentiss Hemphill

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What Is Growth & Healing?

Growth is a series of changes we undergo as we become more able to care for our own mental, emotional, physical, and/or spiritual needs.

Healing is an act of growth as we develop ways to move through conflict, harm, and trauma while deepening the love we have for ourselves and others. By practicing healing ourselves, we can address the harm done to us without causing more harm.

You can only be the expert of your own healing, not of others.

— Fumbling Toward Repair, Mariame Kaba & Shira Hassan

The true goal of this guide is to help us heal our relationships. When we take stock of our needs and care for them, we can grow our capacity to help others do the same. This lowers the ability of conflict to disrupt our relationships, because we’ve already taken the steps to heal from the harm and/or trauma that tends to result from conflict. In order to heal, we must believe ourselves deserving of healing, and worthy of feeling peace.

Our and others’ healing are also part of structural healing, which is the growth of wider systems to support collective healing efforts. In order to fully address conflict and its related (or resulting) harms and traumas, we must understand and change the contexts in which conflict happens. This way, we can direct our future towards structures that reward positive relationship-building while preventing conflict from escalating to harm and trauma.

Growth through love and healing is radical in that it is rarely seen — and certainly not prioritized — in our existing society. As imperfect humans, the only way to realize the healing we desire is to practice. This guide is an effort to reframe every instance of conflict, small or large, as a way for us to practice our values.

I [have] realized that [the concept of an] enemy always serve a purpose. The war relationship is a symbiotic one in which the enemy on one side serves some need within the enemy on the other side…Whenever I catch myself thinking of someone as an enemy I ask, “What in me am I trying to avoid or distract myself from?”

Inevitably I find my own impotence, my own frustrations, my insignificance, my sense that nothing I do will ever really matter. Ultimately I find my own mortality and the seeming futility of most human endeavor. I find my own self-absorption, my resistance to setting myself aside and truly caring about the other.

— I Have No Need For An Enemy, Troy Chapman

🌱 Values

• No one is disposable

• Conflict is an invitation

• Relationships matter

• Accountability is love

• Trauma is not the same as growth

• We are always allowed to change

• We heal on our own terms

• There is no “one right way”

🪜 Full Process Steps

The full Conflict Transformation Guide is available on my Notion, linked under the paywall. At some point I promise I will find a way to make this freely available to everyone via Studio ATAO’s DEI offerings or Resources Library. Until then, please respect that I’ve spent a lot of time building out this Guide by not sharing the link.

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Weekly Memes

Just one themed comic this week 🥲 Shoutout to Jesse Szewczyk for creating some of the best cookie recipes I’ve ever had in his Cookies cookbook!

Personal Stuff from the Week

Listening to: Saving Light by Gareth Emery, Standerwick, Haliene (What a throwback. CW: bullying, suicide ideation)

Watching: Law & Order SVU x Organized Crime crossover episodes (I know…)

Reading: All my notes from the incredible Negotiations class I took during May term, Notion site coming soon!

Eating: All the goodies at the James Beard Awards in Chicago. (I didn’t win, but I did have a lovely time seeing friends + scheming how to keep pushing Awards leadership to listen to workers…)

Drinking: Licorice tea for my perpetually upset stomach, especially as my body attempts to eat itself once a month

Nice thing I did for myself this week: Stopped working at 5pm the other day! What a feeling!!!

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If you know me IRL, you probably know I’m allergic to celebrating any of my accomplishments. (Psychoanalysis? It feels scary and vulnerable to admit I really want something. So much easier to pass off achievements I’ve worked for with a shrug 🫠)

This particular milestone, however, felt a little different. It wasn’t about congratulating myself, but rather about giving gratitude to the team of people that have built this little organization with me, metaphorical brick by brick, with tools we’d never used before and a map we’d never been allowed to follow out in the “real” world. It’s been the kind of adventure that reminded me life really could be what we collectively dream up.

To honor the occasion, I wrote a little something for our newsletter that I am quite proud of and wanted to share with all of you here. It also serves as the announcement of our Mid-Year Fundraise — we’re hoping to raise $55,555 to celebrate 5 years — so if you’re able to contribute, that’s deeply appreciated as well.

🥹 5 Lessons From 5 Years of Growing With Studio ATAO

What a surreal title to write. When Studio ATAO hosted its very first event, Asian in America, at the Museum of Food & Drink in New York City, I was just shy of 28. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I’d never had a real mentor in my career, or even a good boss. Starting from my first job at the college newspaper, I was taught toxicity, hierarchy, passive aggression, and extraction. Even though I wanted change, I didn’t know how to create something different when I’d never seen caring, nurturing adult working relationships modeled for me.

I spent a lot of time looking for guidance externally. I read a lot of books, like Quiet, Art of War, and Principles. While those pursuits were fruitful (Quiet remains one of the most important books I’ve read), it wasn’t the work necessary to build something I felt deeply in my heart but never experienced. That, I’ve since learned, is deceptively simple: 

❤️‍🩹 I needed to heal myself so I could show up for others.

To me, Studio ATAO is a lot more than just my nonprofit baby. It is a space where I’ve been able to heal my inner child by developing the relationships that I didn’t think were possible, that I once didn’t believe I deserved.

It is the practice of finding power in saying, “I care about this, and that is enough for it to matter.”

It is an active rejection that I and others need to prove our worth in order to love and be loved.

It is imperfection, and thus celebration, of our whole selves — mind, body, and spirit — dreaming outside the limits of what we know.

As I step into the immense privilege of Year Five with this organization, I’m sharing a few learnings that have made this journey worthwhile.

1. Surround yourself with people willing to dream with you.

We are conditioned to think small and copy what we can see. For too long, I allowed myself to be drowned out by those who only knew love as “protecting” me from the potential downfalls of trying out something new.

🤔 Ask yourself: Does your inner circle have the capacity to imagine the world you want to build? Are they fluent enough in the language of your dreams to transport you there?

2. “Conflict is the spirit of a relationship asking itself to deepen.”

This quote by Malidoma Somé has taken on many forms for me: When I am in conflict with myself, I've learned that I’m ignoring something I already know. When I am in conflict with my work at the Studio, it means our efforts have drifted away from the collective vision. When I am in conflict with others, I’ve found there is something unhealed we each need to address. 

🧭 Accepting conflict as a teacher required me to see myself more clearly, recognize when I was (or was not) mature enough to navigate through conflict with others, and stop throwing away relationships to appease my own ego. Ultimately, social justice work is relational work. I've learned to go gently.

3. Playfulness is a radical way to engage with the world.

Playing is an act; playfulness is a state of mind. Even in the most nerve-wracking or painful of scenarios, playfulness is an option — but it takes a lot of practice to move beyond our protective instincts of avoidance, dismissal, or anger to engage with challenges as opportunities for creativity and connection.

🛝 Earlier this year, in the face of massive financial uncertainty for the Studio, I saw our team come together in a state of playfulness to find new solutions. Their joy helped me resolve feelings of deep shame, where little can grow. Instead, we filled a well of imagination from which came the idea of celebrating Interdependence Day on July 5!

4. Be aware of who you are performing for.

I lost so many years of internal growth and processing, attempting to perform what others were socialized to see as “leadership.” It was admittedly easier to follow the toxic status quo of aggression, retaliation, and dissociation (“keep your personal life separate!”) instead of leaning into my own values. As a result, my body absorbed that psychic tension, manifesting self-hate through anger, stress, and physical pain.

🌱 I'm still learning to stop contorting myself smaller, and instead seek my embodied knowledge as a guide. Instead of wondering, “Do others see me the way I want to be seen?” I’ve shifted my perspective to, “Am I showing up in a way that’s true to me?”

5. What you water will grow.

Activist Adrienne Maree Brown writes in Emergent Strategy,

“Where you direct your attention, you place your energy. Emotion follows attention. Attention follows intention. Intention determines outcome. And attention is the basis of all human and organic life. What you pay attention to grows.”

Once I began to pay attention to what I needed, my relationships changed accordingly. Those that did not nourish me faded away; those that did flourished as I invested even more into cultivating them.

🤔 Ask yourself: Who and what are the seeds you “water” daily with your attention, love, and care? Are these reciprocal relationships? What are you choosing not to invest in as a result?

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Recent Meme Roundup

Personal Stuff from the Week

Listening to: Space Jesus, a new find (for me)!

Watching: The Work and wow did I just bawl for 90 minutes straight

Reading: All of Jaya Saxena’s work (she recently held an AMA on Studio ATAO’s Discord!)

Eating: All the last things from Boston I can fit in my stomach — some recent highlights were sandwiches from Dave’s Fresh Pasta, Yume Ga Arukawa, and Vinal Bakery. For my graduation dinner, we all went to Pagu for an absolutely spectacular meal!

Drinking: Joey, my new replacement for MUDWTR.

Nice thing I did for myself this week: Slept in until 10am, baby!!!

Below is an excerpted version of a policy proposal I wrote for my Food Law & Policy Seminar class, taught by the brilliant Emily Broad Leib. It’s a continuation of a post from Studio ATAO last year that read, “There are no ‘unskilled’ jobs, only undervalued people,” and I promise you will be aghast at just how racist, sexist, and totally unfounded the entire premise of “unskilled” labor in our society.

Some sections of this policy proposal have been removed for brevity, so if you want the piece in full with sources, feel free to email me for a PDF. Admittedly, this is a tad…drier…than what you’re likely accustomed to from this newsletter; I tried my best to use the Smart Brevity framework to make this as painless as possible. I won’t be offended if you just scroll down for a meme instead 🥲

✅ Main Proposal

Remove the existing “unskilled,” “semi-skilled,” and “skilled” labor classifications currently used by the Department of Labor. Instead, utilize the existing Worker Occupational Categories to address federal worker policies.

🎯 Key Findings

The three-tiered “unskilled,” “semi-skilled,” and “skilled” labor classification system (“Classification System”) was born of racism and sexism.

The Classification System was introduced to the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) via its Statistics Department in 1910 by Alba Edwards. When the demographics of those working technically “skilled” occupations were found to consist of too many formerly enslaved folks as well as “children, young persons, and women,” it was enough for Edwards to “render the occupations semiskilled, even though each of them did contain some skilled workers.”

The Classification System uses arbitrary proxies to determine “skill.”

Delineations between skill levels draw upon ambiguous competencies such as “decision-making judgment” and complexity of tools and equipment being used, which are highly subjective. When contextualized against Edwards’ observations (above), and the disconnect between the federal DOL and workers on-the-ground, these fuzzy descriptors are more indicative of politically coded bias than insights into worker skill.

Other proxies include requirements for formal education, training, or years of experience despite rising degree inflation. For example, a 2015 study found that 67% of production supervisor job postings required a college degree – even though only 16% of the existing workforce had one. Again, these requirements are more indicative of employer preferences (or responses to social pressure) than the reality of skills needed for a particular occupation.

The Classification System impacts critical worker services, such as immigration and disability.

Immigration: It is difficult for “unskilled” workers to acquire citizenship due to their lack of “skill.” The 1965 Hart Celler Act, known for ending decades of discriminatory immigration policy such as the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, still prioritized “skilled” laborers. As a result, “unskilled” laborers are funneled into programs like the H2-A (agricultural) and H2-B (non-agricultural) visa program, both of which are rife with abuse and exploitation. Between 2000 and 2021, employers using H2-B visas stole $1.8 billion in wages.

Disability: The ambiguity of the Classification System makes it easy to deny worker benefits. For example, if you are an “unskilled” worker that has been farming for a decade, but previously operated a forklift (considered “semi-skilled), you can be denied disability benefits because the Department of Labor expects you to have transferable skills for other semi-skilled jobs, regardless of the realistic probability for you to obtain such a role.

The Classification System is not codified in statute or regulatory law but exists as an informal framework for the DOL.

An alternative, more robust occupational classification system already exists.

The DOL also uses Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system (e.g., food service, manufacturing) to understand the U.S. workforce. This contains 23 major groups with 458 broad-level and 867 detailed-level occupations.

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📣 Why This Matters

The Classification System stagnates worker pay and allows for mistreatment.

For immigrant workers, the difficulty of securing non-H2 visas for work in the U.S. pushes them into accepting H2 visa options riddled with low pay and precarious work conditions. Even for those with an H2 visa, workers are tied to their employers to stay in the country, enabling exploitation. Those unable to obtain H2 visas remain undocumented and are often paid less than the federal minimum wage.

For non-immigrant workers, the Classification System is used by the DOL to set industry standards for appropriate compensation for different occupations. For example, fast food workers are classified by DOL’s Occupational Information Network (O*NET) as “unskilled.” As a result, fast-food workers are some of the lowest-paid in the U.S. Even those working full-time live near the poverty line and require public assistance to access basic necessities like food and shelter.

Furthermore, the Classification System does not distinguish between workers of the same occupation who may be more skilled than their counterparts, hampering their ability to acquire higher wages. For example, dishwashers are classified as “unskilled” by O*NET. Even at the 90^th percentile, dishwasher pay is only $34,870 – less than double the 10^th percentile ($19,200). Compare this to carpenters, who are also manual laborers but classified as “skilled.” In 2021, the 10^th percentile earned less than $31,880, while the 90% percentile earned $80,940 – a 2.5x increase.

The Classification System undermines professions disproportionately made up of BIPOC and women. 

Many supposedly “unskilled” jobs are critical to a functioning society: cooks, domestic caregivers (childcare, elder care), farmers, janitors, cashiers, warehouse workers, and meatpacking workers, just to name a few. During the COVID-19 pandemic, these jobs were named “essential,” with President Trump even signing an Executive Order to keep meatpacking plants open.

These roles were historically occupied by children, enslaved or previously enslaved folks, immigrants, and women explicitly because they were viewed as sources of free or cheap labor. Continuing the Classification System perpetuates a cycle of undervaluing these essential job functions and widening the racial and gendered wage gap. In 2019, the median Black worker earned 24.4% less per hour than their white counterparts; in 2022, women earned 18% less than men.

The Classification System is known to be an indicator of social mobility.

Sociologists and historians regularly “use occupational statistics to create an index not of economic specialization, but of ‘social’ mobility.” The implementation of the Classification System starting with the 1910 Census was part of the Bureau’s effort to differentiate workers based on social and economic class – not just what industry they were part of. “Owners” were further differentiated from regular “wage workers” as part of this.

The Superintendent of the Census, Francis Walker, described the “social value” of the statistics as indicative of “the habits of a people, their social tastes, and moral standards.” Edwards echoed these sentiments, using occupation as an “all-purpose indicator that would describe the total life experience of a worker and his family.”

This self-fulfilling prophecy still stands today. In 2021, the CEO-to-typical-worker pay ratio was 399 to 1. White families have nearly 10x the wealth of Black families. Even after workers retire, social security is calculated based on average monthly earnings across a worker’s lifetime and perpetuates financial instability for those in low-wage jobs.

⏮ The Backstory

The “unskilled,” “semi-skilled,” and “skilled” labor classification system originated in the early 20th century as a way of more accurately capturing the productivity of the American workforce. Since 1820, the U.S. Census Bureau has been collecting data on the occupations of both free and enslaved people across the agriculture, commerce, and manufacturing industry. By 1870, the data was offered at geographical cross-sections (e.g., cities and states) and subdivided according to ethnicity, age, and gender. In 1890, the Census Bureau also attempted to include unemployment figures in the report.

Given the rapidly changing nature of the workforce due to the Industrial Revolution, the occupational classification system was significantly reorganized in 1910. The Census Bureau introduced two new questions: one concerning the worker’s industry (e.g., agriculture), the other on their position (e.g., “employee,” “employer,” or “working on own account”). It was also at this time that the manufacturing sector was divided into “specified occupations,” “semi-skilled operatives,” and “laborer” – part of the basis of today’s Classification System.

At the Department of Labor, Alba Edwards had taken over the statistics department, where he initially introduced six “Social Economic Groups.” Three were reserved for the “professional” or “mental” workforce (i.e., today’s “white collar” workforce), which were not organized by “skill” but rather factors like “property, credit, and business and executive ability.” The term “skill” was only used for manual laborers, or where “muscular force” was paramount. “Skilled” workers referred to tradespeople, while “semi-skilled” meant apprentices and machine workers, and “unskilled” were laborers and servants.

In 1930, 14 million people worked in just four “unskilled” occupational groups: agriculture, domestic work, factory labor, and “other” – compared to just 7.9 million in the “semi-skilled” occupation. Race was a leading indicator of this divide: 75% of all African Americans worked in “unskilled” occupations versus only 20% of non-immigrant white Americans. Agricultural work formed the largest group of “unskilled” laborers – unsurprising given its deep history of slavery. The wealthy and influential in the U.S. who made their fortunes from plantation economics have always had a vested interest in keeping agricultural work as close to a system of slavery as possible. The Classification System was a way to do just that.

Against the backdrop of the Great Depression, the occupational data collected by the Census Bureau became the subject of additional scrutiny. Occupational divisions were introduced, explicitly dividing laborers within the same industry along socioeconomic lines. “Owners” were now distinct from “workers,” and the “unskilled,” “semi-skilled,” and “skilled” designations initially meant for just the manufacturing sector had extended beyond to other “mental” workforces. An additional major change happened in 1940 with the elimination of the “manufacturing” sector, replaced with “proprietors,” “craftsmen,” “operatives,” and “laborers.”

The U.S. has operated on this classification system since then, implicitly shaping social expectations of “blue-collar” versus “white-collar” workers. Although the actual difference between the required “skill” levels in these positions has been, at best, fuzzy from the beginning, the wage divide between “unskilled” versus “skilled” laborers proves that perception can often trump reality. In 2021, the Economic Policy Institute found that the wage gap between low-wage workers versus high-wage workers had nearly tripled.

Today, the Classification System affects all parts of workers’ lives – from their immigration status to worker pay and benefits to disability services and social security payments. Just as enslaved or formerly enslaved people, women, and immigrants made up the “unskilled” categorization more than a century ago, the same marginalized groups still comprise the bulk of our “unskilled” professions. As we continue to see looming worker shortages in these “unskilled” roles that cannot be immediately automated, the industries that have relied on these workers are digging deeper into our incarcerated workforce. The National Restaurant Association, for example, just received a $4.5 million grant from the Department of Labor to train incarcerated young adults with the technical skills for food service work.

🏁 The Bottom Line

The Classification System in the U.S. draws from a history of racial, gendered, and socioeconomic divisions that continue to divide our workforce today. The outdated and harmful language of “unskilled” work fails to accurately represent essential work performed by the vast majority of the U.S. workforce. Changing the Classification System is a crucial step toward recognizing and valuing the dignity of all workers.

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Weekly Meme Roundup

Only one meme again, I promise we’ll be back to 5 in the summer. But in all seriousness…where is the least toxic place for me to get my Ph.D. in food, identity, and social justice?

Personal Things from the Week

Listening to: Seven Lions in preparation for his concert in May!

Watching: Parts Unknown: Singapore in preparation for my upcoming Fulbright research year abroad.

Reading: A whole lot of queer theory as I work on the second chapter of my book proposal, titled Fruity As Hell: Food As Power & Subversion in Queer Protest.

Eating: Had an incredible meal at Umami Omakase in celebration of receiving the Fulbright scholarship!!

Drinking: Bitter melon tea for my stomach, which is the first thing to protest when I’m stressed 🫠

Nice thing I did for myself this week: Began making dinner reservations in New York City because ya girl is headed back to the Big Apple for the summer!

This is the essay that was meant to be published via Narratively back in 2018, but the prose struck my editor as “unnecessarily anthromorphosizing food” and was subsequently hacked at until it fit their parameters of what a personal essay “should” be like.

I was too fresh of a writer to argue back then, but now I feel a deep sense of sadness for not standing up for myself. This style of writing — my style of writing — is just as valid as the supposedly more “professional” piece that ran.

When I read this piece from the rearview, I almost envy its messiness, its imprecision of hurt, its frantic grammar longing for what’s next. I’ve learned that writing while in pain is very different from writing after being in pain. This presents a major conundrum for creatives who would like to preserve their mental health, all the while knowing that translating feelings into a new form is something that must happen in the present.

I don’t often read this piece because it still makes me cry. I hate realizing I’ve repeated the same mistakes I memorialized instead of triumphing over them. That I’m still overcome with insecurity whenever my writing takes on personal inflection, as if scrubbing my paragraphs clean of emotion were a measure of validity. That I feel deeply alone when I dream up new dishes, upending my entire kitchen in pursuit of an idea I can’t even explain.

Perhaps some works are meant to exist precisely because they are raw. Perhaps they are not meant to heal us, but to remind us of how we live.

But some things have changed, and my body is still playing catchup. My parents and I have reconnected, and our relationship is stabilizing. I came out as bi to my partner, and we just celebrated our 8th anniversary.

This piece also formed the basis of my TEDx, and comparing this piece to my speech, I’m really proud of how I’ve developed my voice in a way that still feels true to me. So today, I’m republishing this in hopes it’ll encourage someone to keep writing in whatever style they fucking want.

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If you were served shame for dinner, what would it taste like?

For me, it starts with candy ham and the scent of summer. I’m 6. It’s my first day of camp, and the breeze of wood fire and pine trees gives the night a gentle warmth. I stab a thick slice of ham with my fork, hungrily wishing for chopsticks and thinking how odd it is to serve food so large and impossible to eat.

My teacher grabs my hand and waves it in the air for everyone to see. She’s angry, but I’m not sure why. “We do not eat like this. We have manners.”

I’m 11, and it’s summer again. I’m screaming at my mother, who refuses to let me buy school lunch. “We can’t afford it,” she pleads. Our household income has risen above the subsidy levels, and yet, we’re poorer than ever. “Well, you aren’t a very good mom then!” I cry because I win the argument; I cry because I can’t admit I despise burgers, nachos, and every other school lunch I’d tasted. That day, shame tastes like the shepherd’s purse wontons I wouldn’t see again for years.

Ask me at 21, and I would answer that shame tastes like sweet and sour sauce. I’m in culinary school this summer, and our class is hot and harried attempting to cram all of Chinese cooking into two days. Stewarding forgets our Shaoxing wine, star anise, Zhejiang vinegar, and a whole slew more, but it’s no matter. As I attempt to resuscitate my peer’s sweet and sour sauce, my instructor assures me, “I know just what you need.” He means ketchup, a whole can of it. “The best Chinese chef I know told me this is the secret to all your food.”

Next to him, my classmate scoffs. “Oh. I should’ve known.”

Presented in a dish today, shame sits in a metal lunchbox. Inside are many of the same things I once scarfed down in a bathroom, gentrified into something clever and expensive. Garlic chives, the newly discovered secret to Chinese cooking that has the unfortunate side effect of smelling like farts; freshwater eel, but no barbecue sauce to mask its robust flavor; duck tongues, white snow fungus, and mealworms round out the lot.

It’s a small dish, just three bites, over quickly like the insults and the whispers, but the flavor, I know, lingers uncomfortably in the back of everyone’s throat. Over the years, I’ve learned to embrace the unpredictable guest reactions to these types of dishes. No matter how many times I host popup dinners, I’ll find myself at the pass, staring into the crowd, frozen with uncertainty. There’s usually an uncomfortable delay of silence, then a light murmur, and every so often, someone laughs with a relief that seems to answer, “You have felt this way? Yeah, me too.”

I used to think cooking was about making people feel good. Food, as it was lauded, was the great equalizer. If I made something others found pleasurable, I could cherry-pick a new narrative of myself and include only what I wanted to show. I joined fine dining in search of how to make that perfect plate, the one that could open the path of who I could be.

Plate after tiny plate, I peered onto the delicate surfaces of herbs, gels, and caviar constructed by other chefs to see what it reflected in them. For many of the chefs I long admired, years of hard labor manifested itself in restraint. Every so often, you could taste their exhaustion, but more common was beautifully manicured food, breathing inspiration and decadence.

I watched as guests marveled at the dishes, at the chefs, and how all this glorious food made them feel satisfied and important too.

But what about everything else? I came into restaurants to run away, but my stories demanded a voice of their own. Perhaps they didn’t fit the boundaries of four-hundred-dollar tasting meals with suits and heels, but I couldn’t deny they lived in me and deserved some recognition. If anything, there is beauty in creating imperfectness, food that isn’t free from the blemishes of struggle, pain, and loss.

I can taste regret too. It’s warm and rich, reminiscent of chicken korma and spiced basmati rice. My former roommate and best friend is cooking — a sight so rare, I furtively check if it is April Fools. “I skipped class because I burned the chicken and had to start over,” she admits jokingly. She’s on the brink of failing that class, and I vaguely consider telling her to get her priorities straight. The whole dinner seemed so sudden to me, but she had been planning it all week as a way to say thank you — for me, for our friendship, even if I would quickly prove maybe I never deserved it.

For some, art may be catharsis, but I find food to be a magnifying glass. As I toast fenugreek seeds and stir them into lamb jus, I think about how stupid I was to let my opinion about her boyfriend destroy our years-long relationship. I think about all the angry texts I sent her as I drank and pretended I didn’t care. I let the mixture envelop shucked mussels for three days, and when I pull them out, they are cool to the touch but spicy hot at the same time. When I close my eyes and take a bite, I hear us laughing, lugging a half-broken TV into our apartment, and my heart hurts.

Cooking doesn’t need memories to bloom, either. There are lies; lies we tell ourselves, and lies we tell other people. Looking back, that’s sweet and fermented, like beer mash in a latte. It’s 2am, and my marriage is near collapse. My two dogs are quivering under the dining room table.

“I knew this would happen,” my husband accuses me. He’s so calm and direct in all the ways I’m not, sputtering and storming around the kitchen in a fuzzy blue robe. “All I could see on your face when I proposed was fear.”

He’s right, but I can’t admit it to myself yet. I was looking to be sure, and I wasn’t back then, I wasn’t right now, and maybe I never would be.

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Reconstructing that today, lies are soup. Necessary nourishment for the mind that’s treading water. I make some to house one giant, fluffy matzo ball that likely doesn’t meet the bare minimum to be named such a thing. There’s duck fat and Chinese pork sausage, baking soda to keep it afloat, bathing in a pandan broth with charred ginger. Some may say cultural appropriation doesn’t exist, but I respond that substitutions surely do.

In the end, there’s no conclusion. I’m not yet at the age where I can resolve all these stories, and I’m learning that pressing fast-forward means there’s no rewinding and reminiscing later. So I let things continue to trail forward, like my parents, whom I haven’t spoken to in over two years. My mother writes me an email every few weeks, chirping about her new plants, as if we speak daily. My father takes a different approach: he demands an apology for my lack of communication. My grandpa passes away, and the funeral is finished before I’ve constructed a suitable answer. I finally type a reply to my grandmother, who is asking me to come to make wontons and forget this mess, but I never hit ‘send.’

I’m plating it now, erratic strokes of fermented raspberry and sticky honeycomb with a waxy taste that never quite leaves the palate. There’s smoked bone marrow in ice cream form, powerful and unctuous, with the strange feeling something is missing. I finish with a chrysanthemum cake I still haven’t mastered, every version a surprise in density. I send it out to the crowd as I reckon with my imposter syndrome, the frustration of my food always feeling so out of control, of learning and forgetting who I am over and over again.

To me, food is meant to express who we are now, not just who we want to be. I find the most inspiration in little moments, where no one is watching us, and perhaps more importantly, we aren’t watching ourselves.

The moment when I saw my art this clearly was no ostentatious affair. It’s midnight, and I’m watching the Executive Sous Chef of a two-Michelin-starred restaurant juice a few oranges over pork butt, followed by a swig of Coca-Cola. She winks at me, “That’s why they keep me around – because I make the good food.”

We share a laugh. “It’d be nice to have a dose of these Filipino flavors on the menu,” I venture quietly. She snorts, loudly. “This type of food is for family meal.” The air is sharp as she wraps up the hotel pan and heads to the walk-in. I say nothing, struggling against some unreachable question about how it feels to grow up somewhere but never belong.

Today, I wonder what her story of shame tastes like.

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This piece will also be featured in the upcoming issue of Havard Education School’s magazine The Appian Way.

Just one meme this week because I am also crumbling under the pressure of 7 classes and full-time work 🥲

Personal Things From This Week

Listening to: Asian American Alternative (created by my fellow HGSE-er, Matt Kamibayashi)

Watching: Paris is Burning (and bawling the entire time)

Reading: Still finishing Crying in H Mart in between my class readings

Eating: I was up in New Hampshire last weekend to tap a maple tree (for maple sap → maple syrup) and had a nice meal at Trillium Farm to Table in Laconia, NH

Drinking: Aplos — especially nice with Topo Chico

Nice thing I did for myself this week: Spent a luxurious weekend day not working or doing schoolwork! Incredible.

A few weeks ago, I received exciting news that I’m a semifinalist candidate for a Fulbright fellowship in Singapore!

If you’re unfamiliar with Fulbright, it’s a government-sponsored program for U.S. citizens to study, research, or teach abroad. I’m applying to research hawker stalls and wet markets in Singapore, and how they have influenced food (in)security in the country. If selected, I’d be working with three professors at the National University of Singapore to document and analyze the impact of Singaporean governmental interventions in these two areas since the country began (1965).

Similar to why I posted my successful Harvard Statement of Intent, I’m openly sharing my full Fulbright research proposal for anyone who is interested in the program. No gatekeeping of applications here! (Also, contrary to popular belief, you can apply even if you’re not a student, so I encourage everyone to consider it if researching abroad is a dream of theirs.)

Special thanks to Bruno Villegas McCubbin, Agustina Ollivier, Grant Stream-Gonzalez, Jim Coffman, and Ayelia Ali for their support in the application process. Shoutout to the folks who wrote my letters of recommendation: Edric Huang, Mykim Dang, and Abbey Stone.

I’ll find out about my final status in April, so keep your fingers crossed for me!

Project Title

Impact of State Interventions on Food Security: Investigating Access Via Hawker Centers & Wet Markets

Abstract / Summary of Proposal

Every country takes a different approach to ensuring food access for its residents. I’m proposing my Fulbright for Singapore to analyze two structures of its food system as potential models for improving food security in the U.S.: hawker centers, open-air centers that house prepared-food vendors; and wet markets, markets that sell fresh produce, meat, and other raw ingredients. I aim to understand how state interventions supporting these two institutions have affected food access for local residents.

Hawker centers emerged in the 1960s as street hawkers were consolidated into centralized stalls for public health purposes; rent was subsidized to incentivize hawkers to stay and keep prices low. Many hawker centers and wet markets were also built by the government alongside new housing developments, so residents had reliable outlets for fresh and prepared food. In recent years, the state has also invested in efforts to digitalize wet markets and improve the nutritional composition of hawker menus.

As a professional chef and social justice advocate in the food industry, I’m intrigued by these alternatives to U.S. food aid. Unlike programs like food pantries and SNAP, hawker centers and wet markets readily adapt to customer choices, carry little stigma, and serve as a throughline across socioeconomic groups. I want to investigate if this approach is fully responsive to the needs of local residents, and if so, what interventions have made a long-term impact.

Synthesizing how public policy affects outcomes at hawker centers and wet markets can improve future legislation in Singapore while offering a new framework for developing food policies in the U.S. My long-term goal is to apply these learnings as a public policymaker.

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Statement of Grant Purpose

The design of food policies affecting how people are able to acquire which foods, where food is distributed, and what food messaging is embedded into mainstream media carry long-term implications for the relationship between individuals and the state. My research seeks to understand the impact of government interventions within the food system to support those facing food insecurity, and if these policies ultimately deliver on their intention to sustainably improve food access for local residents.

I’m proposing my Fulbright specifically for Singapore to analyze the efficacy of two culturally and politically significant institutions of its food system in regards to food access: hawker stalls, or open-air centers that house a multitude of prepared-food vendors; and wet markets, or open-air markets that sell fresh produce alongside meat, fish, and other raw ingredients. As of 2013, there are 107 hawker centers (with over 6,000 stalls) and wet markets across Singapore. Even in 2022, prices at certain hawker stalls remain below $1 Singaporean dollar, and wet markets offer more affordable fresh foodstuffs than most supermarkets. Given that the country is home to four major ethnic groups, these spaces have also evolved into state-sponsored entrepreneurial centers that can intuitively and appropriately respond to diverse needs.

In addition to overseeing these two institutions (through the National Environmental Agency or NEA) and conducting regular inspections, the Singaporean government has repeatedly intervened to improve their atmosphere and food offerings. Since 2001, the Hawker Centres Upgrading Programme has renovated centers with anti-slip floors and better sewage and ventilation systems. During COVID-19, the Infocomm Media Development Authority launched a campaign to digitalize wet market vendors so they could sell via mobile apps; the NEA offered cash assistance, rental waivers, and subsidies for services like centralized dishwashing; and the Community Development Council distributed resident cash vouchers to be redeemed at hawker stalls. Alongside formal policy, the state uses soft power to influence directionality. In 2014, the Health Promotion Board introduced the Healthier Dining Programme encouraging hawkers to provide at least one healthier menu option; over 2,700 stalls participated.

I aim to build off existing research on the evolution of hawker centers and wet markets to analyze the impact of government interventions on these two institutions, and how those policies have affected food access and security for local residents. The National University of Singapore (NUS) has invited me to conduct this research with the joint support of three of its faculty members from their Business School, the Communications department, and the Yale-NUS College Environmental Sciences programme. My faculty champions will connect me with the agencies involved with hawker stalls and wet markets, supervise the NUS students supporting me in archival review and translating interviews, and offer feedback through the lens of their own areas of expertise.

Over a period of 10 months from August 2023 through May 2024, I will examine the interventions the Singaporean government has undertaken since the 1970s (after the Republic of Singapore was established and economic activity began to rise) to standardize and invest in hawker centers and wet markets. In the first three months, I will interview government officials and review historical archives of existing synthetic research to document and categorize past interventions in three hawker centers and wet markets: Tiong Bahru, Tekka Market, and Geylang Serai. These interventions will be organized into groups such as, but not limited to: financial aid, press and messaging, resources/training, and land use. For each category, my interviews will pay special attention to the strategies for amassing public and political support for these policies. In efforts to understand how consumer perception of hawker centers and wet markets have changed over time, I will also track how, when, and where mainstream media was deployed to influence the uptake and acceptance of these state interventions.

I will then review quantitative data (e.g., sales revenue, foot traffic, stall permits, stall turnover, physical improvements) to determine if there exists a correlation between interventions and the overall success of those centers in the months or years afterward. I’ll also interview multi-generational hawkers and vendors for detailed accounts of how these policy decisions impacted them at a business level. Seeing these centers are a critical source of livelihood to its vendors, I seek to understand the role of ancillary entrepreneurial resources provided by the government in their overall job satisfaction and stability.

In the remaining months, I will conduct qualitative research by interviewing ethnically diverse residents living near these three hawker centers and wet markets. These will consist of one-on-one interviews over the period of a month, small focus groups, and in-the-field observation, to understand the power of these structures on everyday consumption patterns. I plan to use an inductive reasoning approach to ask detailed questions assessing if there is an observable influence on residents’ feelings of access and ability to acquire nutritious food for themselves and/or their families. To appropriately compare across mixed research methods, I will develop a common qualitative coding system to draw out key themes, and utilize case study logic to offer nuanced examples of how these institutions influence daily food decisions.

I am a professional chef, author, and speaker who regularly teaches the politics of food to public and private organizations, and I have carried out similar field-specific research through my nonprofit think tank since 2018. Our research has subsequently become foundational aspects of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in leading industry organizations such as Vox Media and Dotdash Meredith. I am also gaining formal academic experience in emancipatory research and ethical research design via a Masters of Education degree from Harvard University. Thus, I am well aware of the challenges this type of research faces, especially in acquiring research subjects; I will leverage my own, NUS, and volunteer networks to establish mutually beneficial, trusting relationships with vendors and residents I hope to study.  

Food is an inherently political arm of the government, and I believe the results of my research will be salient across both Singaporean and U.S. contexts. For Singapore, surfacing the dynamics between food, culture, and public policy will be meaningful in shaping future legislation targeting food insecurity in the context of different racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups. I will be working with NUS Libraries to create a digital archive and showcase rooted in my research, and hope to secure an audience with representatives from NEA to present my findings. I do recognize food security is a sensitive issue for the Singapore government, and will tailor my approach to appropriately align with the state’s priorities in these areas.

Despite the differences in government structure and resident demographics, I believe there will be translatable aspects of my research to offer convincing new perspectives for embedding self-determination and self-governance within existing food aid programs in the U.S. Seeing we already have stateside versions of hawker centers and wet markets in the form of food halls and farmer’s markets, I am eager to adapt my learnings about successful state infrastructure and interventions to enhance, expand, and evolve these spaces. Ultimately, I hope my research can further bilateral conversations between the U.S. and Singaporean governments about effective systems-level interventions in each country, and together allow us to co-create more equitable foodscapes across geographies.

Host Country Engagement

I commit to advocating for positive change in the Singapore hospitality industry through grassroots initiatives. I will start my search through the People’s Association, a government agency that promotes cross-cultural social cohesion. For example, volunteering with Residents’ Committees at the sites of my research seems a natural first step toward building rapport with the community and grounding my work in a sense of place.

I also plan to connect with organizations like the Hawkers’ segment of the Federation of Merchants’ Associations to find localized and worker-led efforts. I can see that the hospitality community in Singapore and U.S. face certain parallel issues, and believe my experience implementing more equitable standards within the U.S. food system, alongside my academic background in food and politics from Harvard, will be useful in mobilizing with future colleagues on the ground.

For example, the generational loss of hawker stalls as another wave of owners retires is similar to the decline of Chinese restaurants in the U.S., with second and third-generation children pursuing other careers. Gentrification is another common theme: rising rents in popular locales are pricing out legacy businesses, altering the fabric of those neighborhoods.

To deepen my relationship in the hospitality community, I will also stage (i.e., apprentice) at several hawker stalls. As a chef, I know that working service together is an important trust-building exercise. I will document this educational experience using various media to digitally preserve this part of Singaporean heritage and generate interest worldwide. Given hawker centers’ UNESCO status, I hope this can be part of the National Geographic Storytelling Fellowship.

Plans Upon Return to the U.S. 

After working to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion within the food, I want to transition into a public policy center like the Food Policy Institute, then move into a Task Force, like the one on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health, charged with implementing new interventions.

My Fulbright experience will deepen my critical analysis of state considerations in addressing residents' food needs. Beyond food insecurity, I aim to evolve our nation’s perspective of food as a construct of power, influence, and control.

There have been talks of a Council to coalesce the 20 federal agencies handling food legislation. My dream would be to lead this Council through a social justice-based lens, so future policies can dismantle inequities in our incarceration system, immigration law, and public education currently perpetuated through food politics.

Personal Statement

Food tells us where we belong. At least, I know it did for me. As a first-generation Chinese American, how I learned my place in the world was in relationship to food: where I sat at the dinner table; who I could linger with during lunch at school; what flavors, textures, and presentations were acceptable, and “good”—and which ones were “different,” like me.

What I ate not only shaped others’ perceptions of me, but also my own understanding of identity. Through the nostalgic dish of tomato and egg my parents often made, I found myself in a generation of immigrants belonging to a cultural nowhere: too disconnected from my “home country” to find solace in it, too foreign and racialized to transition seamlessly to the U.S. From the bruised, mushy watermelons and blackened bananas my grandpa persuaded me to eat by calling them “best-in-class,” I learned the realities of social mobility in the U.S.—and how essential it is to maintain pride and dignity in the face of both hardship and aid.

The unspoken rules of food are real-world manifestations of the power dynamics underpinning our relationships at every level. Controlling our food supply, policy, service, and culture have far-reaching implications, it has become my life’s work to embed a thorough consideration of food politics into decisions within the private and public sector. At 21, I left a comfortable career in management consulting and a Columbia MBA to pursue culinary school and a career in the food industry. Working in restaurants for 60 hours a week, for $9 an hour, while living in the most expensive city in the U.S. put in sharp relief how food is used as a political tool. The U.S. hospitality industry was founded on enslaved labor and is still reliant on an undocumented BIPOC workforce. It is by design foodservice workers are categorized as “low-skilled,” making pathways to naturalization difficult: this legal precarity renders workers unable to leave, even in the face of poor wages and workplace conditions.

I, however, did have the opportunity to leave foodservice. This arbitrary privilege was not lost on me; I dived into the social justice world, starting a nonprofit community think tank called Studio ATAO that advocates for more equitable standards in food, beverage, and hospitality. Our first initiative focused on issues in food media: we spent two-plus years collaborating with leading food publications to improve guidelines for their journalism and workplace policies.

But food issues do not exist in a vacuum. As Studio ATAO expanded its capacity, I’ve led us to take on more entangled and systemic subject areas. This year, our key project examined the relationship between hospitality businesses and gentrification. Our research brought up questions that reached into social and legislative issues like housing, law enforcement, and the nonprofit industrial complex. This led me to embark on two interrelated paths: one to create a meaningful food education that takes a political perspective, and the other to enter the public sector.

I am pursuing a Masters of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in preparation for both of these goals. My time at HGSE will equip me with a deeper understanding of how individuals learn, and I am actively implementing learnings into Studio ATAO’s Food Systems 101 curriculum. Fulbright is my step toward the second path, exposing me to new frameworks for considering future policies to sustainably address food insecurity.

In my 2020 TEDx talk, I asked the audience what it would mean to recognize “food’s faculty in highlighting the complexities – and often hypocrisies – of human relationships.” I want to build a future where food is not absolved from its political implications, but embedded in both diplomatic and legislative decisions. From my social justice career so far, I’ve learned there is only one slow, deliberate way to make this a reality: By changing one conversation, one person, one relationship at a time. I look forward to using my Fulbright as an opportunity to do just that.

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Sources

Khor, R. (2022). Singapore's Changing Wet Markets. BiblioAsia, 18(1). Retrieved from https://biblioasia.nlb.gov.sg/vol-18/issue-1/apr-to-jun-2022/singapore-changing-wet-markets/#fnref:44

National Heritage Board. (2018). Our Wet Markets: An Insight Into Singapore's Heritage Markets. Retrieved from https://www.nhb.gov.sg/~/media/nhb/files/resources/publications/ebooks/nhb_ebook_wet_markets.pdf

Channel News Asia. (2018, May 21). Heritage and Gentrification: Is there a win-win for neighbourhoods? Retrieved from https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/heritage-and-gentrification-there-win-win-neighbourhoods-1029601

My Business Asia. (2020, December 18). Singapore's Hawker Culture added to UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage. Retrieved from https://mybusiness-asia.com/singapores-hawker-culture-added-to-unesco-list-of-intangible-cultural-heritage/#:~:text=Since%202013%2C%20the%20median%20age,for%20hawkers%20nationwide%20remains%2059.

Pelago. (2021, February 16). Singapore Hawker Culture: From Past to Present. Retrieved from https://www.pelago.co/articles/singapore-hawker-culture-unesco-heritage/

Singapore Food Agency. (n.d.). Singapore Food Security Despite the Odds. Retrieved from https://www.sfa.gov.sg/food-for-thought/article/detail/singapore-food-security-despite-the-odds

Lai, V. (2021). Wet Market to Table: A Modern Approach to Fruit and Vegetables. Singapore: Epigram Books.

Makansutra. (n.d.). Makansutra. Retrieved from https://makansutra.com/

Yeo, I. J., & Lim, J. S. (2017). On Hawker Prata: A Multimodal Approach to Singaporean Food Culture. Appetite, 114, 157-167. doi:10.1016/j.appet.2017.03.032

Forward Singapore. (n.d.). Home. Retrieved from https://www.forwardsingapore.gov.sg/

Wong, J. (2012). The Hawker Heritage of Singapore. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 18(5), 496-510. doi:10.1080/13527258.2011.652254

The Straits Times. (2021, May 18). One-off $500 injection for NEA-managed hawker centre and market stallholders. https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/consumer/one-off-500-injection-for-nea-managed-hawker-centre-and-market-stallholders

Ripoll-Guillén, M., González-Torre, P., & Adenso-Díaz, B. (2021). Analysis of Food Sustainability in Hawker Centers in Singapore: Challenges and Opportunities. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 5, 740780. doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2021.740780

Liu, R. (2016, June 30). Serving up a solution to Singapore's retiring hawker sellers. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-singapore-food-hawkercentre/serving-up-a-solution-to-singapores-retiring-hawker-sellers-idUSKCN0ZK0BW

Tan, J. (2020, May 12). The Singapore government and BLKJ are bringing wet markets online. The Drum. https://www.thedrum.com/news/2020/05/12/the-singapore-government-blkj-are-bringing-wet-markets-online

National Geographic. (2019, June 27). Why UNESCO is honoring Singapore street food. National Geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/why-unesco-is-honoring-singapore-street-food#:~:text=Singapore's%20iconic%2C%20but%20endangered%2C%20street,stand%20sells%20charcoal%20roasted%20duck

HPB. (2018, May 4). Healthier Dining Programme extended to include food in hawker centres and coffee shops. Health Promotion Board. https://www.hpb.gov.sg/newsroom/article/healthier-dining-programme-extended-to-include-food-in-hawker-centres-and-coffee-shops

Reuters. (2019, January 11). Not cheap or cheerful: Singapore hawker centers struggle with new business model. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-singapore-food-socialenterprise/not-cheap-or-cheerful-singapore-hawker-centers-struggle-with-new-business-model-idUSKCN1P90IP

Avieli, N. (2017). Review of Food, Foodways and Foodscapes: Culture, Community and Consumption in Post-Colonial Singapore by Lily Kong, Vineeta Sinha. Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, 32(2), 432-437. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44668429

Memes from This Week

Personal Things From This Week

Listening to: Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel

Watching: Haven’t started yet, but Carol is next on my list for when I have a moment!

Reading: The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness (back on my YA research!)

Eating: Some bamya I made the other day!

Drinking: Some Châteauneuf-du-Pape (arguably my fave AOC?) I purchased from Wegman’s — my first time shopping at Wegman’s!!!

Nice thing I did for myself this week: Wow have I slept a lot this week! The luxury! Nearly 7-8 hours a night!

On Sundays, I have a ritual. I go to Los Angeles’ Chinatown and queue up behind the aunties at Shang Lee Poultry for a freshly killed, just-plucked bird. Even in the “winter,” there’s a line of visors and sunglasses as I stand quietly and listen to overlapping Mandarin, Cantonese, and occasionally Spanish, too. When I reach the counter, I order my usual: a single yellow chicken, please.

The woman at the cash register picks one, raw and sometimes just a glimmer wet from cleaning, from a gray bus tub to her right. Its small, lean body — complete with a head and claws — in a loose, clear bag looks so fragile compared to the bulbous ones at the supermarket, wrapped so tightly in plastic as if to prevent escape at any moment. The taste is incomparable: This chicken’s flesh is bouncy when cooked, its bones offering a broth no lighter than molten gold. Most glorious of all, I must butcher it; faction off its feet, still studded with toenails. Drive my cleaver between the neck and wishbone. Glide my knife against the ribs until it whistles gently to release each miniature breast.

I can’t quite remember when carving and cooking a Sunday chicken became my way of reconnecting with my work in restaurants. The process has become akin to sending a love letter to all those I’ve been able to cook with, perhaps born of nostalgia, but now evolved into something else entirely.

It’s an invisible ode to all the things never displayed to customers, who likely focus on the frenetic pace of the expeditor’s station, the glow of warming lamps as a chef conducts a symphony with the ticket machine. “On the fly,” I bet they overhear, or “right now, right now!” or maybe, if they are listening carefully, “popup birthday, PX.”

Those are memories, too, but the details get fuzzier as the time between then and now stretches on. What is the right machination of letters to describe the sound of the ticket machine? It used to feel like an Etch-A-Sketch into my basic bodily sensations. What is the name of those barely absorbent disposable napkins we spritzed with cool water to layer with fine herbs and flower petals? Where again is the perfect cutoff level to maximize the filling in a giant pastry bag, while still maintaining enough clearance for a hearty spin to remove air pockets?

But preparing this chicken, slowly, carefully, brings texture back to my recall in a way even eerily accurate shows like The Bear or dystopian imaginations like The Menu simply cannot. The things I miss are just not that spectacular, like walking in at 6 a.m. with only the hum of the HVAC reverberating against stainless steel.

Or darting over to the dish pit and spraying down the blade of the Robot Coupe (by far my least favorite kitchen appliance) with a nozzle outfitted with water pressure I only wished my shower at home could match.

Or standing on a milk crate and peering into a massive tilt skillet for a bone broth steam facial, the smell already easing my pre-service hunger.

The satisfaction of getting a perfect stroke of the squeegee during mid-shift clean. Emptying the last of the flour, miso, xanthan, whatever it was for mise with a sigh, only to nail the recipe grams and be spared going to dry storage to open another bag.

The things I miss are feelings, a hard-to-translate language I’m no longer well-practiced in. So I curl my knife into the little hollow crevice of the chicken’s oyster cavity, examining how much precious meat I’ve left behind. Scraping it clean, I almost think I can hear the buzzer of the Rational oven again, feel the punched-out grooves of the anti-fatigue mat under my feet.

I don’t know if it’s quite accurate to say I miss it. I do not miss coming home full of bitten-back words I’d wished I could retort back to rude customers and incompetent sous chefs, inhaling half a box of Triscuits and hummus for a 2 a.m. post-shift dinner. Or foot pain like walking on a ball of rubber bands that snap and break, leaning against the prep table to slip off my Crocs for the barest moment. “You look great!” My non-restaurant acquaintances would say to me, like clockwork, roughly a month each time after I started cooking again. They can see the fatigue in my eyes and are trying to say something nice. “Yeah,” I would agree wearily, “it’s the starvation diet.”

These are people who can grill a perfect scallop over a binchō-tan with just a metal offset, or sear a ribeye to a beautiful 130F on an induction burner that beeps aggravatingly every time the cast iron leaves its surface for just a fraction.

They are dreamers who write poetry and recite it quietly at the garde manger station. “You should compile it all and publish a book,” I had said. “Maybe after I save enough to move home,” was the reply.

They are the observant peers who looked the other way when I kept eating precious leaves of ice plants during prep — a mix between being hungry, a new “clean eating” goal, and really liking ice plants — and brought me some trail mix the next day.

They are tough bosses who are unendingly kind and wise. During my first externship, I attempted to take an enormous pot of hot stock downstairs by myself out of a misguided desire to prove something. The sous chef stopped me as I crouched down, ready to blow out my back for my ego. “Trust is what makes you strong,” he said, and we carried it downstairs together.

They are women who look out for you, and offer you a wry smile when you start becoming more upset than usual about being assigned that one task you always try to avoid. “Motrin?” she had asked. I didn’t need any, but it made me laugh. Tweezing off the barest of whites from the thin membrane of egg yolks was far better when you felt understood.

Making this Sunday chicken, I imagine how my past coworkers might like the dishes I’m concocting. The salt and vinegar chicken wings would be a hit at family meal, I know. The gingery chicken breasts probably, too. I shake my head thinking of how I would convince the few wary eaters to try an herbal soup with ginseng, goji berries, angelica root, and watermelon rind. One day I swear I’m going to make a former peer’s stuffed chicken thigh with vermicelli noodles, but that was before Instagram, and I never wrote down their contact information.

Now prying off a singular roast chicken tail, hot from the oven — a little indulgence I always save just for me, before the rest of the roasted carcass goes into the stock pot — I wish for all my restaurant brethren this same gentle joy I am experiencing, however it looks for them, wherever the kitchen life has led them. Of being carefree enough to bask in perpetually perfect LA weather on my little patio for a few moments, to pet my dogs, and to eat a crispy, fatty little triangle of chicken delight — bone and all — and simply be.

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This Week’s Meme Roundup

Personal Things From This Week

Listening to: Lil Nas X

Watching: Shut Up And Paint — it’s excellent!

Reading: Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner for Studio ATAO’s book club!

Eating: Oleana — one of the more delightful meals I’ve had in Cambridge so far!

Drinking: Just ordered Joey, fingers crossed I like it!

Nice thing I did for myself this week: Bought a new alarm clock that gently wakes me up with light and ocean wave sounds so I’m not constantly getting jolted awake full of anxiety by my iPhone!

High fever, severe stomach pains, diarrhea, and splotchy red rashes – the symptoms of typhoid fever are hard to miss. Spread through exposure to contaminated water, oysters became the unwitting cause of an epidemic of typhoid fever that ravaged the country in the late 1920s. In New York City alone, 150 people died in the winter of 1924-25. As news spread of sewage sludge sharing the same waterways from which oysters were harvested, what was once a food embraced by the masses were quickly and decisively regarded as public enemy number one.

Oysters, however, were not the only food under public health scrutiny. Unsanitary meat processing practices highlighted in the (fictional) book The Jungle (1905), spoiled milk, and botulism outbreaks had thrust food safety firmly into the public eye. With the rise of the home economics movement that blended “professional business” with “domestic affairs,” the concerns of the woman’s “home sphere” soon grew to encompass a wide range of social issues, like food safety, water quality, and child labor.

It just so happens that the oyster industry managed to encapsulate all three.

Food had been a central instigator for women’s movements dating back to at least the French Revolution (1789-99) when women marched to the Palace of Versailles in response to drastic food shortages. Before the passing of the 20th Amendment, suffragists used hunger strikes as a way of capturing both public attention and sympathy. (In 1914, journalist Djuna Barnes even staged a “forced feeding,” a common government response to hunger strikes, to elicit support from outraged readers.)

When it came to foodborne illness, women-founded organizations like the National Consumers League (NCL) and Federated Women’s Clubs mobilized women to influence politics, even without the right to vote. The NCL conducted grocery store inspections and compiled a codebook that demystified food labels and expiration dates (which at the time were only known by store owners), setting the stage for what would be the 1906 Food and Drugs Act that banned misbranded or adulterated food, beverages, and drugs. Even at local levels, women were shaping legislation: physician Esther Pohl Lovejoy in Portland, Oregon, was able to successfully change milk regulations after publishing her paper Impure Milk and Infant Mortality in 1910.

Part of women reformers’ cache in advancing their sociopolitical charges was using what is now called “maternalist politics.” That is, framing the specific societal ills as moral challenges necessary to be addressed by women – with special attention paid to the motherly bonds underpinning their demands. Child welfare not only nestled perfectly into this larger message, but commanded immediate, emotional reactions.

The Industrial Revolution of the 1870s had dramatically changed the landscape of cities across the U.S., and demand was surging for low-paid labor. In 1900, 18% of all American workers were under 16. Only 51% of white school-age children and 28% of their Black counterparts were enrolled in school, as more and more young children went to work in factories, processing plants, and coal mines instead. At oyster processing companies, children were paid as little as 60 cents a day (roughly $10 today), and women not much more.

And where were all these oysters headed, exactly? Whole, shucked (chilled and uncooked, marketed as “raw”), as well as steam-cooked (or “canned”) oysters, were loaded onto specially-designed “oyster cars” to be delivered, by rail, to faraway states of the U.S. west like Arizona and Wyoming also hit with the oyster craze. It was another mundane activity that hinted at major changes in store for the women’s movement: the growing economic and political power of the western states, and the Democratic Party’s appeals to draw in this new voting bloc.

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Long before women formed the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) in 1904, state-level women’s groups like trade unions had been agitating for minimum age laws. Massachusetts was the first state in 1836 to pass legislation requiring workers to be at least 15 and attend school 3 months a year, later following up in 1842 with a limit of children’s work days to 10 hours. But these rules were rarely enforced in practice, pushing women to demand oversight at a federal level. Fortunately for them, the expansion of government power over social issues was a key theme in both Republican and Democratic politicking of the time. 

Initially, Republican policies of the 1860s and 70s to enact federal aid for social services like the railroad, universities, and (primarily white) western settlers were met with resistance from the Democrats. But when the unintended impact of these policies largely benefitted larger companies – banks, rail conglomerates, manufacturing factories – instead of individuals and small businesses, the Democratic Party began to espouse more values of social justice in an attempt to win over those same western voters now frustrated by the lack of governmental support. A similar tension was unfolding in the post-Civil War south, where the same Republican Party that championed to end slavery was quietly condoning Jim Crow laws and the Black Codes. With both parties testing out the rhetoric of federal responsibility to attract western and African American voters – while attempting to avoid alienating existing white men voters – child labor was an issue that reached across the aisle.

In 1916, Democratic President Wilson signed into law the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act after much campaigning from the NCLC. This banned the sale of products that had been made with labor from children under 14 – notably making it illegal for interstate trade of these goods. It was quickly struck down by the Supreme Court – staunchly pro-business at the time – and replaced by the Child Labor Tax Law (1919), which taxed the net profits of employers using child labor. (This was again declared unconstitutional in 1922.) Under Republican President Coolidge, the Child Labor Amendment – a proposal for expanding Congressional power to “limit, regulate, and prohibit the labor of persons under eighteen years of age” at a federal level – was submitted to the states for ratification. (It was only ratified by 14 states.)

Despite these setbacks, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s term, social justice – and especially labor protections – had become a firm part of the Democratic platform. With his political reinforcement, significant changes like the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act – which prohibited “oppressive child labor” – and the landmark West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish decision – which granted backpay to a woman named Elsie Parrish on the grounds of a new minimum wage law being signed into Washington state law – were finally instituted.

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Contrary to the standard narrative of suffrage dominating the early feminist movement, the triangulation of food, water, and child protection in women’s issues had taken root well before the second wave of feminism in the 1960s. Keeping with food safety and child protection, water quality concerns were encapsulated within calls for clean and sanitary kitchens and homes. This was in stark contrast to existing norms, where dumping human waste from buckets and bedpans onto city streets was routine, and waterborne diseases like cholera and yellow fever being transmitted from nearby waterways were also common.

One of the very founders of the home economics movement, chemist Ellen Swallow Richards, was also the first person to systematically test local waters for pollution, per request by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1887. Of the 20,000 plus samples of drinking water she generated in the two-year span, a shocking number was identified as being polluted by industrial waste and sewage. (In response, sewage treatment facilities began to open across the country, starting with Lowell, MA.) Richards’ use of the term “ecology,” and especially “home ecology” (which was later replaced by “home economics”), soon became a defining feature of her work and values; rather than referring to the passive study of relationships in nature, she advocated for analyzing how humans were changing (and often damaging) their environments –and inevitably affecting their quality of life.

The deteriorating image of the city due to outbreaks like oyster-induced typhoid in 1925, combined with growing concerns about rapid deforestation and depletion of environmental reserves due to large-scale industries like timber or natural gas, catapulted the conversation of conservation (intentional, respectful use) or preservation (protection from use) of natural resources onto political memos. Over a million women across the country joined women’s clubs, each with specific committees dedicated to preserving outdoor habitats and purifying urban environments. (These predated the Sierra Club, which was founded in 1892 and is now the nation’s largest environmental organization.)

Yet these same activists – white, middle and upper-middle-class white women with the money and connections to access media and politics – actively excluded Black and Indigenous women from their efforts. In 1902, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs – which served as a network for various women’s clubs – refused to accept Black suffragist Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin on account of her representing an all-Black (versus an integrated) women’s club. The erasure of these perspectives has had lasting implications on the trajectory of environmentalism to this day: issues of contaminated water have been generally resolved in majority-white areas, but potable water remains an issue in places like Flint, Michigan, or along the (prone to leaking) Dakota Access Pipeline on Indigenous reservations in South Dakota.

The same romantic renderings of scenic “American wilderness” that drew public support for the creation of city-level, State, and National Parks also carried with them distinctly racist undertones. To establish National Parks like Olympic in Washington state, the Indigenous nations of the Hoh, Jamestown S’Klallam, Elwha Klallam, Makah, Port Gamble S’Klallam, Quileute, Quinault, and Skokomish were forcibly removed or denied entry to areas they once lived, hunted, or used for community and ceremonial purposes. There lies an inconvenient irony that much of the need for Olympic conservation came about due to settlers’ exploitation of the fruits of the land, including waterways once brimming with the native Olympia oyster; yet to achieve this goal, the original caretakers of the land “must” be pushed out.

In cities, large plots of land were carved off for new urban parks, built to channel the pastoral energy of the countryside, and situated at the edges of cities where working-class residents would have difficulty reaching them. For its newly-appointed protectors, the idyllic wilderness – natural or human-made – constituted a physical and metaphorical escape from crowded cities full of non-white, lower-class bodies. But that isn’t to say all the outdoors were white spaces: getaways like American Beach in Florida were havens for (more affluent) Black Americans during the Jim Crow era, and have since been assimilated into the National Park Service thanks to MaVynee Betsch (aka The Beach Lady)’s tireless environmental advocacy.

While perhaps not in the most flattering way, the humble oyster once again proved resourceful in highlighting the complexity and extensiveness of women’s activism in early feminism. Their work on these fronts continued well into the 1960s, when another electrifying debate sharpened the movement’s focus: reproductive rights.

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Read Pt. 1: Recipes of A Certain Class

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