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Tasting my way through
Fiji
From Fiji
This photo series reflects on my relationship to space in the Greater Toronto Area and transnationally to Hong Kong, as a queer gender-fluid disabled Asian person through food.
Food has always been meaningful to my life. It connected me to the spaces where I ate the food in, as well as to spaces in stories that come from those I eat the food with. Food has been a way of making and building space. Sometimes it’s intimate kin-ship space from coming together with my community, family (chosen or biological), lovers (or failed lovers) and those I share loving relationships. Food has nourished movements and political dissent when I shared tea and snacks with fellow disability activists in the wee hours of the morning figuring out how we can make space, or convince the university or government official to make space for crip bodies/minds/senses. Food has also created intergenerational space when my elders in my family share stories tied to the food that we’re eating together. There’s a pedagogy I’ve learned through food. However, food has also been a site of struggle against curative, racist, and fat-shaming violence. When kids would make fun of me for the “weird, smelly, Asian food” my mom would pack for me (the school was predominantly white). When my parents and relatives would send me all sorts of foods considered to be healing in Traditional Chinese Medicine to “fix” my neurodiversity after I acquire a traumatic brain injury. Or when my biological family tells me that I need to eat less, or that I shouldn’t eat this or that.
White Rabbit
My neighbourhood in Markham, at the edge of the Greenbelt, was really white. I was literally the only Asian kid at school. Every time that I would bring candies, not just the White Rabbit candy, but candies I got from Hong Kong or my dad brought back for me when he came back to visit, the kids would always want to try the candy. Weird and complicated emotions come up as I think about this, because bringing candies like this, that are markedly foreign, to a very white space at my elementary school, was something that also made me stand up more as a foreign body. Bringing candy for my classmates was something that always generated some pleasant interactions. Candies are really meaningful, because they kept me safe in another way.
I've actually had chalk written in front of my house saying go back to China. That was late elementary school or early high school, I can't remember. Later on I found out it was my neighbour's younger kids who did that.
Eating with my Ancestors: “One Brick of Fu Yu” and a house full of intergenerational memories
My mom always tells me this story, about growing up poor in Hong Kong. My maternal grandparents came from wealth, but then communist revolution happened and their stuff was all confiscated. They fled to Hong Kong from Guangzhou. My grandfather actually lost his life very early doing hard labour in a Chinese mainland prison for being caught smuggling food and money to his relatives on the other side. My grandmother raised a family of five children by herself. They lived in the outskirts of Kowloon Walled City for a while, then moved around. So the whole family of six including my grandmother, depending on how well off they were that day, all they would have for dinner was rice or congee and a single brick of fu yu (fermented bean curd). My mom always tells me about how one single brick of bean curd was what her family survived on, whenever I wouldn't finish my food as a kid.
I've matured and realized that it's also really meaningful to think about the conditions my mom grew up in. They used to be squatters. From what I understood, their first house in Hong Kong was a six foot by six foot single room building, made of wood that my grandfather put together himself. Then he passed away and the government wanted to redevelop that land and made my mom's family leave. So I guess that's gentrification. Eventually five kids and my grandmother settled on the rooftop of another building, and they built a tit paang uk (iron shed). A very flimsy metal shack, thinking about Hong Kong humid weather with typhoons, is hot and tiny for the family of six as they shared one single brick of fu yu. You can see the size compared to the chopsticks, how tiny it is and how that sustained them for many of their meals.
Fu yu is actually a food that I really like. It's super salty and it's pretty tasty with congee. But every time I eat it, I also think of my mom’s stories and I feel as if I'm eating with my ancestors or my mom's memories. There's just so much history that goes into that. So that's why I created two pairs of photos with almost the same shot to represent what happened in the past at the home that my mom grew up in, and the home I’m living in right now.
Have you eaten yet? Food is medicine, medicine is food
Since I was young, I've been taught that what I eat isn't just food, it’s also medicine. I was actually a really sickly child with all sorts of allergies and malnutrition. I was asthmatic too, so my parents have always been giving me different types of food that's supposed to help fix my health conditions. There is nothing that reminds me more of my identity as Hong Kong Chinese Canadian than jung yeuk (Chinese herbal medicine), which is also food.
Food aside, bed as a space makes me think of home, as I spent a lot of time in hospital beds after my accident of being hit by a car. I guess you could say that at one point home for me has been hospitals. For most of my high school, I was in bed and literally didn't have the energy to be in class while my brain was recovering. I was put on Western medicines like amphetamines to raise my energy enough that I could go to class, but it had many bad side effects. But with these herbs, the side effects aren’t as noticeable for me.
The absent body here is also quite meaningful. It's like another world for me because I've been exposed to so many different kinds of medicines given what my body has gone through. So to me, this is one of the marked ways to differentiate my Asian identity and the Western world that I live in. They're both kind of like nested worlds. It's like my Chinese world is nested inside the Western one, kind of like the way that I and my body should be nested in the bed. It's still a part of it, it's not outside, and they're not detached. But they're still different, parallel worlds; one in which medicine is food, and the other where medicine sees the body differently. Medicine that targets problems to be treated, to be fixed.
Chinese New Year: Awkward Questions and Heteronormativity
This is a pretty simple fare, just my sister, my brother in law, my niece, my parents, and myself. New year and home is pretty significant for myself as a queer Asian woman, because new year is also the time when we usually have to get together with extended relatives. When my relatives asked awkward questions in the past like “when are you going to get married? Are you seeing anyone right now?” Those questions are always awkward for someone who's not hetero, or even for someone who's hetero, but extra awkward for someone who's not hetero. For myself as someone who identifies as ace and aromantic, it's definitely awkward because how do I explain that I have absolutely no desire to ever nest with anyone, and I'm just going to be single forever because that's just my orientation?
New years for me, it's supposed to be harmonious as we sit at a circular table and share food together in round bowls. There's no square plates on the table. It’s supposed to be a harmonious time but only harmonious if you fit cultural expectations, and your identity as heterosexual and not queer. Because Chinese New Year is very much about being together with your family, family prosperity in general, and things alike. So it's very much about home. But what if you don't feel at home in this family?
Salad Days: Asian Identity & Fatshaming
This is what a lot of my meals look like since 6 months ago and I have lost 20 pounds. The reason I did this actually was for medical reasons because I was borderline diabetic, so the doctor asked me to go on a low carb diet. But there's so many issues. Our medical industry is kind of very fat phobic. Almost every time we go to the doctors, the resolution is often to diet right, especially for women.
I've always grown up being fat shamed by my family and people around me, but also in the representations of people that look like me on TV. Whenever I go to Hong Kong and meet with my relatives, they're always suggesting that I lose weight and things like that. As a curvy Asian woman, I constantly feel like my diet is to please my own community. And it's weird because my community also is such a food loving culture, yet there's a lot of focus on women on being skinny. When talking about food and health, the conversations always run into “oh that's great that you've lost 20 pounds, but you know you can lose more.” For someone like myself who builds muscle really easily, it's always been a struggle because no matter how little I eat or how strict I keep my diet, I always look bulky. It's gotten to the point for me, even though I have grown up, every time I want a snack I'm always kind of sneaking into the kitchen and putting things back exactly where they are, because I'm worried about who's going to see me and what comments are going to be made.
There is a cultural imaginary of the East Asian woman being petite and slim, and that's the Western narrative of her. But as an East Asian woman, I also feel like that's a narrative my own culture favours. Sometimes it's not just about conforming, but what I eat also becomes a sign of resistance and authorship over what I want to do with my body.
Tasting Ghosts Hao Gwai
A lot of times when I make traditional dishes, my parents always tell me that it tastes hao gwai, which means “kind of white” and where gwai literally translates to ghost but is a Canto colloquial for westerners or white people. They don't use the word bland or mild, and they tell me that it tastes like quite gwai. I just find it interesting that when I make food, I swear I learned how to make it from my mom, but somehow it tastes different and white. It's like eating with ghosts, kind of like how Western culture haunts my body and everything that I do.
I use the blue light in this photo because blue links to death and funeral in our culture. The blue light shows a way of thinking about the ghosts that are kind of in my cooking. Even if the ghosts aren't who my ancestors might be, there are the ghosts of Western culture that haunts me when I try to do traditional things. When I think about identity at moments like this, no matter how I feel, no matter how hard I claim my ancestral identity, it's not necessarily my claim of it will be recognized. Because to my cousins and relatives in Hong Kong, I'm white on the inside, and I've actually heard them say that. So to them, I'm a westerner.
It’s an interesting thing to hear and think through the idea that whiteness is something that can be tasted. I'm not sure if it's the actual taste of my food or if it's the association of western tastes with the food that I make because of who I am, then how others perceive me. So my cooking kind of carries the places I've been in, but there's also an interpretive aspect because they need to be interpreted through the food. It's not just me making it, but they need to taste it. It's like a dialogue about my identity.
Fiji
Fiji, or Fiona Cheuk, holds a complex relationship to disability as an ace-aro crip gender fluid person of Chinese descent from Hong Kong. She holds a settler relationship to the lands she currently inhabits, Rouge Tract area, and the lands she works, teaches, and researches in, Tkaronto. Her academic work explores the connections between ableism, racism, and settler-colonialism and how they disappear and why those dis-appearances matter in inclusionary politics in Canada. Her creative work in this project reflects a series of embodied conversations between different facets of her identities, and the spaces, as well as places that she nurtures them in through foods.
Fiona has also been heavily involved in disability justice based organizing in disabled student advocacy and issues of access at York University, and the University of Toronto with Students for Barrier-Free Access (SBA). She was also an organizer for the 2016 Decolonizing Writing: A One Day Symposium on Decolonizing Studies X Critical Disability Studies, and the curator for the Critical Ethnic Studies Journal (CESAJ) Blog from 2016-2017, and blogger for the Citation Practices Challenge Tumblr from 2015-2018.
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