a contemplation from my food processor

so it’s settled: my mom, siblings and I will be going on a big family trip to taiwan in october! while each of us will arrive and depart at different times, the highlight of our trip will be a weeklong bus tour of key sights around the island which my mom has already handpicked. counting kids and significant others, there will be about ~20 of us in total on the bus, and this will be our largest family reunion since 2018 when i threw a big going away party before i moved to Germany.

the family whatsapp group is abuzz. my brother, in particular, is asking lots of cringeworthy questions: is there a taiwanese equivalent of korean bbq? can we have a bus with western toilets so nobody has to use those primitive squatty ones? why is it necessary to bring cash; doesn’t everyone use mobile payments by now?

my initial reaction was to sort of half-laugh along. i didn’t realize how much my brother’s questions actually irritated me until tonight, as i busied myself with a dress rehearsal of the gluten-free potstickers i am planning to make for Lunar New Year’s eve dinner on saturday, when Ulrich’s daughters will also be spending the night. i had never thought it was possible to make gluten-free potstickers until i saw an instagram reel the other day showing how to re-purpose rice paper (commonly used for vietnamese/thai summer rolls) as dumpling wrappers. since Ulrich’s daughter Greta has celiac’s, i often jump at opportunities to try out new gluten-free recipes.

it wasn’t long before i ran into some technical snafus, particularly with the food processor, which is not actually a food processor by itself but rather one of several add-ons which came with our hand blender. this “food processor” was most certainly not up for the task of chopping five carrots, seven rehydrated shiitakes, and a small can of bamboo shoots which i had tossed into it all at once. i couldn’t remember which button to press so i jammed my thumb alternatingly on both of them; there was one button with a “T” on it (which I assumed was like “Pulse”) and another which corresponded to the number on a dial on top of the blender’s stick. i couldn’t tell if the power increased with the number or inversely in proportion to it, so i dialed in both directions while button smashing, a simmering feeling of frustration boiling up within me. the mixture - intended for the dumpling filling - was getting unevenly blended in the process: at the bottom, near the blade, was a thoroughly pulverized, wet, pulpy mass, whereas layers of carrot and bamboo sat virtually untouched on top of the pile. Finally I decided to remove each bamboo slice one at a time, begin sautéing the already pulverized parts of the filling before re-attempting the bamboo with the remaining larger chunks of carrot and mushroom. I went round and round with this clumsy workaround: scoop out, sauté, pulse, pulverize. Scoop, pulse, pulverize. Rinse, repeat.

and then, as i was mid-button mash, i suddenly heard a shrill, self-righteous voice echoing across the space between my ears. how could he, the child of taiwanese immigrants - fumed the voice - be so proudly clueless about the country they grew up in? it occurred to me that i was attacking the ingredients in the food processor with the acute disgust i felt towards my brother.

one striking difference between my mom and my dad’s parenting styles was the degree to which they emphasized our taiwanese-ness when we were growing up. my mom spoke to me almost exclusively in taiwanese and cooked only taiwanese meals for lunch and dinner (meatloaf and stuffed peppers were her two notable exceptions). my dad, on the other hand, started most conversations in english, only speaking to me in taiwanese if i was the one to initiate the switchover. while my mom incorporated taiwanese dishes into thanksgiving and christmas, my dad was more intent on mimicking the way his american colleagues celebrated those holidays. and yet, at the end of each work day, he’d come home to a traditional taiwanese dinner, his belly having never fully converted to a western diet: our dinners consisted of rice scooped out of our aluminum rice cooker with multiple side dishes which we passed amongst ourselves, shoveling their contents onto our plates with chopsticks. somehow i emerged from childhood with an insatiable thirst to learn more about taiwan, the part of my upbringing which was often hinted at by my mother but ultimately still less visible to me growing up. And somehow, my brother walked away with the opposite impulse - as if he’d forgotten that his taiwanese side existed at all.

as i stood pondering the carrot which refused to be ground into uniformly sized chunks, i wondered: if my brother is the carrot, what am i? i who, according to my sister who’s spent over two decades living in taiwan, once said something which she found laughably un-taiwanese? i examined the dumpling mixture more closely. none of it looked uniform at all; it was a hodgepodge of varying sizes and consistencies. i thought about how, even though i have insisted on celebrating Lunar New Year every year especially since moving to germany, the motions i go through are based on my flimsy memory of how my mom used to do things back in the U.S. i don’t really know what an authentic LNY celebration looks and feels like - the main traditions i follow are ones which i have corroborated using the internet over the years, like: wear red (preferably new) clothes, eat dumplings for prosperity and noodles for longevity. and maybe - the thought occurs to me now - as the children of immigrants, drifters who have never actually lived in taiwan at all, it’s not possible to ever be just the right amount of taiwanese. we will always be not enough in someone else’s more critical eyes.

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash