My career as a food writer is fuelled by racism

Oh, hi!

It's been a long time since I've written a newsletter and a lot has happened — well, one big thing happened and a lot of other small things ensued — I had a baby last year and my life has made a 180. I don't know if it's hormonal or intuitive or something else, but in short, I'm a full-time mom and part-time everything else now.

Mom brain means my thoughts are now filled with kid things, and recently it turned to education. Looking into options for my daughter has led me to reflect on my own education — this time, through the lens of a parent.

Big things like bilingualism have always been on my conscious mind (fun fact: I trained as a linguist at university), but a long-buried memory surfaced the other day that made me realise a) I was writing about food before I knew what "food writing" was, and b) I did it as a strategy to win over an unconsciously (I hope) racist English teacher.

Let me explain. In Year 11, I landed, mid-year at an elite private girl's school in the Melbourne suburbs, having aced my GCSEs in Hong Kong just a month before, only to get a B on my first English assignment. I can't remember what I wrote, but it was something pretty "normal", or, well, white, which was what was drilled into me by the pretty-British curriculum in Hong Kong. I was annoyed, and for my next assignment, went full Joy Luck Club/Eat Drink Man Woman and wrote about the "lavish banquets" (CNY dinner maybe?) my mom or grandma made, probably grandma because why not go all in if you're gonna ham it up? I got the A I knew I would get. (It wasn't an A+, but it was good enough for me, which I guess is why I'm not an investment banker).

At 16, I knew to play the race card on this white woman, my English teacher. Kid-me thought I was frigging smart. Parent-me is horrified and wants to report this incident to the authorities.

But the other thing I realised from this weird (maybe traumatic??) memory is that that was probably my first piece of food writing. I wish I still had it, as I don't remember exactly what I wrote. I'm pretty sure it was pretentious as hell, but still, I like cringe-reading my old work (like my very old blogs), it's educational, and kind of sweet.

From there, I imitated (horribly) food reviews in The Age, Melbourne's main broadsheet, and eating just to write about it became a serious hobby. It was back in Hong Kong that it became a career, fuelled, more consciously this time, by the sort of privileged neo-colonial racism (that people find very hard to admit as racism) that is so common in the press of the Global North, eg. obnoxious travel articles about Hong Kong written by people who can never help but to drop Bladerunner into their copy, and would recommend you have pizza or ramen in SoHo, but never even mention nai cha (and it would have been because they'd never set foot in a cha chaan teng, let alone knew what it was). I've never been a disciplined writer; I wrote because this junk made me angry, and I was quite simply motivated by the need to bury it. Things were bad in those days (I'm talking about 20-odd years ago). They’re a little better now (but are they, really? I suppose that's another newsletter for another day, maybe in another three years…).

Thanks for coming to my (second*) TED Talk-slash-therapy session. And thanks for staying subscribed, if you are indeed staying!

*I did actually do a TED Talk back in the day, it was fun, but unfortunately the organiser was scammy and despite making people pay for entry, never even made recordings of the talks.