Between Asia and the West : the cultural politics of food

To be or not to be Asian, that is the question. A few years ago, I was a guest at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, smack in the middle of the United States. After a lively postgraduate session, one of the Korean students came to me and asked whether I would be willing to hold another meeting, but now especially for and with Asian students.'It would be nice for us to get together with an international scholar who looks like us,' he said. Pleasantly surprised, I accepted the invitation. To accentuate the 'Asianness' of the occasion, we met at the largest Chinese restaurant in town for a modest banquet. The group of about fifteen consisted of male and female students from Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan and Thailand.They obviously felt rather alien in this cold, white heart of Middle America.The conversation ranged leisurely from the serious to the joking, from mild America-bashing to a querying of Asian gender relations, and on to a discussion about the latest Hong Kong movies shown in the students' club. But what was most significant about the event to me was not just what we talked about. It was the very fact that this group had come together under the umbrella identity of 'Asian', and that I was explicitly included in this category. Indeed, it was my own (self-)identification as Asian that made the event happen in the first place. It provided the pretext for this group of students to articulate a sense of virtual kinship "” we are all Asians "” and to act on it. It was a very enjoyable and instructive event, and left me with a satisfying feeling of affirmation. But what does being Asian mean, anyway?