{"id":33534,"date":"2023-10-19T19:53:57","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T02:53:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=33534"},"modified":"2023-10-19T20:06:08","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T03:06:08","slug":"authentic-dignity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/authentic-dignity\/","title":{"rendered":"Authentic Dignity"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cJust take a look at the menu, that\u2019s not authentic, it\u2019s not real<\/em> Chinese food\u201d. I hear this from my friends (Chinese and oddly non-Chinese), I hear this from family, I hear my own voice echo this sentiment about certain Chinese restaurants. One such restaurant, China Town, is in the town my wife went to high school in and grew up near, Barre, VT. For some context, Barre is a town of about 9,000 people and is 93% white. The menu at China Town features dishes like orange chicken, General Tso\u2019s chicken, and crab rangoons, among other dishes that may or may not have rose to prominence through Panda Express. These dishes were different than the ones my parents, grandparents, and aunties and uncles made growing up. They\u2019re different than the ones I love when I visit Taipei, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. I rarely go out of my way to find these dishes and they\u2019re not what comes to mind when I think of Chinese food. And yet, I can\u2019t shake this feeling that I\u2019ve thought about this wrong. This feeling surfaced again as I was reading Vincent Lloyd\u2019s Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In his book, Lloyd offers his key assertion that Black dignity, and perhaps dignity in general, \u201cis not an essential quality or a gift; it is something that is performed through the struggle against domination\u201d.[1]<\/a> I especially appreciated and gravitated toward how he talks of the breadth of dignity when embodied in action.[2]<\/a> Lloyd goes on to unpack what this looks like through his encompassing chapter titles on Black rage, love, family, futures, and magic. The section that stirred my own thoughts of dignity, and perhaps Chinese-American dignity, came from his section on love. In discussing Black love, Lloyd posits that \u201clove is how it feels to struggle together against racial domination, whether that struggle manifests at a protest or in daily life \u2013 or in intimate encounters\u2026 dignity is nourished by the unique power of self-love and bodily encounter.\u201d[3]<\/a> While Lloyd goes on to talk about bodily and erotic dimensions of that love, it is food that embodies love in Chinese-American communities.<\/p>\n

Food, in Chinese culture, can be a means of communicating feelings, expressing values, and telling stories.[4]<\/a> My family would gather around food, we plan trips around what we\u2019re going to eat, my parents and grandparents would show their care and affection with food offerings. As witnessed by the resounding popularity of the Disney short animation, Bao[5]<\/a>, the meaning and value of food runs so deeply within Chinese and Chinese-American communities that cultural tensions and realities can be explored through interactions with and over food. Perhaps that is why my reflections on what food merits the label of being \u201cauthentic\u201d are so hurtful. For these restaurants like China Town, the food tells stories of survival, family, and change. Food was likely not only the strongest connection to where they came from, but the only means for survival and relationship in the place they had moved to. In discounting their food as non-authentic, I was ignoring the stories that they told, the realities that this family lived, and the dignity that these people struggled for.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Vincent Lloyd, Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination<\/em>, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), 1.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Ibid, 3.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Ibid, 58.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Guansheng Ma, \u201cFood, Eating Behavior, and Culture in Chinese Society\u201d, Journal of Ethnic Foods<\/em> 2, no. 4 (December 2015), 195-199, https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1016\/j.jef.2015.11.004.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Domee Shi, \u201cBao\u201d, directed by Domee Shi, produced by Becky Neiman-Cobb, Pixar<\/em> Animation Studios<\/em>, Walt Disney Pictures, April 21, 2018, animated short.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cJust take a look at the menu, that\u2019s not authentic, it\u2019s not real Chinese food\u201d. I hear this from my friends (Chinese and oddly non-Chinese), I hear this from family, I hear my own voice echo this sentiment about certain Chinese restaurants. One such restaurant, China Town, is in the town my wife went to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":161,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2836,2347],"class_list":["post-33534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-lloyd","tag-dlgp01","cohort-dlgp01"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/161"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33534"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33540,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33534\/revisions\/33540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}