My grandfather was born in Swatow, which I have never been to because it feels like a mystical place I hope won’t let me down (complicated feelings about China / ancestry). I have a street name and location for where he was born; his name is in some kind of family book there. That’s the only thing I know about ‘genealogy’ (we aren’t big on that stuff).
Lately I’ve been looking at content about Swatow and in the Teochew language (which I understand perfectly) on Xiaohongshu. It’s such a window into a part of his life / my life that I never had.
In one recent video, some guy says ‘how to get amazing food in this city? Literally walk outside the door and sniff, join any line, sit down, eat’
Even though I have never been there, I kind of feel I have this unreal expectation that all of life, in every city, should have amazing food exactly like this. I guess I know where I get it from.
(Season one of ‘Flavourful Origins’ on Netflix is about this obsessive food culture I come from)
I feel like my English self and my Teochew self and my Mandarin self are three completely different people.
In English: confident, of course, but also feeling very much like an interloper in a world which isn’t my own.
In Teochew: complete acceptance that, from my accent, places me immediately within 5 miles of where my grandfather was born. Largely among a diaspora that, like me, has never been there but speak of Swatow as ‘our home’. Speaking it at Thai and Vietnamese restaurants immediately gets me great food and friends.
In Mandarin: competent but bored and apathetic, mostly irritated at this language and whenever I have to speak it. But also thankful for the insights and access into another world outside of English.
I’ve lived my entire life between languages and cultures. I code switch effortlessly into ‘Anglophone Singaporean’ (it’s its own thing beyond just speaking English). I was surrounded by people like me so I never find multicultural multi linguistic anything impressive or interesting. It just was.
But the further I get from Asia, the more sensitive I am to how important some of this stuff is to me. None of the ethnic pride BS (I am especially allergic to all manifestations of Han Chinese pride), but rather to the idea that I am now in a part of the world where not everyone is like me.
It is weird, maybe, to be as obsessive about food and food quality the way every single person in that community has been. It is just not the norm.
That I can’t and won’t engage with English language food media coz I find it so revoltingly classist, but I look forward to talking about 18 hour soups and how to fold dumplings in all of my other languages.
Most of all, I feel a bit of heartbreak and loss: that it’s setting in that I’m very very far from home, wherever that is.
That’s why I do things like go to 3 different Korean grocery stores in Seaside / Marina, CA. I’m finding the rituals and conversations of engaging with people who care deeply about preparing and procuring food to be something familiar and anchoring, even if I only speak basic food Korean.
I have a deep yearning for a sense of home I’ve never even been (Swatow). It makes all the sense in the world (for me, culturally, linguistically) and none at all (as a place to spend any amount of time beyond tourism). But at the same time, leaving home for new homes is also something ‘we’ do.
I was very close to my grandfather. He was a deeply autistic man who, even in death, has his special interests on his grave. (People are instructed to leave flash lights and alarm clocks, never flowers, there)
He never told me stories about Swatow. He just said he got on a boat and never looked back. He didn’t have fond memories. He never returned, not even once, not even when we could afford it. He never wanted to go ‘home’.
But the sense of home he imparted to me was tied strongly to the language he spoke to me in. I have his accent, so strongly and so distinctly that even my elderly Teochew neighbors in San Francisco think I was born there, too.
In Thai, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Chinese restaurants around the world, if they’re not speaking Mandarin or Cantonese, it’s enough to say, are you from Swatow too? And we all say yes, even if in practice, most of us have never even been there. We don’t ever say ‘China’. We say ‘over there, by the mountain’
@skinnylatte my mother's family are from the Ozark mountains. I've only been there once, as a child. The people we met there could have told you I had local ties at a glance. My great grandma's house had a dozen kids playing outside and I didn't know until I saw them that I looked like them. I have a people. I'm from somewhere. I'm a completely Mid-Atlantic urban tech person and I wonder sometimes how many of us feel as though we have no history. The scraps I hold onto, my grandmother's jam cake recipe, some quilts, a pie plate -- they're not enough. I'm glad you have what you have and it's lovely to hear you talk about it.