On being Korean and being raised in the Deep South. I thought this was a great story that touched on food as culture (I heard it on The Splendid Table) and also on how the way we self-identify can be challenged by how others want to identify us, exemplified by this story from the show (also found in the linked magazine article): I was sitting in an elementary school cafeteria in Birmingham, Alabama, with my 6-year-old twin boys. An older child, maybe a second-grader, looked at us on his way to put up his tray. He grinned and said, Hey, Chinese lady! It was a stab to the heart, not much different from words I sometimes heard as a 7-year-old girl growing up in the Mississippi Delta, sitting in my own elementary school cafeteria, listening to friends who puzzled over my otherness. They knew white and they knew black, but they certainly did not know what I was. Nor, exactly, did I. Ms. Taylor Pittman was born and raised in the South, and was as Southern, and American, as that little boy. But being non-white in American means also being the other, and never being allowed to forget that.
Posted on: Tue, 06 May 2014 17:15:36 +0000
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