Hong Kong In The 60s

luckypeach:

The food we found in these suburbs was not only more Chinese than “Chinese” food of the take-out sort—it was more Chinese than Chinatown food. We rarely drove to San Francisco’s Chinatown anymore; the things my parents craved couldn’t be found there. The urban Chinatown—with its tourists and souvenir lipstick holders and monochromatic chow mein—was no more familiar to my parents than the lazy sprawl of California’s suburbs. But the latter, where you could run into classmates from Taiwan or dorm mates from Illinois, afforded them more space to think about things—was this “home” now? What more could you want? For my father, years before, the reminder of his childhood in Taiwan had come in the form of an occasional youtiao. Now my parents could eat better than anyone back in Taiwan could, and they could finally try dishes they had only heard about as children. As they got further away from their origins, their sense of identity grew hazy. Food was their mooring.

Suburbs are seen as founts of conformity, but they are rarely places beholden to tradition. Nobody goes to the suburbs on a vision quest—most are drawn instead by the promise of ready-made status, a stability in life modeled after the stability of neat, predictable blocks and gated communities. And yet, a suburb might also be seen as a slate that can be perpetually wiped clean to accommodate new aspirations.

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Fantastic piece from a brilliant magazine :-)