Have You Eaten Yet?
Earlier this month, I had the privilege of speaking about Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) topics on a Conference of Consulting Actuaries virtual event, alongside a remarkable panel which included CeFaan Kim as the moderator. CeFaan started the discussion by explaining the anti-AAPI discrimination we see in the media these past few months is not new and only the part of reporting and speaking up about them is new. The discrimination that Asians have experienced has been around and to kick things off, CeFaan asked us to share our earliest memory of being made felt we did not belong.
Early in elementary school, my mom would pack my lunch for me to bring to school. Having grown up in Hong Kong and only been in the United States for a few years, she really was only familiar with making Chinese food, so that’s what she packed for me. I grew up in Ohio where all my classmates at that time were white. When they saw what I was eating for lunch, they relentlessly made fun of the food my mom had packed for me. This was so traumatic for me as a young kid that the next time my mom cooked my lunch, I sat outside the kitchen crying and I begged her not to make me take the food to school. At first, she asked if it were because I didn’t like it and she could make me something else. I assured her I love her food (I still do today) and I explained to her what happened. She was heartbroken when she heard my reasoning, but she understood and gave me some money to buy lunch the next day instead.
It hurt to experience this as a child, but it hurts perhaps even more to tell this story as an adult because of the many facets I now realize. This incident has such a deep impact on me that lying next to me is a tissue that has become damp from dabbing the tears involuntarily surfacing as I sit here typing this story out.
As I grew up, I learned that in the Chinese and other East Asian cultures, the standard greeting to ask a friend or family member is “Have you eaten?” Whether calling a relative or just reuniting with a friend you haven’t seen in years, you ask them whether they’ve eaten — not “How are you?” One of the historical reasons for this is during the Cultural Revolution, food was scarce. My mom has shared stories with me before of how she had to skip school when she was young to secure a place in line to buy vegetables because if she got there too late, the family would not have food for the next few days. When a region of the world grows up like that, you can understand why the culture has adopted asking, immediately upon talking to someone, whether they’ve eaten rather than how they’re doing.
Having faced times of food insecurity, offering someone food is a way of showing love in the Chinese culture, similar to how we know a caress or a kiss to be a very personal way for a mother to express her love for her little girl. I cannot imagine trying to kiss my baby girl only for her to start crying and to beg me not to do that, despite her very much wanting her mother’s sign of affection.
Another facet of this story is understanding my parents’ own journey. With language barriers and the importance of food in their culture, my parents, like many other Chinese immigrants of this country in the 1970s, made a living out of providing food for others in the restaurant business. Cooking became their decades-long career, cooking put a roof over my head growing up, cooking put me through college that allowed me to become the actuary I am today — cooking became my family’s American Dream. But cooking was the one thing their daughter begged them not to do — to strip herself of her cultural identity and of her family identity — so she would not be made fun of at school.
These are the things I learned as an adult of why this experience scars me so much more than just being made fun of at lunch one time.
CeFaan concluded the discussion asking each panelist whether we thought tomorrow will be better than today. I emphatically responded, “Absolutely.” I believe there is a movement that has started, towards being more aware, so we can be more inclusive. Being more aware starts by sharing, by hearing, and by understanding each other’s stories. They can be painful to experience, they can be painful to tell, and they can be painful to hear — but only through that do we get to understand and pave a way to acceptance, inclusivity, and unity.
Thank you for hearing my story this AAPI Heritage Month and partaking in this process of a better tomorrow.
