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A deeply insightful and ravishingly appetizing look at the way we gain and lose access to ourselves and our communities through food and language, told through the author's experience emigrating to America from Malaysia as a member of the Chinese diaspora.

Chinese Food was Shiamin Kwa's comfort food when her ethnically Chinese family first moved to the US from Malaysia, where they'd lived for generations, and where they instilled in her a deep sense of her and their Chineseness. As a ten-year-old in US Middle School, she satisfied her hunger for both flavor and a sense of home with Chinese Food, even though it was nothing like any food she'd ever eaten. Whatever this food was, it nourished her, often in secret, as she adjusted to life in a new country, with its own strange customs around eating, dishes, and meals. And race. Her encounters with (mostly white) Americans always involved questions about Shiamin's background. Who (or what) was she? But all this began to change when Shiamin began to cook and to study the history of "Chinese Food."
As she says, "I did not think that I was searching for myself when I started searching for 'authentic' Chinese-American food." But it was through this history and its food and flavors that she came to terms with how to be and feed herself. "From my childhood in Malaysia to American teenage-hood and beyond, I have learned how to eat, often in translation. That has been an important skill that has given me insight into other eras and other people... Most of all, it has taught me about myself. Who I am is as simple as what has been with me all along in many forms: in a steaming bowl among elbow-bumping customers at a night market melamine tabletop in Penang, in a pot of spicy instant noodles cooked surreptitiously in a forbidden rice cooker in a New Hampshire dormitory room, in a waxed paper carton gobbled alone in front of a television in a hotel room. The small and impermanent triumphs of a dish of food have taught me about the messy accumulations that we call culture and history, and it is a dish of food that gives succor to those who feel out of place."

Shiamin Kwa is a writer, translator, and award-winning professor of literature at Bryn Mawr College and the author of four books, all published by University Presses. She is published widely in her field, across theater and fiction, food studies, graphic narratives, literary studies, cultural studies, comparative and world literature, and literary and narrative theory. She is a first-generation naturalized U.S. citizen of "Overseas Chinese" parents.