"Nian Nian You Yu"

"Writing is an extreme privilege but it's also a gift. It's a gift to yourself and it's a gift of giving a story to someone" ~Amy Tan

            This week, the "Fish Cheeks", by Amy Tan was a piece that I could really connect to.  It tells of Tans experiences eating a Chinese-style Christmas dinner with a Caucasian family guest. Effectively, this piece combines two of my favorite things: Food, and Christmas, together into a work that resonates with my Chinese-American Heritage.

             Like Amy Tan, I also have felt the awkwardness and shame of "noisy Chinese relatives", and their seemingly boundless capability for faux pas (at least in an American context).  I have also had phases of wishful thinking, where I would be born white, and raised on such stereotypically American foods as steak, potatoes, and burgers(all of which I do consume nowadays.  But like the Tan family, I also commonly consume "rock cod", "tofu", "dried fungus", and "squid"(Tan 95), as well; perhaps having experienced both sides to this story, the contrast I see in the piece may not be as stark as the reactions of readers of other backgrounds.

              In many Chinese families, we have the saying "nian nian you yu", which is a play on words: the word fish is a homonym for abundance: the phrase itself means "every year has abundance/fish", and its the reason that fish is part of every Chinese new year, or marriage, or special occasion meal.  So I guess I have my own "fish cheeks".

             In the end, Tan does a remarkably good job of capturing the awkward, the embarrassing, and sometimes outright hilarious life that is a Chinese-Americans. And before I forget, the new show "Fresh off the boat", which tells the story of an Asian-American family? Amy Tan would definitely approve.
~Chris