On Race, Privilege, and Medicine
  • oRPM
  • ...mini-blog...
  • Contact Me!
  • Didactics and Consulting

Taiwan. Food. Vegetarian!!!

7/17/2016

1 Comment

 
PictureCoffee from my favorite cafe in Taiwan, 老樹咖啡
In an age of internet dating and profile writing, it seems like everyone is a "foodie" these days. I was filling out one of these for work when my colleague looked over my shoulder and said, "I'm surprised you didn't write 'foodie' on yours." I am obsessed with food. But I'm not a foodie because my relationship with food goes so far beyond a hobby. Really, it's a matter of identity.

I won't deny that there's a cultural disposition. My parents are from Taiwan. It only takes a few days of wandering around Taiwan to realize that food is a creative outlet in Taiwan. Food here is an evolving organism. It's constantly reinventing and perfecting classics. It's constantly experimenting with techniques and recipes from other cultures. It's so far outside of the box that the box is a piece of dust that Wu Pao-chun swept off his kitchen counter as he got ready to beat the French at the international Bakery Masters competition.

Even CNN recognizes how much Taiwan loves its food.

Members of my family have been known to bring an empty suitcase with them when they go back to Taiwan, just so they can fill it with food to bring back to the US. But for me, it's not just about getting to eat food that we can't get in the United States. My bond with food goes deeper than a cultural indoctrination. It's also about finally being in a place where things that I love are not seen as weird and I'm not seen as strange.

Like many children of immigrants, food, something that was so important at home, became a source of alienation outside of the home. I have a vivid memory of bringing in some lychee jellies to school one day to share with my friends. They were  not only delicious, but also a rare commodity. The local Asian market only carried an inferior kind of lychee jelly that didn't have a piece of firmer fruit in the center. I excitedly passed them around at the lunch table and was crestfallen to hear everyone's responses. "Why does it have this thing in the middle?" "This doesn't taste like anything." "This is weird." "I don't like it."

My friends weren't trying to hurt me, but it's certainly one of the most vivid memories I have of learning the power of microaggressions. How does one explain to another person that their seemingly small and personal comment about a food made me feel weird, alone, isolated, and foreign? Unlike the need that many second generation children feel to fit in, I felt the need to be understood. I wanted my identity to be seen and celebrated in the same way that everyone else's was. I wanted to be recognized as a person regardless of how different I may have been.

Additionally, like many cultures, giving food is a way to show love in Chinese culture.

To this day, it's really hard for me to not interpret the dislike of food that I try to share with others as a rejection of my love. And despite knowing that taste is also a matter of personal preference, it's impossible for me to see the rejection of Chinese food as a manifestation of a self-centered system of evaluating the world.  When my friend told me that my lychee jellies had no taste, it was clear to me that it wasn't the lychee jelly that was bland. The issue was that she was judging it based on a Western palate and simply assuming that her way of viewing the world and judging food was the accepted norm.


So while there are incredible non-edible experiences in Taiwan, food and family are my primary concerns when I come to Taiwan.

As you might expect, such a vibrant food culture means that you can't always expect the same restaurants or food carts to be where you last saw them. It's sad to discover that a place that you discovered has closed or moved on. As a vegetarian, this can be particularly heartbreaking.  It might have been the only place that made a vegetarian version of a special dish.

However, with a large population of buddhists and a focus on health in the past decade that includes eating vegetarian, you can always count on finding new vegetarian favorites.  Here's the highlight for the past week:

巧克力巨蛋麵包
The most delicious new bun!
Soft chocolate with a traditional 奶疏 (sort of textured custardy filling). This fancy one came with a little syringe to inject fresh chocolatey syrup just before consuming
Picture

Read More
1 Comment

Healthcare is Politics #yellowperilsupportsblackpower

5/22/2016

0 Comments

 
Hey y'all. As we all know, access to the healthcare system only impacts the health of our patients by, like, 20%, if that. What really impacts health outcomes are education, housing, food security, and, well, not getting shot. If you care about health, you need to care about politics.
Picture
0 Comments

Peter Liang Highlights the Asian American Identity Crisis 

2/28/2016

1 Comment

 
PictureThis. Is. Nonsense.
The conviction of Peter Liang is the best thing that has happened to Asian Americans since the Immigration and Nationality Act of the 1960s. It’s also an embarrassingly example of how bewildered the minds of some Asian Americans are when it comes to race.
 
The conviction is a much-needed wake up call to those who have been brainwashed to believe the model minority myth. It’s clear evidence that white America still views Asian Americans as “other.” The “Blue wall of silence” does not cover yellow.
 
Peter Liang’s conviction makes painfully obvious three crucial facts that are necessary to understand the racial circumstances of Asian Americans. (1) American racism includes Asian Americans. (2) Through intentional legislation and campaigning, the white majority has utilized the educational and financial privilege of a portion of Asian Americans to convince society that racism is no longer an issue. (3) Asian Americans themselves have fallen prey to this message, driving a wedge between the Asian American community and other communities of color and weakening our collective power to change the status quo.
 
The model minority myth has led much of America to believe that through hard work and an unwavering dedication to academic achievement, Asian Americans have achieved the true American dream, supposedly showing that it is not systemic racism but lack of adherence to American work ethic that holds back other communities of color.
 
While the falsehoods that make up the model minority stereotype and its toxic impacts are too complex and numerous to unpack in their entirety here, exploring a few the issues is necessary.  A key misunderstanding is the origin of stereotypes. While most of us recognize that stereotypes are generalizations that cannot be applied to any one individual, we also believe that they spring from a small grain of truth.  They represent a generalization of a true trend in behavior or characteristic that is common amongst a group of people.
 
What this line of reasoning fails to capture is that frequently these behavioral trends are not inherent, but a group of people all responding to a uniform external pressure. For example, the disproportionate number of black athletes in the NBA does not represent an inherent racial ability anymore than the disproportionate number of white athletes in the NHL does. It’s a reflection of the networks and opportunities available to black males in this country. Under the same social restrictions, many black men come to the same conclusion: the only way to make it is to become a professional athlete and the only sports available are basketball and football.


Read More
1 Comment

Ted talk here I come! Talking about the Model Minority Myth

2/25/2016

0 Comments

 
One day we'll do an animated version, but until then, powerpoint and prezi is where it's at...
0 Comments

Gaysia hits the MomsRising Blog Carnival

6/5/2013

0 Comments

 
May was Asian Pacific American Heritage month and Momsrising.org had a blog carnival in honor of it. I haven't been writing much during my intern year, but couldn't resist contributing after getting an email blast soliciting contributors. Check out the article: Gaysian Marriage?
0 Comments

Google Games and Stereotypes

4/26/2012

4 Comments

 
We all have that friend. The friend who in the middle of the conversation will pause to google whatever it is you're discussing or debating.  Occasionally I find it annoying but more often, especially since I don't have a "smart phone" myself, I find it satisfying and convenient.

Recently, while hanging out with said friend, we all discovered a new game.  Since Google Search has an algorithm for auto completing searches based on the most popular searches out there, we realized that if we just fed in our ethnicities, we could get a pulse on what the masses were thinking about us.

Some were expected, but others, well, others I could not have predicted. Most were hilarious.
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
And then just a few more because I was curious:
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
4 Comments

My kindred bacteria: H. pylori, Gastric Cancer, and the Asian American Population

10/16/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
H. pylori kickin it in the belly - from the New England Journal of Medicine
The year 1984 is probably most well known because of George Orwell. More relevant to me, it was the year I was born.  More relevant to researchers desperate to publish before they proverbially "perish," 1984 was the year that Helicobacter pylori was discovered.  With a brand new bacteria that nobody knew anything about, it was low hanging fruit for publishable data.  There's even a whole journal that is soley dedicated to H. pylori and it has a new issue every two months!  More recently, it's become clear that H. pylori is highly correlated to the development of gastric cancer and most experts believe that it's causative due to the chronic inflammation that can result from infection. However, it's important to note that only a minority of people infected with H. pylori will go on to develop gastric cancer.

In the medical student world, though critical and diagnostic thinking are highly emphasized, rote pattern recognition is just as important.  During our internal medicine rotation and board exam studying common scenarios are pounded into our brains.  Young African American woman with difficulty breathing? Sarcoidosis. Diabetic with an unhealing ulcer? Osteomyeolitis.  The list goes on and on. The Asian claim to fame? The Japanese man who eats lots of preserved foods.  He has gastric cancer.


Picture
But that's all I've been told. Basically, I can bubble in the right answer on a multiple choice test question. Nobody ever told me that gastric cancer used to be the second most deadly cancer in the world.  Nobody ever mentioned that though the incidence of gastric cancer has drastically decreased worldwide, it's happened disproportionately.  The incidence of gastric cancer in rich countries continues to drop, but even in the United States, according to SEER data, Asian Americans, Latin Americans, Black Americans, and Native American's have a much higher rate than other races.  And absolutely nobody ever told me that the 5 year survival rate is only 25%.

Earlier this year I did a rotation at Asian Health Services (AHS) in Oakland, CA. AHS is a non-profit primary care healthcare system that provides services to low-income, linguistically-isolated Asian Americans in Alameda County.  Part of my time there was spent reviewing the current research on screening for H. pyolori, gastric cancer, and Asian Americans. I could only find one study that actually studied gastric cancer in Asian Americans. It was an epidemiological study that found that rates of gastric cancer in Japanese families decrease in each subsequent generation after immigration.  One other study used Japanese Americans as a subset for analysis.  It was a cost-effectiveness analysis and they simply took data on white men in the United States and multiplied their risk by four.  I'm not sure that counts.
 
It's not surprising that though gastric cancer in Asians is common enough to warrant a board's question, there's been little research done on it in the United States.  Asian American's are nearly invisible when it comes to health research. The US Department of Health and Human Service's Healthy People, in their 2010 Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders: Defining a Baseline, reported that only 0.1% of published medical research articles even mention API populations. This, in combination with the model minority myth, only perpetuates and contributes to the false notion that the API population does not suffer from any health inequities. Despite this having been recognized for years, little has changed in medical research and issues in data collection and analysis still remain. 


Read More
0 Comments

Amy Chua vs My Mom

2/9/2011

0 Comments

 
My mom recently wrote a letter to the editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer and it got published in the Sunday edition!  I've been reluctant to blog about "Tiger Mom," though I do want to say that though she sounds obviously quite extreme (and some of that is played up as a writing technique which I find effective and hilarious), I think she does make some interesting points towards the end of the Washington Post piece.

Read More
0 Comments

Mooncakes for Mary

9/18/2010

1 Comment

 
I remember two particularly dreaded days of the week as a child. One was Thursday, reserved for piano and violin lessons, and the other was Saturday, earmarked for Chinese School.  This was particularly painful as they not only happened to flank the celebrated Friday, but also left only one day of the weekend to truly enjoy. However, being a pessimistic person, even Sunday was tainted as I was never quite able to forget the imminent arrival of Monday.

It wasn't that I didn't like playing the piano or violin (in fact, on the numerous occasions where policing my practicing got to be too tiresome, my mother would just tell me to quit, something that I never wanted to do) or that I didn't want to learn Chinese. In actuality, though I might not have had the inner drive to practice everyday like I should have or study the current week's lesson, I also did not want to show up unprepared. Somehow, at the age of 11, it made more sense to just skip than be caught a slacker.

One time, I locked myself in my room, refusing to go to Chinese school. As my parents banged on the door alternating between sweet talking and threats, I just pictured my blank workbook sitting in a bag next to my desk. As time dragged on, even I began to recognize how ridiculous the situation was getting, but I couldn't back down. If I gave up, then I'd have to show up to class without having done my homework AND I would be late. It would be better for my dad to be pissed at me; at least that was all kept in house. I would not have labeled this behavior as “saving face” at the time, that was something that out-dated Chinese people worried about, but looking back it was definitely all pride.
Picture
homemade yue bin!
It was at Chinese school that I remember being told the story behind Zhong Qui Jie (The Mooncake Festival). Previous to this I had regarded it more as a vague time period rather than a holiday (August 15 on the Lunar Calendar). From my experience it was closer to a several week experience where several times a week my parents would call my sister and me down to the kitchen and we would eat yue bin, mooncakes, as a family. On one particular night, my parents would tell us that tonight was the actual night and my sister and I would nod and return our focus to the more important task of trying to figure out which slice miraculously had no piece of salty egg yolk.


Read More
1 Comment

god. damn. it.

8/24/2010

1 Comment

 
After a weekend in NYC for my cousin's wedding, I went jogging yesterday evening around Ann Arbor.
Picture
canal st, nyc, ny
Picture
canal st, aa, mi
1 Comment
<<Previous
    What I've been reading:

    The Dark Forest (Remembrance of Earth's Past #2)
    ​
    by Liu Cixin

    Picture

    about this blog

    A place where I can write my thoughts on race, on privilege, on class, on being a doctor. Part of the endless struggle to become a little bit more enlightened and feel a little less alienated.

    Agree with me. Call me out. Pass it on.

    I post once or twice a month with smaller comments on mini-blog.

    about me

    My name is Jess. In the interest of full disclosure: I'm a 30-something-year-old Chinese American and believer that the quest for social justice and equity must be an intentional and active one. I'm a Family Medicine physician. I'm queer. I'm a radical. I grew up in a mostly white suburb and my parents are white-collar workers.  And I don't eat meat, but I miss it sometimes.

    categories

    All
    Conferences
    Film
    Food
    Interracial Relationships
    Labor
    Lessons From The Motherland
    Links
    Medical
    News
    Prattle
    Race
    Rainbow
    Reading Group
    Writings
    Yellow

    archives

    March 2018
    June 2017
    May 2017
    March 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2014
    June 2013
    December 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    January 2012
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    June 2011
    April 2011
    March 2011
    February 2011
    January 2011
    December 2010
    November 2010
    September 2010
    August 2010
    July 2010
    June 2010
    May 2010
    March 2010
    February 2010
    January 2010
    December 2009
    November 2009
    October 2009
    September 2009
    August 2009


    Subscribe via email!
    (no lists ever sold)

    Picture
    a radical news collective

    Featured on BlogHer.com
Copyright © 2016 by Jessica Guh