Chris’s dad’s birthday is today. For as long as Chris and I have been together, Chris’s parents have almost always been traveling, usually in North America, during the time of his dad’s birthday every May, with a couple exceptions. They usually choose to travel at this time because his dad, who is self-employed, has a slower work period at this time. It’s also because the weather tends to warm up as spring approaches in the northern hemisphere, and they prefer the milder temperatures. While he certainly had a different kind of birthday this year with COVID-19, Chris’s mom prepared a nice meal of Sri Lankan style hoppers with eggs in them alongside a curry. No travel, but at least Sri Lankan food can come to him.

Chris’s dad’s favorite topic is always about travel: airports, airport lounges, different airlines, airline and hotel status, hotels and their amenities, different cultures and what makes them interesting across the world when they do their big round-the-world trips each year. So the worldwide pandemic has obviously halted a lot of his plans and what he’s looked forward to during the year. Because of this, he has less to talk and email us all about. In fact, these are the last two email subjects of emails he has sent the family: “Airbus A380” and “Jazzed Up Amenity Kits.” What will we do if we cannot travel for longer than just a few months, if it goes beyond a year? What will his emails and discussions be about then?

The current situation with the COVID-19 pandemic is pretty bleak. Our country is full of incompetent politicians and people, eager to believe conspiracy theories and to compare the COVID-19 deaths to the deaths of people who suffer heart disease or strokes. They do not realize that lives actually matter, and that to compare saving lives with saving the economy is a false equivalency. And I realize that while I hate the current administration and all the enablers that allow President Dipshit’s lies and moronic ways to continue, the pandemic has actually restricted my day to day life, preventing me from doing the big and little things I love: going to the gym, grabbing coffee with a colleague, meeting a friend for dinner at a restaurant, traveling, whether for work or pleasure, exploring new cultures. We can’t even hug people anymore. It’s all on pause for who knows how long, and we have this orange incompetent loser to thank for all this. And for the foreseeable future, no one will want dirty Americans entering their countries for fear that we are carrying the virus and will infect their people. And why should they want us given the terrible way we’ve responded as a nation and how selfish and short-sighted we have been? Trump got the wall he wanted between the U.S. and Mexico, though it’s an invisible wall where actually, Mexico would want to enforce it because they don’t want us coming over and infecting their people. Anyone who could possibly support this administration in the current situation is completely dead to me.

Apparently, The New York Times columnist Alison Roman, who I have recently decided I cannot stand because she likes to steal food staples of people of color and whitewash them, has decided to attack two successful women of color, Chrissy Teigen and Marie Kondo, for their “content farm” and creating empires with their names on them. It’s funny that she would actually go after women of color who are successful instead of other white women who have decided to stick their name on everything to make millions, whether that is Gwyneth Paltrow or Rachel Ray or Giada de Laurentiis. Her spice colonialization also clearly knows no bounds, because she has repeatedly been interviewed saying that her bland coconut turmeric chickpea stew is “not a curry” and is not at all influenced by the food of South Asia, even though the New York Times, after having experienced backlash for #thestew, has edited the description to say that the stew “evokes” the food of South India. A few other foodies in my Facebook college food group have also noted that she’s taken things like kimchi, fish sauce, and harissa, and made it seem like no big deal, like she just discovered them on her own and was not influenced at all by Korea, Vietnam, or countries in North Africa/the Middle East that use harissa. She even had the gall to host a paid food tour of VIETNAM last year so that people could experience Vietnam with her, even though this was her first time in Vietnam and she knew absolutely nothing about Vietnamese culture. This tour was clearly made for white people who did not know any better at all.

It’s always amazing to me how there can be such clueless white people out there who can profit off of the foods and creativities of non-white nations and think they are doing absolutely nothing wrong. Her cookbooks, supposedly best sellers, are catering to people who are exactly like her, and sadly, what that means is that there are too many people who are just like her out there. This is how my cynicism of the world continues.

Sheltering in place has gone on for over two months now for us here in New York City. While working from home has been fine and bearable, though I do miss work travel, the worst part about all of this is not being able to do two of the things I love most: travel and eat. I can’t eat out at a restaurant, and many restaurants across the city have closed. So of the restaurants that are within walking distance or can do delivery, that’s what we’ve been indulging in once or twice a week during this period. And to date, nowhere in sight can I find a reasonably decent Vietnamese spot who can fulfill my banh mi craving… until today!

Pho Shop is actually on the Upper West Side on 72nd Street, and we found out from their Instagram account that they reopened this location today. Chris indulged me and got a big order of several banh mi, pho, shaking beef, and chicken skewers so we could try them for the very first time. To report back, Pho Shop did not disappoint. The fillings of the banh mi were on point and quite generous. Though the bread quality was not clear to me since it was delivered, but it definitely hit the spot. It felt comforting to know that I could get my banh mi cravings fulfilled from a spot that is walking distance from us now, and I don’t necessarily need to go to go all the way to Brooklyn Chinatown to Ba Xuyen for a reliable banh mi anymore. Though I do wish Ba Xuyen the best during these times and hope they come out of this okay.

We’d been getting low on our Teddie peanut butter jar. After some initial skepticism, Chris embraced this brand of peanut butter, declaring that it really did have just the right amount of sweet and salty to it. He did a quick search on Teddie’s official site and found out that Teddie peanut butter can actually now be found at select Key Food locations in the city, one of which happened to be walking distance from us on 85th and Amsterdam. Chris insisted I didn’t look carefully enough. I insisted that back in 2011, when I ran out of Teddie, Teddie was definitely NOT outside of New England, with the exception of buying it on Amazon for inflated prices.

We trekked up to the Key Food, stood in line for about 10 minutes, and went inside to discover not only raspberries and blackberries packages for a buck each, but also both conventional chunk and smooth Teddie peanut butter (with salt). I was ecstatic. We picked up a jar of each and gleefully went home.

We were telling our building handyman and friend about this, that this was our highlight of our Saturday. He laughed and said, “What a time we live in now when the major highlight of our weekend is finding a specific brand of PEANUT BUTTER at a grocery store!” I insisted to him that this peanut butter was absolutely worth the hype. He said it probably was quite good, but these are the biggest things we look forward to in a time of shelter-in-place. Once upon a time, we looked forward to discovering new eats and restaurants, going to the theater, seeing a movie, catching up with friends visiting from out of town, an upcoming domestic or international trip. Now, it’s peanut butter.

Two Bros pizza is one of New York City’s most famous. When I say that, I do not mean that it’s considered the best, the most loved, or of the highest quality ingredients, but that New Yorkers know it for being the cheapest, most reliable, and consistent slice. At no other pizza spot can you get a $1 slice of pizza, and add another dollar, a soda for the “recession lunch special.” The pizza is not quite “New York style” in that it’s not extremely thin, but it’s not too thick either, and no one would mistaken it for deep-dish Chicago-style pizza. The tomato sauce is passable, the cheese is okay. The ingredients are fine. The pizza can easily and frugally satisfy a pizza craving a city known for pizza.

Chris had a pizza craving on Friday, so we decided to get Two Bros pizza delivered from the limited number of pizza places that would deliver to us. He wasn’t sure how large they would be, so he ordered two. Two massive pizzas were delivered to our front door, which was likely enough for about 8-10 people to eat. It was really overwhelming to open the boxes and see the large mushroom pizza and the large meat and vegetable pizza. The pizza quality was better than I last remembered it: the meat was tasty, the sausage was spicy, the crust was chewy and slightly crisp; the mushrooms were definitely canned, though. This is what you can expect from Two Bros.

The highlight of our Saturday yesterday was going out for a long walk… and going to Sunrise Market, the nearest Japanese market to us on 41st street between 5th and Madison. We lucked out, as we read earlier in the week that almost every Asian grocery store was facing a shortage of kimchi. We got a 1-lb jar of kimchi from Sunrise, among fresh shiitake and enoki mushrooms, Japanese egg noodles, and bok choy. I could get bok choy from Whole Foods, but refuse to out of principle. Why would I want to pay that much for bok choy, the most basic Asian green vegetable that white people have come to understand and like, and as such, is jacked up in price at places like Whole Foods? Although I would have loved to get water spinach/kong Xin cai or gai lan (Chinese broccoli), those don’t seem to show up in Japanese cuisine (not to my knowledge, anyway), so Sunrise does not carry them.

It’s always the little wins each weekend going out now: being able to get kimchi and not wait in line too long. Asian vegetables – YAY! Fresh enoki mushrooms, which cannot easily be found outside of Asian markets. This is our evolving reality now.

I’m almost done reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s book Americanah, and I’m completely in love with her writing, her prose, and her insightful perspectives on race, color, and gender in today’s world. With many books, it takes at least the first 50-200 pages to really get interesting, especially with fiction, but with this book, I was taken immediately from the first page. I also watched both of her TED talks, The Danger of a Single Story, and We Should All Be Feminists. She is clearly a very talented story teller, as both are talks told with personal and heard/learned stories extremely seamlessly and thoughtfully. The Danger of a Single story had me tearing up throughout it. The idea behind it is that if we only ever hear one story of a person, place, or thing, that will fully shape our understanding of it, resulting in ignorance, lack of complete understanding and the full picture of that person/place/thing. The second talk around why we should all be feminists — it seems very straightforward, as “feminist” merely is a person who believes that women and men are equal. Unfortunately, we still live in a society today where people shy away from that label, and even worse, where people, consciously and subconsciously, do not genuinely believe in the equality of the sexes. But as she is a writer, she asks thought-provoking questions and adds different perspectives to really force us to think.

I started doing more research on Chimamanda and reading interviews that she’s given. I’m definitely a true fan girl of hers now. These are some of the things she’s said that I really love:

“I want to say what I think, and it’s lovely to be liked. And I like being liked, but I don’t need to be liked. I think that also sort of has been a thing for me where because of that, I say what I think, for good or bad.”

“The only reason you say that race was not an issue is because you wish it was not. We all wish it was not. But it’s a lie. I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black, and I only became black when I came to America. When you are black in America and you fall in love with a white person, race doesn’t matter when you’re alone together because it’s just you and your love. But the minute you step outside, race matters. But we don’t talk about it. We don’t even tell our white partners the small things that piss us off and the things we wish they understood better, because we’re worried they will say we’re overreacting, or we’re being too sensitive. And we don’t want them to say, Look how far we’ve come, just forty years ago it would have been illegal for us to even be a couple blah blah blah, because you know what we’re thinking when they say that? We’re thinking why the fuck should it ever have been illegal anyway? But we don’t say any of this stuff. We let it pile up inside our heads and when we come to nice liberal dinners like this, we say that race doesn’t matter because that’s what we’re supposed to say, to keep our nice liberal friends comfortable. It’s true. I speak from experience.” 
― Americanah

“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would threaten the man. Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.” 
― We Should All Be Feminists

“Some people ask: “Why the word feminist? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?” Because that would be dishonest. Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general—but to choose to use the vague expression human rights is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender. It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women.” 
― We Should All Be Feminists

“The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” 

“Of course I am not worried about intimidating men. The type of man who will be intimidated by me is exactly the type of man I have no interest in.” 

“If you don’t understand, ask questions. If you’re uncomfortable about asking questions, say you are uncomfortable about asking questions and then ask anyway. It’s easy to tell when a question is coming from a good place. Then listen some more. Sometimes people just want to feel heard. Here’s to possibilities of friendship and connection and understanding.” 
― Americanah

“Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.” 
― We Should All Be Feminists

“The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations.” 
―We Should All Be Feminists

“Race doesn’t really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don’t have that choice.” 
― Americanah

“A woman at a certain age who is unmarried, our society teaches her to see it as a deep personal failure. And a man, after a certain age isn’t married, we just think he hasn’t come around to making his pick.” 
― We Should All Be Feminists

Having lived in three major metropolitan areas that have a decent sized Asian population, I have been quite spoiled when it comes to having Asian food nearby. I would always read food blogs of writers of Asian descent and how they relocated from a place like New York or California to a place that considered bok choy an exotic vegetable, where getting Indian spices like fenugreek seeds or coriander powder is at least an hour’s drive away; they would have massive nostalgia for being able to have these precious ingredients so close. Why would they relocate from what they loved so much? I always thought to myself.

At Wellesley, whenever I craved Chinese or Vietnamese food, Boston or Cambridge was just a quick 40-minute bus ride away. In San Francisco, you don’t even have to go to Chinatown to get Chinese food, as “mini Chinatowns” popped up in multiple areas, from Clement Street in the Richmond District to Irving, Noriega, and Taraval Streets in the Sunset. Here in New York, Manhattan Chinatown is a quick subway ride away from us; Flushing Chinatown is always a favorite destination of mine, but that leaves out Elmhurst’s budding mini Chinatown, Sunset Park in Brooklyn, and multiple Asian business studded streets of the Bronx. But without going to any of these so-called Chinatown-type areas, East Village, “Curry Hill” (Lexington in the 20s), and Koreatown (32nd Street between Broadway and 5th) are all extremely accessible and provide multiple options for Asian ingredients for home cooking. That doesn’t even include the random Japanese grocery stores that are sprinkled throughout the city.

Now, I have a slightly similar feeling to those relocated food bloggers I used to wonder about. Being in quarantine due to COVID-19 has made me feel more trapped than ever before when it comes to accessing foods and ingredients I want. While we are very lucky and have a full pantry, not to mention a packed fridge and freezer, there are always things I’m going to crave that are not going to be easy to get because Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Morton Williams, or Western Beef is not going to have the right market for Asian vegetables like water spinach/morning glory/kong xin cai, or dou miao/pea shoots. If I’m near the end of my beloved shiitake mushrooms, I can’t just hop on the subway ride down to Chinatown to get another bag of them. When I want to make Chinese taro or radish cake, well…. that just isn’t going to happen unless I can source Chinese radish or taro from a grocer that is willing to do delivery to my zip code. When Chris’s aunt posted on my YouTube channel, saying that she was still waiting for my mapo tofu video, I responded and told her it was nearly impossible to get the correct Sichuanese broad bean paste (pixian bean paste actually made and imported from Sichuan province!) that was needed to make authentic tasting mapo tofu during a time of shelter-in-place, so until I was able to source it, I wouldn’t make it a video for it because it just wouldn’t be right.

Some people probably would think I’m crazy to say that I am craving different vegetables right now because we don’t often associate “cravings” with vegetables. We usually associate it with comfort foods, which are normally carby, bready, meaty, fatty, filling. But I actually am having them now. My biggest craving is definitely for water spinach, as it’s one of my all-time favorite vegetables. I would really love to have yellow chives now. I would love to get my hands on some Thai basil and steam some gai lan / Chinese broccoli. But… these things will have to wait.

Once upon a time, I really was spoiled and super privileged to be able to have any of these above items and more pretty much a quick subway ride away. I felt like I could get nearly anything I wanted whenever I wanted, with the quantity I wanted. Now, that luxury has been taken away, if only temporarily. So when I finally do get my hands on some water spinach, I will hold it like it’s gold and chew it just a few more times to savor it all.

Once upon a time, in a land and time far away, the idea of having a million dollars seemed like a big deal, like really really big — so significant that when you finally reached that amount, you could label yourself a millionaire. Wow, I’m a millionaire! Yippee!

That time, at least, for “middle class,” white-collared professionals, particularly ones living in particularly expensive and dense areas such as New York City or the San Francisco Bay Area, has ended. Now, what does a million dollars buy you — a crappy, dilapidated two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, crawling with roaches and full of lead-filled paint? A one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side? Is that what you would consider “rich” today?

It’s a depressing thought. I used to always imagine I’d have a comfortable house, maybe four or five bedrooms, with a huge backyard where I could plant fruit trees, endless flowers, and have a section just for vegetables. When I was young and dreamt of that, the idea of money and building wealth wasn’t top of mind. I didn’t know the real worth of a dollar then. I don’t really want that anymore, but I do still wish I had some outdoor space. Who has that while living in New York City?!

Now, in a time of the Coronavirus pandemic, the idea of “richness” to me has changed in meaning. Now, I think about being rich in terms of food and toilet paper. Tonight, we had a third delivery from Mirchi Market, an Indian/Pakistani grocery delivery service, now a standard delivery for us during this period, and when Chris opened up the boxes, I marveled at all the fresh fruit and vegetables, the dosa batter, even the Indian mixture snacks he got. I especially widened my eyes when he unveiled an entire flat box of 16 beautiful yellow mangoes, fragrant from being nearly ripe.

I was so excited. “We’re rich! We’re rich! Look at all these mangoes!” I exclaimed. We’ve had to store some of the mangoes in our coat closet, and as a result of this, as the days have passed and they’ve slowly ripened, when I open the closet, I am immediately greeted by the floral, sweet perfume of their juices nearly oozing out.

This is what it means to be rich, to have so many gorgeous, delicious, sweet mangoes that you don’t even know where to store them all; to have a freezer so full that you have to hesitate before considering adding yet another frozen item to your shopping cart while at the grocery store; to not make another dish until you have more free space in your fridge. This is what it means to be rich right now.