Cultural appropriation

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So many chefs and celebrities over the years have been accused of cultural appropriation. Some of it is legitimate, and some of it may be a bit off base. Famous chef and cookbook writers like Ivan Orkin, the owner of Ivan Ramen, and the British chef and cookbook writer Fuchsia Dunlop, who was educated at the Sichuanese culinary academy and is the author of several acclaimed Chinese cookbooks that vary by region of China, have both been accused of it. The thing about both of them is that they both have made seemingly complex cuisines more understandable to Asian Americans like myself, who oftentimes struggle to understand how to “bridge the gap” between Eastern and Western culture. Ivan Ramen introduces new techniques to the humble ramen bowl by introducing rye as an ingredient in ramen noodles. Fuchsia Dunlop tries to use more modern techniques in Sichuanese and Hunanese cuisine while preserving flavors, and even writes a memoir that helps me understand the nuances of a culture that I’m supposed to claim as my own, even though I’ve grown up here in the U.S. She’s actually studied the language and the history of China, and tried to understand the language nuances and cultural differences in a way that someone who isn’t Chinese in China can understand. It’s people like Ivan and Fuchsia who have helped me better understand these Asian cultures, one of which I’m supposed to identify with. But in China as in the language, everyone outside of China is an “outsider,” even those who are ethnically Han Chinese.

War Paint

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Today, a good friend from San Francisco and I spent the day together. We watched the off-Broadway musical War Paint together, and as two people who work in marketing, a lot of the themes resonated and cracked both of us up. The one that was the most ridiculous given what industry we work in was when Helena Rubenstein, who was back in the day a famous and very wealthy cosmetics titan and icon, was trying to figure out how to increase her company’s revenue. Her then partner says to her, why don’t you just take the same face cream formulation, label one jar “day cream,” and the second jar “night cream”? No one will know the difference! This “genius” idea led to literally double the revenue they had previously seen and much success for their brand. Of course, this was back in the day when women had no idea what ingredients were going into their skincare and makeup, and they lapped up any type of advertising that led them to believe they were becoming more beautiful and “youthful” as a result of all this crap that different brands were selling at the time.

As someone who works in marketing, I realize that there are some things that I am more easily bought in on than others. The “day cream” vs. “night cream” idea is just so awful that it is good.

Two months

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It’s been almost two months since we left the Upper East Side, and today, we’ve come back to run some errands and pick up some random mail that failed to get to our new address. Seeing all the new Asian restaurants that have popped up here in just two months since we’ve left is a bit crazy. I guess that goes to show how quickly any neighborhood changes. There’s now a very affordable Filipino restaurant that is the second and sister restaurant of a spot I loved downtown, and they even serve macapuno ice cream. Five years ago when I moved to the Upper East Side, I never for a split second thought that macapuno ice cream would make its way up to that neighborhood. I guess I was wrong.

Now, my old neighborhood seems like it has better food than my current one. It always seems to be greener on the other side.

Takeout with friends

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Tonight, we invited some friends over for dinner to see our place for the first time since we’ve moved in. We haven’t had many people over at all due to travel schedules and my parents’ visit, so this is really the only time we’ve had more than one person over at once. Given that it’s a Friday, I unfortunately wasn’t able to cook and instead opted to get takeout for us instead. Seeing what was in the area and what delivered, I decided to get some Napolitean-style pizza from Don Antonio, a spot Chris and I have been to a few times and have really enjoyed. Little did I remember that the pizzas were expensive – with toppings, anywhere from $20-29 each, and they really aren’t that large — just four pieces per pizza. With just three pizzas ordered, with tax and delivery tip, it already came to over $70. I supplemented the pizza with a spring mix/arugula, toasted walnut and pear salad, some grilled shishito peppers, mushroom turnovers, and dessert.

Is this really how much “takeout” for a party of four should cost? I thought you were supposed to save money by eating in?!

Processing medical claims

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I was at the office today after over 2.5 weeks of not being around, either due to vacation, being in San Francisco, or being sick. It felt really good to be around my colleagues again, listening to what everyone has been up to in the last few weeks, and listening to stupid jokes and sarcasm again… and being sarcastic myself.

What was not fun was figuring out how to file my claim for my medical treatment while being in New Zealand. It’s like health insurance companies want to make everything so difficult for you when trying to get your money back that they make the entire process more and more cumbersome. No, you cannot just file the claim online. You actually have to copy every single form the doctor gave you outlining the treatment and your condition, plus any prescriptions or medication recommendations, plus all your receipts, and snail mail it to their designated PO box. And even that will not guarantee that you get your money back because they need about 15 different things explicitly called out and highlighted in the documentation they give you.

I feel like I am putting these documents together blindly, and putting them in the mail is like a gamble. Am I going to hear a response? Will they actually pay me back? Who knows.

Dentist dread

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I went to see the dentist yesterday, and with my cleaning, I also had to get some restorative work done on my two front teeth. I am a teeth grinder at night. It’s a terrible habit, but one that I am unable to control because what I do in my sleep… is when I am not conscious. So I wear this pathetic, childlike mouth guard at night, which is very unsexy, but despite that, the grinding continues. The guard is there to lessen the damage to my teeth, but the damage still happens. So the dentist took x-rays and saw there were some cracks in my front teeth that needed some help.

Can you imagine going to the dentist when you are 31 years old and being told that there are cracks in your two front teeth that need some sealant? That’s like being told you’re at risk for becoming toothless for the rest of your life, at least, for the two front teeth that really matter every single time you meet or speak with anyone.

I can never get any good news at the dentist. Ever.

Fire alarm

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I decided that after a lot of negligence that tonight would be the night I’d re-season my cast iron pan. Cast iron is known to be frustrating in that if it’s not seasoned properly, everything will stick to it. I followed the instructions by preheating the oven to 450 degrees,  oiling the cast iron pan inside and out so it was nearly dry, and then sticking the pan into the oven. Almost immediately did the fire alarm in our new apartment go off, and when I say “go off,” I really mean GO OFF. A little voice kept on repeating “fire!”, and the alarm, glaringly loud, just kept going on and on. I couldn’t figure out how to shut it off. I turned the air conditioner on, then the fan, then even opened a window (for the very first time in this apartment). I finally had to call the doorman to ask him how to shut it off (he reiterated how sensitive those fire detectors are). In the end, it went off on its own after the apartment cooled down a bit, but wow, is that thing sensitive. Everyone on my floor must have hated me.

These are the nuances you learn about your apartment the longer you live in it. Maybe next time I set the oven over 400 degrees, I will just need to shut the fire detector off.

Unfinished Business

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Anne-Marie Slaughter, a prominent international lawyer, foreign policy analyst, professor and former dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, former Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department under Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State… okay, she has too many titles and accomplishments, but the point is that she wrote this book that was published last year called Unfinished Business, which the media often portrayed as the counterpoint to Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. Lean In primarily argues that change relies on the individual; Unfinished Business argues that change needs to happen at the societal level, but that means that the way we all think has to change. Obviously both are necessary for full and true equality of men and women, but there are a lot of points that Slaughter brings up that are a bit hard to swallow, especially when you realize you enable a lot of the behavior you may not rejoice about.

In her second and current marriage, she says that for the most part, she and Andy are equals… but are they really? They have raised two sons and generally share in teaching, disciplining, clothing, and feeding them, but why does it always feel like she is asking her husband to do things that he should just do? Why should she be checking with him about the medication they need to give the kids, or reminding him to give one of them a bath when he should just know it? Why does she always have a sense of urgency when it’s time to clean the bathtub or mop the floor, and he seems to think it can happen later and asks why it needs to be done at that very moment (which really means… probably never)? When it’s time to clean, she finds herself doing the lion’s share of the cleaning and organizing not because she thinks he’s unwilling, but because it’s just easier if she does it herself and doesn’t bother asking him. Because shouldn’t they both know that cleaning needs to get done?

He may be guilty of being less willing to clean, feeling less “urgency” to get those menial tasks done, but at the same time, she enables him by justifying in her mind that it’s quicker for her to take care of certain tasks. So she just gets them done. This then enables the imbalance in duties. So then the problem remains: how do they both have an understanding of what needs to get done and by when so that it doesn’t feel like one party is doing significantly more than the other, or that one is nagging the other to get things done?

This feels like my situation. Or maybe it’s the situation of most couples who live together because nothing is ever truly “equal” or egalitarian. But then that begs the question of what imbalance are you going to be comfortable with to really be happy and fulfilled? It’s all too easy to fall into gender roles in heterosexual relationships where the woman “owns” most of the domestic duties. But then that’s not really fair if both work, right? It’s far more challenging and a constant work in progress to continually evaluate how “egalitarian” the methods are that duties are divided and see what can be improved upon.

Finding medicine

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I haven’t slept through the night in over a week because I’ve been waking up to cough up mucus or vomit. It hasn’t been fun, and it’s been very exhausting on my entire body. Lucky for me, last night was probably the first night I successfully was able to sleep more than four consecutive hours. I think I slept about six. I had a lot of different dreams throughout the night, but this one was the most vivid.

I was at my parents’ house, sick and in bed. My mother, as per usual, is nervous and not sure what to do. She’s pacing around the kitchen and bathroom attempting to locate the correct cough medication to suppress my coughing. “I think this is the one! Is it?” she’s asking herself.

Ed comes out of nowhere and passes through the kitchen. He quietly opens the kitchen cupboard, pulls out a bottle, and hands it to her. “This is the right one,” he said. He takes a quick look at me, and we make eye contact for a few seconds. And then, just as quietly as he entered, he leaves and shuts the door behind him.

He comes to save the day, and then he leaves.

Erratic route

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After I checked out from my disgusting hotel yesterday at noon, I had an Uber driver take me from the hotel back to my parents’ place so I could rest for the remainder of the afternoon. The oddest thing about the drive, though, was that the driver took the most erratic route. The quickest way to get from the financial district to my parents’ house from downtown is via Pine, and it’s especially fast when there’s no traffic (and at around 1pm on a Friday, there was none). He did begin by taking Pine, but when we were reaching the end of it, he went on some weird back streets and continued to use backstreets all the way back to the Richmond. And another odd thing: one back street he took brought us right past the Columbarium, right past Loraine Court, where my brother now rests.

I felt guilty this week for multiple reasons — being in San Francisco for work and not being able to participate in our mid-year kick off event, which was the primarily reason I was out here to begin with. I felt guilty being laid up in a terrible hotel bed when I was supposed to be engaging with my colleagues and doing work. I felt bad using company expenses to not work and instead to vomit into a toilet while being sick. And I also felt bad knowing I’d have no energy to go visit Ed at the Columbarium. It would be the only trip I’d ever take to San Francisco since my brother’s passing that I would not have gone to visit him, and it made me feel terrible.

So maybe this erratic route was some strange, other-worldly way to acknowledge my brother, to acknowledge the fact that I wanted to see him and say hello despite falling ill and not being able to do as I originally planned.