Blog Post #31: Spicy Cumin Hand-Ripped Noodles

Perhaps this is the start of “feeling lost in my 20s” but I’ve noticed that despite acknowledging my wasian-ness, I sometimes feel like I want to run away from the White half of my Chinese-White self. At, least, that’s what I was thinking ordering my spicy cumin hand-ripped noodles (孜然羊肉手扯面, and yes, I copied those characters directly off the online menu) at  a Xi’an restaurant yesterday. I pointed my finger at my desired dish and said “yào yīgè zhège” (“I want one of these”). When asked in both Chinese and then English which spice level I wanted, I pointed again at the third level and said “zhège” (“this”). Sure, I could’ve just ordered in English to begin with, but I didn’t want to. Why? I’m not too sure, perhaps I just wanted to be seen as someone who speaks Chinese, by the waiter looking at me curiously as I joked to him that I was speaking Chinglish. Or perhaps to the people waiting behind me in line, or perhaps even just to myself- to prove that I’m Asian enough to walk into a Chinese restaurant and order in Chinese. 

As I dug into my thick, chewy, noodles drowning in chili oil and topped with spiced lamb, I didn’t really care about any of those things. My nose was running, my lips numb by the time I finished the bowl. No, I’m not fluent in Chinese, nor can I read or write. But sometimes I feel nostalgic for a country I’ve never lived in, a longing to be closer to a culture which is inherently part of my identity. And so I let myself hold onto those small things, the videos sent in our family WeChat group of my cousin’s baby, the daily Duolingo lessons, the playlists of songs I can’t really understand but enjoy anyways. 

These are thoughts I’ve been wanting to put on paper for a while. At times, our cultures may be othered, stigmatized, stereotyped, but America is a country that was built off of immigrants, and my experience might not be a unique one. The experience of wanting to feel more connected to a culture in which you didn’t grow up in. And as humans, we are allowed to choose to fully explore all the puzzle pieces that make up us.