Grocery stores and "home"

Home doesn't have to be a place

I’ve been sick this weekend and today, instead of binge watching another series, I finished Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart. It’s a memoir she wrote about her relationship with her mother, which was largely mediated by food. Read what became the first chapter in the New Yorker here. The book ended up on my list as I continue to pursue reading more East Asian novels, a project I’ve been working on since 2019.

There was a lot in this book that I identified with. Zauner’s mother was Korean and her father is American, which means “white” if you’re biracial. “I could never be of both worlds, only half in and half out, waiting to be ejected at will by someone with a greater claim than me. Someone full. Someone whole.” My note says simply, “this,” because it’s the story of my life. American but told I’m Asian (specific cultures or nations being unimportant, the othering being the goal). Taiwanese, but told I’m American. Not familiar with American traditions or Taiwanese traditions. The list goes on.

But what I’m thinking about now is her relationship with grocery stores and the idea of home.

It’s one thing to become an immigrant, to grow up and decide to move to another country and make a life there. It’s another thing to grow up the child of an immigrant, which I did, and then go life an immigrant life yourself, which I do. It’s a double, triple, who knows the math on this kind of displacement.

People ask me a lot about home. Do you miss home? What does home mean to you? Where do you feel at home?

And for years I tried to answer the question reasonably, politely, lightly. Only recently have I begun to understand that it’s a foreign a concept to me as gezellig is to non-Dutch speakers.

You see, it’s not just that I moved a lot as a kid and a young adult. I know a lot of people who’ve done that. It’s not just that my parents are immigrants, I know a lot of kids with that. It has to do with the particular situation of my family. My father was an only child of divorced parents who we did not visit due to geography and a niggling habit of being awful to my mother on my grandmother’s side. My mother’s family was so far away in Taiwan that I didn’t visit until I was 8 and then three more times before I went to college. There wasn’t a family home to visit in Taipei. My grandmother lived with my older uncle in a tiny first floor apartment where the outdoor kitchen shared space with the outdoor toilet stall.

My friends in high school, all of us living abroad, told stories that are legendary to me, almost fairy tale like. One girl went to grandparents in Kentucky in the town where her father grew up. Another had a grandfather who collected children’s picture books. I’m married to a man who’s father can trace his family history back to a farm near Laren that the family has rented since the 1600s. He’s got a distant cousin living there now.

These people have a sense of home, a sense of place, as sense of being from somewhere that I will never have and, frankly, possibly never miss. To be honest, a lot of them don’t seem to value it much anyway, so why does it bother people so much that I don’t have a “home” that makes sense to them?

What I do have is grocery stores. Asian grocery stores, to be specific. My mother’s from Taiwan, but didn’t learn to cook until she married my father and moved first to North Carolina and then to California. She learned to bake in Germany. What feels like home to me is an Asian grocery store and a German bakery, in the sense that those are places where I know how to navigate and feel comfortable.

As the daughter of an immigrant, hunting for ingredients has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. In the 1980s in South Dakota and in the early 1990s in North Carolina, they were small, messy, dirty feeling shops where we went in search of fresh dofu, oyster sauce, mung bean noodles, Taiwanese barbecue sauce, and picked up haw flakes as a treat. We also got white rabbit candies and the soft chewy candies that were wrapped in rice paper and had a sticker in the pink and green cardboard package.

When I was a girl, the Asian grocery store was where we got treats, a tradition or maybe a habit that continues for me with my children today.

An example of the kind of snack shopping that happens if I go to an Asian grocery store. Most of these items are also made in Taiwan - a bonus!

Moving out into the world on my own, I was always on the lookout for the Asian shops that could satisfy my needs. There was a shop just off the main shopping street in Lausanne where I could pick up ramen noodles for my dorm room and one across the street from the train station in Basel that carried the deliciously spicy Korean ramen packages. In Barcelona, I found a nice Asian shop around the corner from the Plaça Catalunya. When I moved to the Netherlands, a visit to my in-laws usually involved a stop at the Amazing Oriental in Arnhem if I could manage it. When I went into Amsterdam for school during my Masters degree, it was a special treat to walk down the Zeedijk through China town and pick up fresh moji or stop at the grocery store on the way home. In Chicago, we finally lived somewhere with dim sum nearby and when I saw the sign in Nijmegen advertising the Amazing Oriental opening in town, I cheered out loud.

The Amazing Oriental is the name of a chain of wonderful Chinese-owned Asian grocery stores in the Netherlands. This is significant because most Asian stores in the Netherlands are tokos. Toko is the Indonesian word for shop. The Netherlands colonized Indonesia and take Indonesia as their reference for Asia. Most shops are fully stocked on Indonesian ingredients, with a Japanese section and some Indian foods as well, but lack Chinese ingredients. Yes, there is a difference. The Amazing Oriental carries the widest selection of Chinese ingredients and even has a few fabulous Taiwanese ingredients that I’m extra happy to buy.

I could talk for hours about the taxonomy of Asian shops and how they’ve changed over the years, in North America, from east to west coasts, and throughout northern Europe as well. One of the great benefits to living in Edmonton now is that the T&T is here, a huge grocery store chain owned by Taiwanese immigrants. Not only do they carry nearly everything I could ever want to get, including the little clams I can cook with soy sauce and dofu that my mother approves of, they also have a hot bar that knocks our socks off. It’s a far cry from the dingy one-room feeling grocery shops where my mother shopped in South Dakota, and a place that feels so, so good to me.

It isn’t just the food. Let’s face it, I don’t know what 80% of the stuff is and can only read some of the labels anyway. It’s the fact that I’m sharing this space with a bunch of other people who are also displaced one way or another. I’m sharing the space for a moment with people who would also love to eat at a night market, don’t think it’s weird to want to check a fish’s gills before you buy it, and prefer their vegetables hot, because salad is just a depressing option. Yes, they’re wild generalizations. Yes, someone will call me racist. But most North Americans would have a hard time understanding my “I love vegetables but salad makes me sad” position.

So there you go, I read Crying in H Mart and it took me on a weird path down memory lane past all the Asian stores that have helped me feel at home in the world in cities here and there.

Oh - and I haven’t misspelled dofu multiple times. It’s how my mother pronounces it. I grew up eating dofu and was shocked to find it spelled tofu. I realize by now that there’s no fighting the general position on this spelling, but I stick with dofu because no matter how many vegetarian cookbooks tell me I should grill my tofu (ick), it’s always dofu to me. Not a meat substitute, but a gorgeous food in its own category that I genuinely enjoy eating.