For the first time in my adult life, I have chosen to forgo a salary. For the past year, I’ve been covering my colleague’s maternity leave, working as a Multimedia Journalist for the International Bar Association. Before that I spent two-and-a-half years as the team’s Content Editor.
Upon my colleague’s return, I’ve decided to take a step forward instead of backwards into my former role - I’m taking the plunge into freelance writing and editing.
I am scared and I am excited, and, most importantly, I feel inspired. There’s nothing like shaking up your life to reinvigorate your creativity.
At the IBA, I primarily wrote about human rights issues, particularly gender and race equity and justice, poverty, asylum and refugee rights, and more. Those are my passions, so will still be a staple of my writing and this newsletter.
But, technically, until 5.30pm GMT on Thursday, I’m still employed by the IBA. I’m on annual leave, taking a breather to recuperate from the past year of learning to be a journalist while remote working in the middle of a pandemic. While I’m employed by the IBA, I can’t really write the things I’d usually write, about human rights, injustice, and so on. That is going to have to come later.
Instead, for this first edition, I’m going to talk about food. (That seems fitting, because this newsletter, ‘Marginalia’, is named after a Billy Collins poem that ends with the line ‘pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love’.)
On Friday, my partner Rowern sent me a Financial Times article by Fuchsia Dunlop: ‘How the British-Chinese takeaway took off’. It’s a vivid and thoughtfully written piece about the kind of Anglo-Cantonese food - and the takeaway establishments offering that food - that for much of the UK is synonymous with takeaway itself.
Dunlop talks about the history of Chinese takeaway in the UK, and offers a nostalgia tour of food and place as she searches for ‘Jar Jow’, a dish that seems to exist only in East London (it can be found at New World in Plaistow).
The article is a great read, and it reminded me of conversations I’ve had with my eldest brother, Laurie, who happens to be a chef.
For more than a decade, he has lived in the US, working at restaurants including Le Bernadin in New York, then crossing coasts to San Francisco and eventually becoming Dropbox’s (I know) Global Executive Pastry Chef. At the very fancy restaurants in New York, he’d make those strange deconstructed desserts that call themselves ‘Bakewell tart’ but consist of a teardrop of mousse and a cuboid almond truffle.
I still dream about food that he’s made for us at home - including, just once, for my eighth birthday, a sea-themed sugar-scape to sit atop my birthday cake.
When he came home for our mum’s birthday in 2019 - possibly the first homecoming in a decade - I wondered where on earth we would take him for dinner.
To my surprise, he was desperate for a good curry, specifically a curry in Northampton, where we grew up.
For him, curry was the quintessential British food that he had missed most. Not scones, fish and chips, or shepherd’s pie. Not Victoria sponge, deconstructed or otherwise.
So we took a road-trip, winding down backroads to find a place he remembered - or at least a highly rated spot on Google maps. The food was delicious. And familiar. And now, I understand.
Britain has enormous flaws and a horrendous, unforgiveable legacy of colonialism, which, to my frequent dismay, some people still desperately cling to as a source of national pride. But, by its nature, ‘British culture’ is a beautiful, messy, fusion of traditions and flavours and people.
Rowern has started telling me about all the foods and dishes that seem ubiquitous to certain cultures that originally came from somewhere else.
Some attribute the origins of tikka masala to South Asian cooks living in Great Britain. Sweet and sour is an Asian-American invention. And although if you do a web search for sushi you’ll likely see pictures that include salmon, there’s no salmon naturally in Japan - salmon sushi came from Japanese immigrants in America. The grapefruit is a hybrid invented fruit, made of the pomelo and orange, from the Caribbean. ‘British’ tea, of course, has been imported since its conception.
As Dunlop tells us in her FT article, there are dishes that only exist in the UK, sometimes only in a small region. They’re fusion foods, not traditionally Chinese, but very much what white British people know as Chinese.
They are dishes that were originally created in the UK by Chinese immigrants bringing flavours and ideas from Chinese cuisines to the Western palate. Chow mein, chop suey, ‘jar jow’ are distinctly Anglo-Chinese dishes, favourites of white European customers at places like New World.
My family never really had takeout when I was growing up, but whenever I had any with friends’ families, or at university, it would generally be Chinese or Indian. Domino’s Pizza only became a regular once I moved to my university town.
As Dunlop writes: ‘it’s easy to forget that the takeaway was once almost synonymous with Chinese food. In the 1970s, when I was growing up in Oxford, the only takeaways available, aside from fish and chips, were Chinese and Indian.’
This food is such a long-standing and widespread staple across the UK that it is, then, as much a part of our culture, and our shared national identity, as scones, afternoon tea, and the good old Victoria sponge.
We are extraordinarily lucky to be such a multicultural nation, a patchwork of people inheriting different and adjacent cultures growing up alongside each other.
Now that I live in London, not only do I live with my Malaysian-Chinese partner who feeds me delicious Southeast Asian-style dinners, but I get to hear ten different languages a day, see people who look like me and who don’t, and eat food from countries I’ve yet to lay eyes on as well as food that has fused into being right here.
To me, Britain is a multicultural and multilingual world, particularly in our cities but also in small towns and rural villages, where the only thing close to a restaurant is in fact the Chinese takeaway.
Where my mum lives now, there’s a beautiful little restaurant (it does takeaway too) serving authentic and fusion Thai, Malaysian and Chinese food together. It’s my favourite place to eat whenever I go home.
So, I guess now I understand my fancy chef brother wanting a good British-Indian curry when he came home. It’s the ‘food of our people’.
How nonsensical, then, that there unfortunately are many people who would rather lose all of that, whose hatred, in the twenty-first century, continues to undermine this delicious harmony of peoples.
The tide of racist and anti-immigrant sentiment that has swept the UK since shortly before Brexit - also the year of Trump - has been rising and evolving. And because Covid-19 originated in China, and the former US president deliberately and abhorrently referred to it as the ‘China virus’, anti-Asian sentiment is at an all-time high. Some people even avoided Chinese takeaways at the start of the UK’s experience of the pandemic.
Although it seems worse in the US than the UK, I’ve been afraid for more than a year now that someone will take out their fear and their hate on Rowern. We’ve been very lucky, but I know many in the UK won’t have been. And, heartbreakingly, the dangers of white supremacist violence in the US has become headline news again with the killing of six Asian-American women in an Atlanta shooting that killed eight people in total.
The police, who managed to arrest the (white male) killer peacefully, said the man had told them he’d been ‘having a bad day’, and that he had to kill these people to rid himself of some unholy temptations. Many, many women have seen the racist misogyny (two inseparable hatreds) at the heart of this attack for what it is, and have written far better words than I could ever about it, and about how women, particularly women of colour, are seen as disposable outlets for the anger and sexual frustrations of white men. Read Shaila Dawan’s piece for the New York Times here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/us/racism-sexism-atlanta-spa-shooting.html
Dawan writes, ‘There is a long history of misogyny and violence directed specifically at Asian women by men of all races — including Asian men. Asian-American women have long been stereotyped as sexually submissive, portrayed in popular culture as exotic “lotus blossoms” and manipulative “dragon ladies,” or as inherently superior to other women in a way that erases their individuality. They have been subjected to backlash for any failure to conform to those stereotypes and trolled for choosing non-Asian partners.’
I’m going to stop here, as I promised to write about food, not racism and misogyny.
All I’ll say now is: first, that we must remember how much we have to celebrate, as a multicultural nation of people; and second, that food has always had the power to bring people together, at the dinner table and at the juncture between countries and cultures.