For the first time in my adult life, I have chosen to forgo a salary.
Technically, for the next four days, I’m still employed by the IBA, just on annual leave. So I can’t really write the things I’d usually write, about human rights, the law, and so on. That is going to have to come later.
Instead, for this first edition, I’m going to talk about food.
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, run by Julie Tang).
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 and Quince in New York, eventually crossing coasts to become 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. I somehow doubted that the pubs in a tiny market town in Northamptonshire would live up to his standards.
But, to my great surprise, he was in fact desperate for a good Northampton curry. For him, that 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 roadtrip, 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 that some people still desperately cling to. But, by its nature, the ‘British culture’ is a beautiful, messy, fusion of traditions and flavours and people.
Rowern has started telling me about all the foods that seem ubiquitous to certain cultures that originally came from somewhere else. Irish potatoes originally from Peru. There’s no salmon in Japan - all the salmon sushi came from Japanese immigrants in America. There were no chillies in India until the Portuguese came in the 1500s, having been trading with the Americas. Hungary, famous for goulash and paprika? those bell peppers also came from North America. The grapefruit is a hybrid invented fruit, made of the pomelo and an orange, from the Caribbean. All tomatoes come from the Americas, and did not exist in Europe until Columbus brought it over. ‘British’ tea, of course, along with coffee, 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 cuisine, whether Cantonese, Sichuan, or from another region, to the Western palate. Chow mein, chop suey, ‘jar jow’ are distinctly Anglo-Chinese dishes, favourites of the white British customers.
My family has 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.
It seems like ‘takeaway’ has always been synonymous with Chinese or Indian food. Food that is 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 Chinese-Malaysian 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, eat food from countries I’ve yet to lay eyes on, and 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’, as Rowern jokes sometimes.
What I will never be able to understand is how, after all of this, such violent racism abounds that families who have been running local institutions for decades, who have been here for generations, are told to ‘go back where they came from’, or worse.
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.
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 eight Asian-American women in Atlanta.
Knowing and feeling all of this, it has been immensely heartbreaking to learn