INTERLUDE
THIS IS FOR THE ASIAN AMERICAN FACES BEHIND THE FOOD THAT NOURISHES AMERICANS AND ENRICHES AMERICAN CUISINE. The general public knows so little about Asian American people, but our food is everywhere, at once exotic and mainstream. To appreciate the contributions of Asian Americans to food—its production, preservation, preparation, presentation, and consumption—we need to see the faces behind the food. The year 1965 compels a second look as an origin year of food histories.
THIS IS FOR LARRY ITLIONG AND THE FILIPINO AMERICAN FARMWORKERS WHO STARTED THE GRAPE STRIKE IN DELANO, CALIFORNIA, IN 1965. Under Itliong’s leadership, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC)—a group made up primarily of Filipino American laborers—gathered in Delano’s Filipino Community Hall on September 7 and that evening voted to strike. On September 8, approximately 1,500 Filipino farmworkers walked out of the fields, leaving ripe grapes on the ground. They remained militant in the face of eviction from their homes and violent encounters with law enforcement.
To deter growers from hiring replacement workers, Itliong reached out to Cesar Chavez to ask if the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA)—a predominantly Mexican American group—would join the strike. The United Farm Workers (UFW) emerged from the joined forces of AWOC and NFWA. Chavez and Itliong were at its helm, serving as the UFW’s director and assistant director, respectively, from 1966 to 1971. The five-year Delano Grape Strike launched one of the most significant movements for social justice in the second half of the twentieth century.
The farmworkers’ movement raised public consciousness about the harsh conditions in which they worked in the fields. These conditions included no work breaks during twelve-hour days under unrelenting sun or windy and dusty conditions, and no access to clean drinking water and toilets. Farmworkers also endured exposure to pesticides and lived in substandard housing. It is ironic that the laborers who nourished the masses by growing, tending, and harvesting fruits and vegetables were doing so in unsafe environments and for meager wages. Their demands for change resonated with consumers on regional, national, and international levels.
The UFW achieved many post-strike victories—not the least of which was the 1975 passage of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, a landmark agreement recognizing the right of farmworkers in California to organize—but Filipinos were increasingly marginalized in the union that they had helped to create.1 Distinct organizing philosophies and priorities began to pull the Filipino and Mexican American coalition apart. Cesar Chavez Day is a US federal commemorative holiday, but the struggle to remember Larry Itliong and the Filipino farmworkers continues.
Their legacy shines more brightly in large part thanks to the research and writing of scholar Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, the author of Little Manila Is in the Heart, which preserves the histories of the farmworkers who made Stockton, California, a vibrant Filipino community until its Little Manila neighborhood was decimated by urban redevelopment in the 1960s. In an interview for the California Report, she related that her grandparents were farmworkers. And her dad was a farmworker who knew Larry Itliong. However, Dawn did not even know who Larry Itliong was until she went to college. She reflected, “I think it’s such a tragedy that so many young Filipino Americans grew up without knowing the central, pivotal, significant role that we’ve played in American history.”2
THIS IS FOR DAWN BOHULANO MABALON AND THOSE WHO CHAMPION LABOR HISTORY. These advocates include California attorney general Rob Bonta, whose parents worked for the UFW. Before becoming attorney general, Bonta was an assemblyman—the first Filipino American in California history to win election to the legislature—who shepherded Assembly Bill 123, which involved changes in the state school curriculum to cover the role of immigrants, including Filipino Americans, in the farm labor movement.
These bittersweet labor histories were a century in the making.
THIS IS FOR THE OVER THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND ASIAN MIGRANTS—CHINESE, JAPANESE, KOREAN, AND FILIPINO—WHOSE LABOR MADE SUGAR PRODUCTION HAWAI’I’S TOP INDUSTRY. Between 1850 and 1920, they were brought to the Hawai’ian Islands as “cheap labor.” Women workers, most of them Japanese, were among them. They included scholar Ronald Takaki’s grandmother Katsu Okawa, who was a cane cutter on Hana Plantation, and his aunt Yukino Takaki, who was an hapaiko worker, or cane loader, on the Puunene Plantation.3 The grueling work of plantation labor imprinted their bodies with calloused hands and cauliflower ears. Writer Milton Murayama, the son of Japanese immigrants, grew up in a plantation camp in Pu’ukoli’i. His award-winning novel about plantation life is titled All I Asking for Is My Body.4
THIS IS FOR THE CHINESE WORKERS WHO TRANSFORMED TENS OF THOUSANDS OF ACRES OF CALIFORNIA SWAMPLAND INTO ARABLE LAND AND WHO APPLIED THEIR INGENUITY TO ORCHARDS FROM OREGON TO FLORIDA. Beginning in the late 1860s, they built more than a thousand miles of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, using only shovels and wheelbarrows and working in waist-deep water.5 After arriving in the United States around 1855, Ah Bing worked as a foreman in the Lewelling family fruit orchards in Milwaukie, Oregon, for thirty-five years. He is credited as the cultivator and namesake of the popular Bing cherry.6 In Florida, Lue Gim Gong experimented with cross-pollination to produce fruits that were more tolerant of cold weather after the state recorded some of the worst freezes in 1894 and 1895. In 1911, he successfully cross-pollinated a “Hart’s Late” Valencia orange with a “Mediterranean Sweet” to produce a new orange named the “Lue Gim Gong,” which was much more resistant to the cold. His many innovations also included a cold-tolerant grapefruit.7
THIS IS FOR THE CHINESE, JAPANESE, AND FILIPINO WORKERS IN THE CANNED SALMON INDUSTRY OF THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST. Between the 1870s and World War II, they made up the majority of laborers in the canneries that dotted the narrow coastal zone from Alaska to central California. While the fishing life has been celebrated in popular culture, the workers who processed and canned salmon have been overlooked. Yet their labor was a key element of the American West’s economic development. Between 1880 and 1937, Alaska’s canned salmon was more valuable than the minerals mined in the territory in the same period.8
THIS IS FOR THE JAPANESE FRUIT AND VEGETABLE FARMERS. By 1909, more than thirty thousand Japanese were tenant farmers or farm laborers in California.9 They produced 70 percent of California’s strawberries. They also grew the majority of the state’s snap beans, tomatoes, spring and summer celery, onions, and green peas, fulfilling the increasing demands for fresh produce in the cities.10 Issei—or first generation—Japanese women, many of them picture brides, worked in the farms with their husbands, sometimes bringing their children with them during harvest.11 One of these women was Maju Sakaguchi, who was born in Kumamoto Prefecture in 1894 and arrived in the United States in 1915 to join her husband, Chokichi Sakaguchi. Her high expectations of her new life in San Jose, California, were immediately dashed. She spent her honeymoon working in a strawberry field. Furthermore, discriminatory California land laws restricted the Issei from owning land and limited their property leases to three years. Families typically cultivated new land, then had to leave it and begin again.12
THIS IS FOR THE ASIAN INDIAN AGRICULTURAL WORKERS, MANY OF WHOM FOUND WORK IN CALIFORNIA’S FIELDS IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY. The Sacramento Valley reminded Puna Singh of the Punjab: “Fertile fields stretched across the flat valley to the foothills lying far in the distance.”13 These workers moved around the state in groups as contract workers. In the Sacramento Valley, they worked in the orchards and sugar beet fields, then moved on to the vineyards and citrus groves of the San Joaquin Valley in central California until they reached the Imperial Valley’s cantaloupe fields in the south.
THIS IS FOR THE RESTAURANT WORKERS, LIKE CHIN SHUCK WING, WHO STARTED WORKING AT AN AMERICANIZED CHINESE RESTAURANT IN 1936 IN NEW YORK CITY. The first Chinese restaurants in New York emerged in the 1870s, serving Chinese immigrants almost exclusively. By the 1920s, however, other New Yorkers became the majority of diners, and they especially loved chop suey—meaning “different pieces” in Cantonese—with its morsels of meat and vegetables in a brown gravy served over rice or noodles. These restaurants provided their American customers with a gateway to a seemingly exotic new world without traveling far from home. But this was hardly the case for many of its immigrant workers. As a line cook, Chin typically worked a grueling ten-hour day over hot ranges, preparing and cooking chop suey and other dishes. Line cooks sometimes worked back-to-back shifts and, like waiters, dealt with abusive managers and bosses. Chin lived in the United States for a little over fifty years, during which he sent letters and remittances to his wife and children who he left behind in China. But he was unable to return to China before his death in 1987.14
THIS IS FOR THE FOOD SERVICE WORKERS IN CAFETERIAS. These workers include the predominantly female Japanese, Okinawan, Korean, Chinese, and Filipino servers, cooks, and, later, managers in Hawai’i’s public elementary school system in the twentieth century. Students’ memories of these “cafeteria ladies” as they stood in line for lunch were among the most indelible. One cafeteria lady was Eleanor Kim Tyau, a Korean American who was born in 1915 in Kona on the island of Hawai’i. After her first job at Kalihi-waena Elementary School, she was reassigned to Saint Louis School during World War II. The cafeteria was utilized as a civilian defense canteen and a feeding station for war workers. After the war, Tyau resumed providing meals for students and school staff. During her thirty-seven-year career there, she made gallons of kimchi, the Korean spicy dish of pickled and fermented vegetables, and taigu, Korean seasoned codfish, for school fundraisers. Despite the prodigious amount she prepared year after year, Tyau recalled, “I just never seemed to make enough of it.”15
THIS IS FOR THE WRITER AND MIGRANT WORKER CARLOS BULOSAN. He chronicled the plight of the Filipino agricultural migrant workers in his semi-autobiographical novel America Is in the Heart, published in 1946. America was in their hearts because, although their “stoop labor” contributed to the American West’s health and prosperity, the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were not available to them. What life is this when you are compelled to live in segregated places full of desperation, when you are repeatedly demeaned as an animal—”Listen to the brown monkey talk”—and when you are brutalized by police without provocation? 16
THIS IS FOR DALIP SINGH SAUND, WHO, IN 1956, BECAME THE FIRST PERSON OF ASIAN DESCENT ELECTED TO SERVE AS A US REPRESENTATIVE, AND CHAMPIONED THE FARMERS OF HIS SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA DISTRICT. Raised in Chhajjalwaddi in Punjab, India, Saund arrived in New York in 1920. He eventually moved to California’s Imperial Valley, where a number of other Indians had settled, and worked in farming—growing lettuce and beets as well as cotton—over two decades. Although his race, ethnicity, and religious beliefs were consistently raised by the media and critics during the election, Saund credited his political victory to his commitment to small-scale farmers and small businesses.17
THIS IS FOR THAI AMERICANS WHO HAVE A COMPLICATED RELATIONSHIP WITH THAI FOOD BECAUSE THEY ARE OFTEN CONFLATED WITH IT. Scholar Mark Padoongpatt’s groundbreaking research in his book on this subject, Flavors of Empire, provides a transnational historical context for the rise of Thai food’s popularity in the United States.18 During the Cold War, the presence of Americans in Thailand through cultural exchange programs, tourism, and military bases exposed them to the flavors of Thai cuisine that they sought to replicate in the United States. As Thai immigration increased beginning in the 1960s, some of them entered the food and restaurant industry for individual, but also historical, reasons. The US global presence in Thailand had created consumer demand for Thai flavors and dishes, such as pad thai.
THIS IS FOR THE MANONGS. Manong is a term that conveys respect for Filipino elders. It also refers to the generation of mostly Filipino men who came to the United States in the tens of thousands in the 1920s and 1930s, and who labored as migrant agricultural workers. They followed the crops from California to the Pacific Northwest, harvesting grapes, onions, tomatoes, asparagus, potatoes, peaches, lettuce, sugar beets, celery, and more. Their labor contributed to the wealth of growers, while they earned a dollar a day. From the 1920s to the 1940s, the manongs demonstrated their militancy, organizing a wildcat grape strike near Lodi in 1924, a celery strike in the San Joaquin and Sacramento Delta in 1936, and asparagus strikes in Stockton in 1948 and 1949.19 In the 1950s, union members were accused of Communist Party membership, arrested by the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service), and threatened with deportation.20 But their belief in the power of organizing persisted. The 1965 Grape Strike was not an exception, but rather a singular point on a continuum.
As this brief history shows, the labor, innovations, and struggles of Asian Americans in food and foodways overlapped with the post-1965 period. In the age of COVID-19, Asian Americans continue to be the many faces behind the food, using their creativity and leadership to promote communal care during a critical time. This work includes the social entrepreneurship of Hannah Dehradunwala, who cofounded the nonprofit Transfernation and serves as its CEO. Transfernation is a technology platform that redistributes leftover prepared food from restaurants and companies to places that need them, such as homeless shelters, food pantries, and senior centers, thereby reducing edible food waste as well as responding to heightened food insecurity during crises, such as New York City’s coronavirus-related lockdown.21
Another example of food-related communal care is Heart of Dinner, whose mission is to nourish New York City’s Asian elders with love and food every week.22 Founded by Yin Chang and Moonlynn Tsai as a supper club to create a sense of community around a shared meal, Chang and Tsai shifted their vision at the onset of the pandemic given the surge in anti-Asian violence. In April 2020, they cooked Heart of Dinner #LovingChinatown hot lunches for homebound elders in and around Manhattan’s Chinatown area. Volunteers and partner businesses—such as chef-owner of Saigon Social, Helen Nguyen; baker and founder of Partybus Bakeshop, Jacqueline Russo Eng; and owner and executive chef of Bessou, Maiko Kyogoku and Emily Yuen—enabled Heart of Dinner’s expansion to other parts of New York City, delivering over seventy thousand meals as of May 2021. One distinctive aspect of the volunteers’ work is the handwritten notes they provide, composed in the elders’ native languages of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Tagalog with English translations, to personalize their meal-based care packages. Volunteers are also encouraged to decorate the notes and brown bags to bring joy to elderly recipients.
The irony of Asian Americans producing America’s food and enlivening the overall food experience in the context of hate and violence has not been lost on them, historically and in the present day. In March 2021, people gathered at North Dakota State University in Fargo to protest against anti-Asian hatred. One poster read, “Love us like you love our food.”23