I was raised in a household where everything from doodling to cooking food was considered art. Of all the mediums I have experimented with, poetry stood out to me the most. The written form of playing with words and platforming your experiences outside of the conventional five-paragraph essay became an emotional outlet. The best time for poetry, in my opinion, is the summer as it encourages lazy sunny days filled with reading. As I have yearned to find inspiration in the poetry section I stumbled across a new genre of poetry: Food poems. Peach State written by poet and writer Adrienne Su provides a collection that looks at the connections between food and the Asian American experiences.
Born in 1967, Su was raised in Atlanta, Georgia, and earned her BA at Radcliffe College of Harvard University and later went on to earn her MFA from the University of Virginia. An author of several poetry collections, Su’s work often creates discourse around the mundane and ordinary experiences in life. “Peach State” is her newest release.
The role of food and Chinese culture in Peach State
The collection of poems is organized into five sections and is often centered around particular foods, recipes, and the intergenerational meanings behind them. Su inserts her family heritage as a Chinese American woman into each bite of each poem. Her poems reflect on the complexity of growing up in the South.
Su emphasizes the importance of the mundane through her poems about friends “mistaking [her] everyday chopsticks for disposables” and struggle for self-identity through a piece about instant ramen. Her opening poem “Substitutions” begins to list the ways in which she and her family have had to assimilate or navigate the lack of authenticity whether in cooking or life. She brilliantly exposes the ways in which America has attempted to translate Chinese culture and cuisine but failed with examples like “Balsamic, for Zhenjiang vinegar” and “Cod filets, for carp head-to-tail.” But more importantly, Su looks at the literal idea of translations in her line, “Children who overhear the language, for children who speak the language.” Her lyrical lines expose a hunger that children of immigrants face; a yearning for their culture undiluted.
She injects her prose with a delightful measure of humor mixed with seriousness and a slight hint of sarcasm. Her poem “Peaches” illustrates the complexity of belonging within the United States, particularly growing up in Atlanta, Georgia, which is affectionately known as the Peach State.
“I’m from the Peach State, and to those
who ask But where are you from originally,
I’d like to reply The homeland of the peach,
but I'm too nice, and they might not look it up.”
Point in case, peaches were native to northwest China before immigrating to America. Nonetheless, Su allows us all to not only reflect on the idea of what is certain knowledge but also question what is truth.
Su explores the boundaries of form in several poems. One poem titled “Name That Restaurant,” playfully lays ten sets of four words equally spaced out, each capitalized as the proper nouns they are.
There seem to be no rules on the correct way to read the poem; simply finding words like Panda and Express can invoke a feeling or memory on the surface. The poem's true intentions, to me, elicit a feeling of betrayal perhaps on account of America. While Chinese restaurants have gained popularity over the growing decades, Chinese people are not equally accepted. But then again, I may be reading too much into it.
Another example of playing with form includes the shortest poem in the entire collection, in which the title is also the line.
The poem “When I grew up speaking no Chinese, I was forgetting these words” reads like prose and a set of definitions. Su lists Chinese words and defines the particular dish or food such as “Fensi, Dim sum, Laomian;” the latter she writes is “a word listed on menus” that creates the mispronunciation “low main which to [her] ear has nothing to do with noodles, but suggests a sewer problem.” Again inserting some humor that also expresses the feelings of hearing her butchered heritage and language through the American voices.
Storytelling through food
Su educates readers on so many Chinese stories and folklore such as Yang Guifei and lychee fruit or Across-the-Bridge-Noodles and devoted wives making this dish for their young husbands as they prepare for exams. Additionally, she sprinkles her analysis calling out the “unfeminist” aspects of the noodles and rewriting the story to include women eating the noodles as good luck in their imperial exams.
Her poems are steeped with scientific and historical facts and she intentionally curates a space for reflection through her use of enjambment or pauses within her lines. Her poem titled “On the recommendation that American adults consume no more than one-quarter cup of rice, twice a week,” explicitly expresses the national health standard for rice consumption. Her words filter a mix of emotions and reveal the way Chinese immigrants learned to assimilate their culture and foods. She writes, “The rice plants drink up arsenic [...] where fields were cotton” and create “more contamination.” Su slowly stirs in the recognition of environmental factors that impact food intake.
Storytelling through food is so intrinsic to Su’s work. She concludes with her personal story, the stories of her grandparents and ancestors in her final poems. The one that stood out to me the most is titled “Doughnuts.” Su tells a story through a series of couplets about walking into a Krispy Kreme store with her father and her daughters. The exchange of conversation between each generation allows a reflection on hunger and fulfillment, privilege and pain, and, ultimately, sincerity and sacrifice. Her last line concludes the conversation between her father and the cashier, “The cashier smiles. It’s in his job description but he looks sincere. This is the culture that created us. Respect for elders.”
Su’s work is an incredible journey that makes you feel both salty and sweet but nonetheless one of the most powerful food poetry collections I have ever read.