First Generation: Recipes from My Taiwanese-American Home is available for pre-order today!!
My dream has always been to write a cookbook about the food that I love from my first generation Taiwanese American upbringing. Dumplings, steamed bao, scallion pancakes but also Big Macs, fried chicken, CORN DOGS (I can't help the midwest in me). Miraculously, both an agent and a publisher took a chance on me, and suddenly my dreams came true.
With a book deal in hand and an Asian mom's "you can come home to mom and live with me FOREVER" blessing (I declined lol), I quit my tech job at Airbnb and was ready to begin. Except, as soon as I began, I was like, oh shit. To write a Taiwanese-American cookbook means I have to talk about myself, and more specifically my identity. As an introvert who hates vulnerability and sharing, that prospect was terrifying. I've always felt somewhere in-between. I grew up culturally American but was never white enough to feel like I belonged. Yet within my own culture, I was so Americanized that my Taiwanese roots never completely felt like my own. That resulted in me spending so much of my life trying to fit in, to hide the fact that I was Taiwanese, or that I was gay, or that my parents were immigrants. And so, my oh shit moment was the fact that I can't write a cookbook about being Taiwanese-American without exposing all the parts of me I've spent a lifetime hiding.
So with this cookbook, I decided to just say fuck it and not hold myself back. I write about my dad and his scallion pancake recipe, even though I haven't seen him in 7 years. I talk about my grandma with dementia who snacks on roasted peanuts while asking me on the hour why I still haven't married an Asian woman. I talk about all the subtle ways my Asian-ness made itself proudly known even though I wasn't ready, from the scent on my clothes from cooking bing to the white rabbits my grandma would sneak into my lunch box. I even wrote a fever dream that I had about time travel and Antoni Porowski that I documented in my Apple notes at 4 in the morning and somehow get to publish. My goal was to write something that celebrated the hidden shame and overwhelming joy that is being a first generation Asian American. To explore through food the adventure that is finding your identity.
The cookbook is called FIRST GENERATION and I hope it makes you laugh, cry, and simultaneously hungry and full at the same time.
