EATING BETWEEN BINARIES: FOOD AND YOUNG ADULT FICTION

A Thesis submitted to the faculty of f i t San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of VOW the requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

In

English: Literature

by

Ailyn Natividad Pambid

San Francisco, California

May 2018 Copyright by Ailyn Natividad Pambid 2018 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read Eating Between Binaries: Food and Young Adult Fiction by

Ailyn Natividad Pambid, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree

Master of Arts: English Literature at San Francisco State University.

Gitanjali Shahani, Ph.D. Associate Professor

Kathleen DeGuzman, Ph.D. Assistant Professor EATING BETWEEN BINARIES: FOOD AND YOUNG ADULT FICTION

Ailyn Natividad Pambid San Francisco, California 2018

Eating Between Binaries examines the different ways first generation young adults use

food to remember their cultural heritage while also navigating a new American identity.

Looking at texts from Filipina-American author Melissa de la Cruz and Russian-

American author/artist Vera Brogsol, I argue that media centering around first generation young adults not only uses food and methods of consumption as cultural markers, but that the use of more visual genres of literature— including novels, Netflix shows and documentaries, and food blogs—provide new outlets for community building and storytelling. This thesis juxtaposes the visual and the textual to show how visually seeing consumption can enrich or contradict the written word. By studying the intersections of

food and social media, the young adult is better able to see themselves represented in

popular media and respond to challenges around identity and authenticity. The

interdisciplinary nature of this thesis highlights how intertextuality and media ultimately

shape how and why we eat.

I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis.

Q. S h a h ami is Chair, Thesis Committee ' Date ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost, I would like to express my appreciation and gratitude to my advisory committee: Dr. Gitanjali Shahani and Dr. Kathleen DeGuzman. Thank you for introducing me to food studies and all the rich opportunities for research and discussion that comes with the field. Your patience, generosity, and guidance have enriched my graduate learning experience more than I can express on this page. Also, thank you to my colleagues Joshua Lindo, Christine Amador, and Nidia Melgoza for always being there to lend a helping hand (or ear) and for keeping me sane during this process. Thank you,

Jon, for your constant love and support through the sleepless nights. Thank you to my family: my mother, grandmother, and brother. Thanks for putting up with all my debates and overstuffed bookshelves. Special thanks to my father. Thank you for all the trips to the library.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction...... 1

Chapter 1...... 11

I. Fresh off the Boat and Into the Kitchen...... 12 II. “Doin’it for the ‘Gram”: How and Why We E at...... 22 III. I’ll Have What She’s Having: Visualizing Consumption and Desire 34 IV. Eating Bodies in Master of None...... 44 V. Coda: Getting a Seat at the T able...... 57

References...... 60 LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page

1. Anya’s reflection...... 5

2. R am en...... 23

3. Henry Hargreaves...... 24

4. Sushi...... 28

5. B runch...... 31

6. Anya and Pop Tarts...... 38

7. Anya’s lunch...... 43

8. Dev’s search results...... 46

9. Dev’s tex ts...... 49 1

Introduction

“What on earth do people who don’t eat their feelings do to survive being human?” —Roxane Gay, Twitter

The prototypical first-generation tale has a well-loved recipe with more-or-less similar ingredients: a rags to riches storyline in which some sort of the American Dream is realized, commensality through culturally authentic meals, and first generation young adults grappling with both their parents’ culture and their newfound American culture.

Although novels such as Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Jessica Hagedom’s Dogeaters, or John Okada’s No-No Boy1 engage with these themes, newer middle grade and young adult novels such as Gloria Chao’s American Panda, Jennifer Torres’ Stef Soto, Taco

Queen, and Maurene Goo’s The Way You Make Me Feel also use food as a lens to look at how first generation young adults navigate a multicultural upbringing. Yet despite the consistent mentions of food in young adult literature, little research has been done about why and how food is so important to ethnic young adults, especially when food is widely used as a tool to project, signal, and reclaim cultural identity. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the young adult genre has been overshadowed by its counterparts—the children’s storybook and fairy tales, which has received more consistent attention in the work of Hans Christian Anderson, Maurice Sendak, and even Dr. Seuss. G. Robert

Carlsen defines young adult, or YA, literature as “...literature wherein the protagonist is either a teenager or one who approaches problems from a teenage perspective...Typically, they describe initiation into the adult world, or the surmounting

1 For an insightful analysis on food and psychoanalysis in No-No Boy, see "Consuming the Other: Subverting Desire Through Consumption" (Joshua Lindo). 2 of a contemporary problem forced upon the protagonist(s) by the adult world” (“Young

Adult Literature: A Writer Strikes the Genre.”)- Young adult novels, compared to children’s books, deal with individuals who are navigating the space between adolescence and adulthood. I want to study young adult literature in the context of food studies and observe how first generation young adults consume, curate, and create food that not only reflects their ethnic identity, but their newfound American identities. By analyzing these texts, I hope to illuminate the complex nature of foodscapes in how they can both empower the young adult or can act as a site of trauma and conflict.

Food, especially for ethnic minorities, is a way to remember, express, create, and challenge the cultural hierarchy they face after immigration to an unfamiliar place. First generation young adults face their own challenges within this situation, because they then must deal with assimilating with their American peers while honoring the culture of their ethnic origin. The result is that they grow up not feeling “ethnic enough” while also never feeling American enough. Through the works I have chosen to write about, I ultimately want to examine how food contributes and challenges this notion of cultural belonging while also allowing young adults to carve out their own space to express this hybrid identity. First generation young adults, while inhabiting more traditional foodscapes such as the restaurant, grocery store, and the kitchen, are seeking out other means of expression and do so within the digital landscape, one which—thanks to the advent of social media—continues to grow.

For this project, the two primary texts I will look at are Fresh off the Boat by

Melissa de la Cruz and Anya's Ghost by Vera Brogsol. Although both books share more 3 differences than similarities—one is a coming-of-age novel about a Filipino American, while one is a graphic novel about a Russian American attempting to get rid of her physical and cultural ghosts—both depict young adults seeking out alternative means of expression, documentation, consumption. In de la Cruz’s novel, 14-year old Vicenza

Arambullo has just moved with her family to San Francisco from the Philippines and must adjust to both social and financial burdens both directly and indirectly caused by her and her family’s ability to assimilate in American culture. Although I previously mentioned the immigrant tale’s tendency to deal with upward mobility, de la Cruz’s novel looks at the reverse—what happens when one of the upper class in the Philippines immigrates to San Francisco and is forced to work in food service and buy their clothing at the local Goodwill? In this way, Melissa de la Cruz frames class disparity through food consumption and preparation. Through this narrative, the first generations’ struggle to assimilate plays out in their attempt of cultural commensality.

In addition to highlighting class differences, and at the risk of “othering” Vicenza with her comparing American processed foods with the fresh, almost exotic foods of the

Philippines, de la Cruz also allows for the kitchen to be a space of cultural imagination and negotiation. In the Sears cafeteria where Vicenza and her mother work, for example, they cook and sell chicken and pork adobo alongside more typical cafeteria fare such as tuna salad and clam chowder. Here, food is rendered as a cultural reminder while also allowing Vicenza and her family to retain agency amongst the pressures of assimilation.

Although Vicenza is constantly consuming various candies and other junk foods throughout the novel, thus symbolizing her assimilation, her and her family gain financial 4 independence through operating a cafeteria. In addition to curation and community connections, space and food can also be used for questioning or establishing a kind of social hierarchy. In Vicenza’s case, and her family use the space of the cafeteria in order to gain favor from their employer. Similarly, in a school cafeteria setting, Brogsol’s Anya refuses to sit with the only other Russian kid in her school, complaining that he is not assimilated enough in American culture. She continues to ignore him throughout the novel, despite her friends and other classmates making fun of him for the same Russian heritage they share.

Fresh off the Boat is about navigating Filipino and American culture, yet this use of burgeoning social media transcends a kind of first generation story that is merely about nostalgia or trauma. In a space away from her parents and the more traditional foodscapes which they co-inhabit, Vicenza uses email to craft and form her identity to her friend

Peaches back home in the Philippines, transcending what Anita Mannur has observed about Asian American literature:

In Asian American literature, narratives about food occupy a similar position to the mother-daughter tale, or the tale of the displaced immigrant’s nostalgia. Such narratives have been viewed with suspicion because they are an appealing form of writing that appears to be ethnically affirmative and “merely” cultural (21).

Within what Mannur would consider the “sugariness” of Fresh o ff the Boat, whether it be in its “taste of otherness,” it’s Young Adult labeling, or even its candy colored book cover, de la Cruz’s novel is not merely conveying a story that is just ethnically affirmative—it portrays the young adult’s ability to use technology to both affirm and create her own ethnic and cultural truths. Vicenza’s use of email 5 correspondence acts as a sort of framing narrative that runs parallel to the events of the story and informs Peaches—and the reader—what her life could look like if her family had carried over their way of life from the Philippines to America. Like other forms of social media and correspondence, the content of Vicenza’s emails displays the need of first-generation young adults to both remember and curate their lives not only to have something to look back on, but something to aspire to.

If de la Cruz’s novel is about assimilation through consumption, Brogsol’s graphic novel attempts to depict assimilation through starvation. Anya’s Ghost details the daily struggles of Anya, a Russian-American high schooler dealing with grades, her blossoming sexuality, and navigating between her Russian and American cultures.

Although the story deals primarily with her relationship with a centuries-old ghost named

Emily, Brogsol also depicts navigating one’s culture through food and through various foodscapes such as the kitchen and the cafeteria. Whereas Vicenza seems to, literally and figuratively, “eat up” American culture, Anya chooses to refrain from eating certain foods in hopes she will fit in better with one culture. 6

Treated through subtle mentions in the novel, Anya’s navigation between her

Russian and American cultures are a source of social trauma which leads to her to develop insecurities about her body and a tendency to reject parts of her Russian upbringing. In addition to never eating the seemingly fattening Russian foods her mom prepares for her, she goes out of her way to avoid the only other Russian kid in her high school, a boy named Dima who is not as “Americanized” as Anya. When asked by Anya why Emily cares she does not spend time with Dima, Emily responds by saying, “Well, back when I was alive, your people were your family. You defended each other no matter what” (57). It is only when Anya begins to accept Dima and her family, and therefore more accepting of her Russian culture, that she is not only able to find a solution to her social trauma, but also a solution in getting rid of Emily.

Just as de la Cruz’s Vicenza is seen consuming frozen foods and different kinds of potato chips, there is a moment in Anya’s Ghost where Anya asks her mom about purchasing pop tarts, a well-known American breakfast food. Correlations between “junk food” and American culture is no stranger to immigrant stories, similar to how, as Robert

J. Ku observes, ethnic food is often marked by its pungent smells. (Dubious Gastronomy:

The Cultural Politics o f Eating Asian in the USA). In contrast to the frozen, pre-cooked, or ready-made food in American grocery stores, ethnic food is can also be marked through, to a more Western palate, nonconventional foods or methods of cooking. In

Season 1 ’s “Parents,” the Netflix series Master o f None juxtaposes American culture with the cultural heritage of Dev Shah (Aziz Ansari) and Brian Chang’s (Kelvin Yu) immigrant parents. When Brian tells his dad he has no time to buy rice for him at the 7 supermarket, Brian’s dad is shown, through a flashback, as a youth in Taiwan having to butcher his pet chicken for his family when his dad tells him they want meat with dinner.

Later in the episode, Dev and Brian attempt to show appreciation for their parents by taking them to dinner. Both families eventually meet in a Taiwanese restaurant, with

Dev’s father attempting to order a more Americanized dish, chicken with broccoli.

Brian’s father speaks to the waiter, saying, “Sorry, this man is ordering chicken with broccoli. Please bring the good dishes you only serve to Chinese people.” The waiter then replies, “Of course. I can’t believe they think that’s what we eat in Taiwan” (11:56-

12:05). Food for the first generation young adult is way to honor their culture, yet the spaces where they eat and interact with food shows the ongoing tensions between the culture of their parents and the learned culture through experiences growing up in

America. However, food and ways of consumption also highlights the fluidity of culture, and correlates to the growing pains the young adult feels by interacting with the changing food landscape.

Keeping in mind this fluidity, in addition to my primary texts, I will be engaging with social media channels, specifically Instagram, and take a closer look at the second season of Master o f None. By looking at novels, social media, and a television show, I am not only looking at food within young adult coming of age stories, but those which frame literary food studies in a postcolonial lens in order to study how food fits into the context of a first-generation individual’s ethnic and cultural identity. Anita Mannur’s research on different media genres such as film, TV shows, and literature to discuss national identity within the context of food is a large influence on my project, but I am specifically 8 looking at how young adults are in dialogue with foodscapes, both physical foodscapes and digital ones as portrayed through social media. Foodscapes within this thesis refers to physical spaces such as the restaurant, grocery store, and the cafeteria in which food is consumed, created, and shared. Yet by also looking at capturing foodscapes within digital media, I look at food not on only in terms of physical consumption, but how food curation and creation has shaped a new foodie culture where young adults craft a new type of identity to be shared and experienced in the digital sphere. Looking at different genres within this thesis is an attempt to highlight different immigrant experiences while addressing the contributions young adults have made to the ever-changing foodscape.

Throughout my chapter, I focus on these spaces of creation and curation, which include the grocery store, the cafeteria, and the internet. When I talk spaces of creation and curation, I am referring to spaces where the young adult is not only able to make food, but also able to form their own identity separate from their parents. In addition to forming and coming to terms with a multicultural identity through cooking and food, young adults also have the technology to curate their identity through the internet and social media. By doing so and sharing with others both in person and online, young adults can better bridge the gap between their parents’ culture and the culture that is learned through their peers.

Within the realm of young adult novels, particularly those written in the 21st century, there is a new space which the young adult occupies that is unique to their generation in terms of creation and curation—the internet and social media. Social media has not only changed how young adults curate and share their lives, but has also given 9 way to a new type of “foodie” culture. Vicenza is seen using the digital space to portray her life in a different light to her best friend in the Philippines, exaggerating every aspect of her new middle-class life in San Francisco via email correspondence. Although not engaged in foodie culture, this is not much different than millennials using Instagram or bloggers using other social media outlets to document and curate their lives to appear a certain way. Although Anya is not seen directly engaging with media regarding food, the genre of the graphic novel itself is a way to visually tell a story, much like the social media outlets I look at in this thesis. In Karin Kukkonen’s Studying Comics and Graphic

Novels, her considerations in crafting a narrative through graphic novels is not unlike what a food blogger may consider when displaying their images on social media: “Do we need images? Do we need words? Do we need sequence? Or does an individual panel already constitute a comic? Perhaps we do not need each constituent in each instance of a comic, but all three serve as the basic elements through which what we call “comics” unfold” (12). As she asserts that graphic novels are more of a visual language rather than a medium, so can we view the curation of the digital foodscape as its own visual language. From Smitten Kitchen to Rasa Malaysia, to Ree Drummond’s The Pioneer

Woman and Eddie Huang’s The Pop Chef, culinary blogs are the new cookbooks, expanding this visual language that caters to both the old school way of cooking with recipes and the new, social media minded cook. An article by Mashable titled “Hashtag foodie: Young adults and their love for avocado toast,” contributes the rise of how-to cooking videos on outlets such as Youtube and Facebook to a new set of young peoples’ value systems, stating that “...these socially driven tools help young adults satiate their 10 innate sense of curiosity and explore cultures from their very own kitchens.” Within a kitchen, and with the help of social media, the process of making one’s food connects others in a different way than that of the restaurant setting.

In contrast to the grocery store and the cafeteria, the restaurant remains a space in which first generation young adults can choose (rather than create) and consume products of their hybrid culture. In one scene, Vicenza states that McDonald’s was considered a

“treat reserved for Sundays after church,” which is a contrast to her dinner in the

Philippines, where “uniformed maids stood behind our chairs and fanned us banana leaves” (90). Vicenza continues this type of negotiation when interacting with her parents in restaurants, recalling a time she prevented her mother from adding sugar to her spaghetti (as Filipino spaghetti is traditionally on the sweeter side) by claiming, “They don’t do that at the Olive Garden!” (91). Ethnic practices in restaurants, whether it be practices of consumption or cooking, are marked as different when compared to what is typical of a more American nationality, whether that be through flavor, scent, or appearance. Ethnic-national markers, such as smell, are seemed to be shared by a multiplicity of Asian cultures and act the means through which Asian American food is consumed, and this consumption is what helps push back against harmful stereotypes that look to demean Asian Americans. Choosing to eat in restaurants allows young adults to consume other cultures, while also allowing them to see how others consume and digest their respective cultures.

According to Robert Appelbaum, the restaurant is a “postmodern and even a hypermodern institution,” (26), out of which has “come the hypermodern restaurant, 11 which is everywhere and nowhere, bombarded with online blogs, where homo restauranticus may delight in advertising his or her virtual delight” (26). Restaurants and other public foodscapes are not only areas where the young adult can engage in foodie culture and advertise their “virtual delight,” but they are where the young adult can consume and digest their multicultural selves where they otherwise may not see themselves represented. Despite the hierarchy of the structures of cooking and consumption, first generation young adults have found new methods of creating and negotiating the space between what is known and what is familiar, all the while challenging the binaries that separate their cultural racial, and ethnic identities. Food and foodscapes are not only seen as means of sustenance and survival—rather, they are seen as a creative necessity and a means of cultural remembrance and celebration.

Through the physical and emotional labor of consuming and being consumed, the young adult in the primary texts I examine learn what it means to digest and navigate cultures. Through various foodscapes, first generation youth have the capacity to form their own identity despite occupying new and often unwelcoming environments.

Constructing identity can be a consuming process, yet these identities helps sustain and actualize the first generation against harmful and institutionalized stereotypes.

Although food has been looked at in books such as Harry Potter or The Hunger

Games, the use of food within more diverse middle grade and young adult novels continue to grow, implying that food is not merely a trendy trope, but a way to create connections between identity and the immigrant or first-generation experience. Food in young adult literature tends to be a key component in fairy tales, fantasy books, and 12 dystopian novels, yet studying food within first generation young adult literature allows food to be looked at in literary analysis while also conversing with historical and sociological fields. By examining de la Cruz’s Fresh o ff the Boat, I look at how the first- generation young adult interacts with more traditional foodscapes to grapple with identity, and how its use of email in curating identity is similar to how young adults use social media to document shared experiences within foodscapes. My sections pertaining to Brogsol’s Anya's Ghost and Aziz Ansari’s Netflix original series, Master of None looks at what it means to visualize consumption within a book or television show. In addition to food consumption, both works look at what it means to consume the body of the first generation, and the intersections between consumption and sex as it pertains to navigating a multiethnic landscape.

I. Fresh off the Boat and Into the Kitchen

“America. Home of the Free. Home of the Whopper.” —Balki Bartokomous, Perfect Strangers.

The above quote acts as the epigraph to Melissa de la Cruz’s Fresh off the Boat, a novel about a first-generation Filipina whose family recently immigrates to San Francisco from the Philippines. Although the quotation signals the significance of food within de la

Cruz’s narrative, it also highlights the commercialism and culture of convenience many immigrants face upon arriving to America for the first time within a particular moment in their assimilation. When considering the use of food in the immigrant’s experience, 13 particularly for those young adults who are first generation, it is not only important to view what they consume, but also where and how they consume.

This section explores the various foodscapes portrayed in de la Cruz’s novel. In addition to physical spaces of consumption, I also examine the digital spaces of consumption and content curation. In this novel, it is done through email, yet in more contemporary first-generation stories, digital spaces have expanded to include social media outlets such as blogs, Instagram posts, and Yelp reviews. By looking at how the definition of foodscapes have expanded thanks to this younger first generation, I explore the need behind why such spaces exist and the importance of spaces in crafting one’s identities separate from their parents. Racial discrimination within foodscapes, due to the stigma behind “weird” smells and “strange” ingredients in ethnic cooking, threaten to perpetuate the “othering” of Asian cultures when juxtaposed alongside more mainstream

(i.e. white) cuisines. Like how de la Cruz’s protagonist uses these spaces to create her own identity while navigating both her Filipina and American cultures, first generation young adults also continue to inhabit and shape foodscapes in ways that both celebrate and remember their cultures.

In first generation Asian American literature, the conflict within any given foodscape stems from differences between the food and ingredients of the motherland compared to that of the more urbanized ones in the United States. Instead of Filipino turo-turos, there are fast food cafeterias. Instead of open-air markets where food may be freshly caught, there are grocery stores and microwaveable meals and suspicious looking lunch meats. The contrast of these locations inform the first generation of American 14 culture and what is the expected cultural eating practices. In Daniel Miller’s essay,

“Making Love in Supermarkets,” he asserts that “...[grocery] shopping is primarily an act of love, that in its daily consciousness becomes one of the primary means by which relationships of love and care are constituted by practice” (18). In de la Cruz’s novel, although all parties are busy with work and/or school, Vicenza and her family are seen bonding through either commensality or going grocery shopping together. Although purchasing items in bulk from American grocery stores was necessary for her family to remain financially lucrative in their business endeavors, it also provides a new space for both the young adult and their parents to navigate their new culture together. One scene describes Vicenza and her father bonding over a trip to Costco:

We had to pick up a week’s supply of food and paper goods for the cafeteria. Plus, Dad and I loved visiting Costco for the free food samples... We munched our way through the special salsa, the fish crackers, the ginger mayonnaise, and the mini pizzas. “No need to get breakfast!” Dad said. (206)

Although the grocery store as seen here works as a greater site of negotiation and as a means for providing for one’s family, the grocery store also works to complicate traditionally Asian means of consumption, particularly when comparing the first generation’s desires with their parents’ desires, gastronomical or otherwise. The above quote portrays Vicenza and her father eating samples of processed junk food such as fish crackers and pizzas alongside salsa and ginger mayonnaise, joking that it replaces breakfast. This consumption of more American food and purchasing food in bulk instead of in smaller, fresher quantities like one would do at a farmer’s market, show his willingness to share his daughter’s participation in American culture. 15

Thinking that it makes her more “American,” Vicenza relishes her consumption of burritos and other frozen meals from the grocery store, despite it being somewhat uncharted territory for her family: “This is a great and strange land,” my father concluded, after surveying the overwhelming amount of choices in the cheese aisle: lowfat, nonfat, fat-free, reduced cholesterol, no carbohydrates, low sodium, or calcium added” (35). Despite the variety of food items in America grocery stores, this particular description of food in the novel is described in what is missing—no carbs, no fats, and no salt. Although Sandra Gilbert in The Culinary Imagination credits these dietary anxieties to “the industrialization of food production and the rise of ecological sensitivity” (312), it neglects other non-Western palettes. On this idea of food aversion for the sake of health,

Gilbert asks readers to “consider the taboo foods we might unwittingly consume—not just horsemeat but, from a Western perspective, cat, rat, dog, snake, and—shudder— bugs!” (313). Ironically for Vicenza, avoiding these kinds of foods are not done out of health, but to avoid being marked as an outsider, and therefore as a potential target for bullying from her primarily white American classmates. This negotiation of culture was not only seen as a means of assimilation, but also of survival.

Within these kinds of works, negotiating one’s culture results in confusion for the first generation. In her book Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian American

Literature, Wenying Xu attributes this confusion to the first generation linking food with their family, specifically a maternal presence: “A community whose fantasies...about who they are suffer violation undergoes confusion, anguish, self-contempt, self-abjection, the loss of identification, and ultimately the devastation of the maternal. The community 16 afflicted with such devastation faces cultural genocide and extinction” (19). To question one’s dietary intake is, in a sense, to question their culture and the authority of the maternal, who was usually the primary decision-maker in all things dietary. The first generation, through this cultural negotiation and participation from their parental figures, combines aspects from both their ethnic culture and American culture to create a space that is uniquely their own. However, another common foodscape for the first generation to interact with, that of the lunch room, complicates the hierarchy of race and methods of consumption, while also serving to contrast the foodscape of the grocery store.

If the grocery store acts as a site of negotiation, the lunchroom/cafeteria can be seen as a site of aggression and segregation. The cafeteria in de la Cruz’s novel functions similarly to the foodscape of the restaurant, in that its ownership by Vicenza’s family is treated as temporary until they find an occupation they feel is more suited to a middle- class family living in San Francisco. Food and food service in the cafeteria is then seen as a hierarchy of power struggles:

Only Mr. Bullfinch, the store manager, had the privilege of having his order personally delivered to his table (usually by me). It was one of Mom’s signature ideas, a special touch—to curry favor with and allegiance from the powerful... Mr. Bullfinch might not have been the supreme leader of a small, third-world country, but to us, he was just as important. (45).

Here, Mr. Bullfinch, although not a political figure, is regarded as a figure of power within Vicenza’s space of the cafeteria, and so is treated differently by Vicenza’s family in the hopes of gaining favor over other employees. This kind of strategy echoes what Robert Ji-Song Ku writes in Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader, where he likens the space of cafeteria to a mess hall, in that . .they were battlegrounds of 17

Americanization and public relations” (126). Although this Americanization is better negotiated within Vicenza’s cafeteria, where Vicenza and her mother sell Filipino foods along more traditional soups and sandwiches, the cafeteria can still be a hostile space which can lead to a fetishization—or what scholar Ku calls a “gastronomic minstrelsy,” in which those initiating conflict use food-related racist imagery “.. .as an excuse to make

Asians the butt of jokes” (122-3).

For Asian Americans in particular, this gastronomic minstrelsy often stems from the “weird” smells or food that young adults bring to school for lunch, often packed by their parents. Another recent book which brought this conversation back into mainstream pop culture was Eddie Huang’s memoir, and subsequent television adaptation, Fresh o ff the Boat. The memoir and television show feature an incident in which Huang would pack Chinese food to eat at lunch time, his classmates would “.. .stand across the room pointing at me with their noses pinched, eyes pulled back, telling ching-chong jokes”

(30). In the Pilot episode of Fresh o ff the Boat, the younger version of Huang is physically antagonized by a black student in the school cafeteria after attempting to assimilate with the white students, who in turn shunned him for his Chinese-Taiwanese lunch. Although conflicts within school cafeterias are common, this kind of cultural tension can be traced to the Civil Rights movement, another historical instance in which the cafeteria was used as a site of protest.

According to the a study titled, “Contesting the Model Minority and Perpetual

Foreigner Stereotypes: A Critical Review of Literature on Asian Americans in

Education,” the praise that Asian Americans received for their success write that the 18

. .was a direct attack against African Americans in their outspoken quest for equality in the 1960s...” (97) Although both works show the cafeteria as a place where different minorities can come together to consume food, the implication of who serves and who is being served, as well as the struggle for multiple ethnicities to overcome institutional and structural racism, suggests a place of participation while also being a potential site of protest. Both works also deal with the events that occurred after this incident in the cafeteria, leading Huang and his mother to make compromises between old and new cultural eating practices back at the grocery store. The grocery store allows the first generation to figure out their identity in a safe space, often in the presence of their parents, while the cafeteria teaches them how to perform parts of their culture, and to what extent, in a way which does not mark them as different.

This marking of difference, usually through the mention of “gross” or “weird” foods, is another fixture of Asian American literature and is seen as a moment of gaining

American cultural knowledge for the young adult. Typical American foods such as pizza, hot dogs, and hamburgers “are such fixtures at the nation’s lunch counters that they appear natural, indigenous, routine, and incontestable...In contrast, foods identified as specifically Chinese.. .retain an aura of perpetual foreignness despite a lengthy presence in the United States that dates back to the nineteenth century” (Ku). Due to these harmful racial expectations, as well as hostile environments such as school cafeterias, the first generation often manifests conflicting viewpoints into a mixed style of cooking and consumption. But as a result, fusion foods and those who enjoy them are often called to confront questions of authenticity, in that their consumption no longer fits one standard 19 definition. The Asian subject is still consumable, yet no longer palatable for the Western reader.

In contrast to the grocery store and the cafeteria, the restaurant remains a space in which first generation Asian Americans can create and consume products of their fusion culture. In de la Cruz’s novel, Vicenza and her mother use the Sears cafeteria where they work as their own restaurant, serving a Filipino dish, chicken adobo, along with more

American options such as salads and sandwiches. Additionally, they are also served

“Nachos Grande,” which is seen as a Mexican dish served by Filipinos in an American cafeteria. Ethnic kitchens as portrayed in these texts are also sites of cultural negotiation, yet through a creative means for the first generation. They are able to sell and share foods with others who have never partaken in their cuisine and create bonds through cooking.

However, these sites are still ones of contention and complaint, not only because of authenticity but in how the white consumer digests these new cultures. Ethnic practices in restaurants, whether it be practices of consumption or cooking, are marked as different due to what is typical of a more mainstream American culture (Xu). The contrast between what is seen as civilized compared to barbaric food practices then inscribes not only racial distinctions, but class distinctions. Yet these ethnic-national markers shared by a multiplicity of Asian cultures are the means through which Asian American food is consumed, and this consumption is what helps push back against harmful stereotypes that look to demean Asian Americans.

In Dubious Gastronomy: The Cultural Politics of Eating Asian in the USA, Ku discusses the authenticity of certain Asian foods when measured against the 20

(predominantly white American) perception of what Asia is what Asians are perceived to consume. One of Ku’s examples are Asians who eat dogs. Mostly saved as an insult for those of Filipino heritage (“dogeaters”), Ku writes that the “moniker “dogmeat lover” equates to yellow depravity. Yet despite the colonial history of ascribing the term

“dogeater” to Filipinos, Filipino writers within the past decades have reclaimed the term to attempt to broaden its definition in the postcolonial, with the term opening the conversation for a type of fusion identity rather than a harmful stereotype. For example,

Jessica Hagedorn in her novel Dogeaters does so not just in the sense of consumption, but also in her use of language:

I set out to write on my own terms and in the English I reclaim as postcolonial Filipino,” Hagedorn states in her introduction to Danger and Beauty (xi). Splitting open the closure of standard American English by ruptures and indeterminacies brought in by traces of tagalog (the vernacular), tsismis (local gossip), radio shows and nonsensical vocabulary, Hagedorn’s postcolonial English breathes the very hybridity and confused complexity of the characters whose tales it tells (6).

In her article “Gender, Language, and Identity in Dogeaters: A Postcolonial

Critique,” Savitri Ashok notes Hagedom’s combination of Tagalog language, street language, and radio shows to craft this postcolonial English. As the rise of radio shows were a result of the American colonial period in the Philippines, Ashok’s passage reaffirms the longstanding navigation not only between Filipino and American culture, but the refashioning of different genres of media to carve out spaces for what Hagedorn has termed the postcolonial Filipino. However, I argue that this type of hybridity is not just exclusive to Filipinos, but is an experience felt amongst first generation young adults within other cultures. 21

In addition to taste, another marker of both difference and cultural identity is scent. Pungent smells are indicative of Asian cooking, and first-generation narratives convey the importance of smell as a link to one’s familial ethnic identity. In de la Cruz’s novel, Vicenza mentions the Filipino condiment, bagoong, which she describes as “a salty shrimp paste that smelled like feet that Filipinos like to eat with fruit” (53).

Similarly, Huang recollects the moment his classmates marked him as different when they first smelled his lunch: “I’d open up the Igloo lunchbox and a stale moist air would waft up with weak traces of soy sauce, peanut oil, and scallions. I didn’t care about the smell, since it was all I knew, but no one wanted to sit with the stinky kid” (31). For those of the first generation, identity and cultural understanding is tied up with the smells of cooking and preparing ethnic dishes. Perhaps this is part of why the West continues to imagine and fetishize the East, especially in the modern day—their vision is a more sanitized version, instead of a “gross,” smelly one. As Ku writes, “Asian Americans have always been and continue to be emblematic of the unassimilable American, not only in body politic but in gastronomic culture as well” (13). The use of smells here not only emphasized the link between scent and ethnic identity, but also counteracted the exoticization of Asian foods when seen through a Western lens. For de la Cruz and

Huang, food is strong and stinky, yet still consumable, but not as palatable for white

Americans.

In both de la Cruz and Huang’s works, the reader is never told why they eat the stinky foods they are given. Instead, the reader is given explanations as to why they purchase and consume more American foods. The fusion of cultures to create a dual 22 identity is summed up at the end of Huang’s memoir, when he advises the reader to

“Take the things from America that speak to you, that excited you, that inspire you, and be the Americans we all want to know; then cook it up and sell it back to them for

$28.99” (Huang). The consumption of Western foods is a constructed act of assimilation while eating more traditional Asian foods is a different means of survival. For SC Wong, food written outside of a Western lens goes against the concept of “food porn” and addresses the more important issues of why and how of consumption. Wong writes that:

What unites these immigrants in these stories is an ability to eat uncompromising substances and to extract sustenance, even a sort of willed enjoyment, from them; to put it symbolically, it is the ability to cope with the constraints and persecutions Asian Americans have had to endure as immigrants and racial minorities (25).

It is a way to keep their own traditions alive in a new and often hostile cultural environment. In fact, it is this shared difference which links Asian Americans of different

Asian descent together within the United States (Ho).

II. “Doin’ it for the ‘Gram”: How and Why We Eat

The issue of palatability, as Anita Mannur writes in Culinary Fictions: Food in

South Asian Diasporic Culture, stems from “the space of the home becoming] associated with the excess associated with Asian American tastes” (186). Mannur describes this excess through traits typically associated with ethnic cooking when “spacialized through a sensory framework” (185). Her example in the context of Indian food mirrors that of what can be said of Filipino or Chinese food: “Indian food thus becomes defined through its excess (Indian food is too spicy; Indian food smells too much like “curry”) and needs 23 to be disciplined to fit within North American tastes and expectations” (185). This tension is particularly seen within the space of the restaurant review site, Yelp. As I said previously, the space of the restaurant is often a site of complaint. Yet the advent of social media has given consumers new ways to air those complaints, bringing in larger questions and debates over what is authentic and what does it mean for a cuisine (and therefore culture) to be disciplined enough to fit within a given taste. The visual aspect of social media (compared to the written form of email that Vicenza utilizes) also complicates the idea of food palatability when presented in aesthetically pleasing “food porn” shots.

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foodiesofsantaclara 'This place is so not worth getting your hopes up for authentic ramen." - Crystal Z. “Hands down best ramen I've ever had, including authentic Japanese ramen.” - Matthew P.

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The above image is from an Instagram account with the handle

@foodiesofsantaclara, an account I created in order to challenge the notions of foodie culture and the necessity of food Instagrams. This project, created for a seminar about 24 global cities, was partially inspired by the photography of Henry Hargreaves, who is known for his “No Seconds” project in recreating and photographing the last meals of

Death Row prisoners.

Ted Bundy

-43 -Florida -Rape, Necrophilia, prison escape, 35+ counts of murder -Electric chair

-Declined a 'special1 meal, so was given the traditional last meal -Steak (medium rare) -eggs (over easy) -hash browns -toast with butter and je lly -milk -juice

With this project, Hargreaves places meticulously staged food reenactments of last meals as the subject of his photographs. Furthermore, instead of simply having a caption of the contents of the meal, Hargreaves includes the reason behind the inmate’s incarceration as well as method of execution. What could easily be an aesthetically pleasing Instagram picture instead becomes a slightly voyeuristic look into “one of those things that everyone does several times a day, but you never really see it out of context or think about what it says about someone” (Francey). By juxtaposing personal stories,

Yelp Reviews, and recipes with images that may not necessarily make sense paired together, I similarly want the viewer to be drawn in by the image while also thinking about food in different ways: How does one eat? What does it mean to consume another 25 culture? What ethical choices are behind the choices of all-natural or organic meals?

Commonly, food Instagrams with larger followings often “repost” food pictures they are tagged in to share food from a particular city, state, or country with their followers.

Although one main person usually runs the account, the use of the word “foodies” indicate a collective whole dedicated to sharing the best local foods.

In creating my account, I followed this model, also posting (sometimes heavily edited) food shots from local restaurants (in this case, the city of Santa Clara). But in captioning this particular image—instead of containing multiple hashtags, a description of what the image, or my personal opinion of the dish—I have placed differing perspectives of the same bowl of ramen to highlight the contradictions of Yelp culture, while also juxtaposing Mannur’s idea of defining Asian American food in excess with the

Yelpers’ vernacular of excess within their own reviews. (“Hands down best ramen I’ve ever had.”) Authenticity, or the idea of it, within ethnic cuisines play a crucial factor in gaining high Yelp ratings. Yet what is authentic may not always be what is palatable. “A turn to palatability within a culinary frame, however, must not be equated with a tolerance for the brown bodies associated with those foods,” Mannur states. However, in participating in this 5-star reviewing system, consumers often forget that real bodies are ultimately still behind the preparation of these foods.

If you Google “ethnic restaurants and bad Yelp reviews,” the search results yield articles with titles such as “What Yelp Can Tell Us About Gentrification and Race”

(CityLab), “This Is Why It’s Racist to Call ‘Ethnic’ Restaurants ‘Gross’” (HuffPost), and

“Study Purports to Show Yelp Reviewers Tend to Be Racist Towards Minority-Owned 26

Businesses” (Kitchenette). Another article written by Andrew Simmons for Slate titled

“Gastronomic Bigotry,” explores the tendency of North American sensibilities to create a link between disease and ethnic restaurant. This link is due to this association with excess that Mannur has pointed to, but also socioeconomic reasons such as food pricing and where minority-owned restaurants have historically been located within urban settings:

When Yelpers puke, they tend to blame restaurants that serve “ethnic food”—that is, preparations particular to culinary traditions originating outside of Europe... The skewed results of my informal Yelp survey make me wonder if people are especially suspicious of the inexpensive, immigrant-owned restaurants they’ve most recently visited because they have learned somewhere along the way that those sorts of restaurants are more likely to sicken them. Might even some of the foodie adventurers who ably parse the differences between Sinaloan and Chihuahan menudo, fill their Instagrams with bulgogi close-ups, and chronicle their eating exploits on Yelp be guilty of gastronomic bigotry? (Simmons)

This idea of “gastronomic bigotry” that Simmons mentions is a complex one. On one hand, is it not a sign of cultural tolerance if this new foodie culture shares their dishes of menudo and bulgogi on social media? Undoubtedly, food is a way in which different cultures can come together to create a type of fusion identity. The amount of modern-day fusion foods and food trucks are enough to attest to this rise of palatability. However, this idea of consuming another culture is steeped in what Mannur calls a politics of inclusion, in that consumption portrays the false idea that all people, immigrants or not, first generation or otherwise, are all eating off the same plate. In consuming another individual’s culture, it can allow them to temporarily suspend their racial biases while at the same time ignoring the hierarchies set in place by industry standards within spaces such as restaurant kitchens or cafeterias. 27

For example, Krishnendu Ray, chair of nutrition and food studies at New York

University, highlights the economic inequalities of certain cuisines. In an interview for the Washington Post, Ray observes that:

There are what I call internal hierarchies of tastes, and there is nothing that shows this better than when you look at price, when you look at what we are willing to pay for different types of food. We are really not willing to pay for "ethnic food." It's true of Indian food, it's true of Thai food, it's true of Chinese food, and it's true of many others. They're just not good enough, in the minds of Americans anyway, to pay $30, $40 or $50 for these foods. People might say this isn't true, but it's very clear in the actions of American consumers (Ferdman).

This hierarchy of taste is reflected in de la Cruz’s novel, when it is shown that

Vicenza’s mother cooks and sells homemade Filipino sausages to supplement their income from their cafeteria jobs. In order to be competitive, Vicenza’s father is shown to spend a day researching other Filipino supermarkets for pricing of Filipino sausages.

Despite the labor shown preparing and cooking these sausages in the novel, Vicenza states her family makes a profit of only 55 cents a package. The expectation of an ethnic cuisine to be cheap—whether it be Indian, Chinese, or Filipino— further undermines the labor of brown and black bodies. In addition to pricing and the tendency for consumers to link disease to these restaurants, the nuances of a region’s cuisine are lost in labeling of a cuisine as ethnic. What results in labelling certain country’s food as ethnic becomes a type of culinary colonialism, in which a specific cuisine, grouped under this umbrella term as “ethnic,” is considered inferior, and therefore can be improved from outsiders.

This particularly true when one looks at how food trends spread through social media. 28

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foodiesofsantaclara *1 saw a sign the other day outside one of those Chinese-iapanese hybrids that are beginning to pop up around town, advertising 'Discount Sushi, I can t imagine a better example of Things to be Wary Of in the food department than bargain sushi/' - Anthony Bourdaia Kitchen Confidential.

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Back in 2012, Andrew Zimmern, host of culinary travel show Bizarre Foods, stated that Filipino food was “the next big thing” (Today). Fast forward to 2017, and

Anthony Bourdain was quoted as saying Filipino food was “a work in progress” and that sisig particularly is “perfectly positioned to win the hearts and minds of the world as a whole” (CNN). By these two men stating that a specific ethnic cuisine, or even a specific dish from that cuisine, can transform from a “work in progress to “the next best thing,” it implies the idea that this cuisine, and therefore the people and labor associated with it, are also incomplete until a white man with a Western palette tells them otherwise. Ironically, it is this sort of treatment towards Filipino foods which prevented it from becoming normalized within mainstream culinary culture. When de la Cruz’s Vicenza shows embarrassment over her parents’ love for smelly bagoong, Chef Nicole Ponseca would describe this feeling as hiya, or shame in the Tagalog language. As the owner of two New 29

York-based Filipino restaurants, Jeepney and Maharlika, Ponseca names hiya as the reason why restaurants give the “white-man menu” to customers. “But why have hiya,” she states, “when the French have boudin noir and the Spanish have morcilla? It is because when you’re colonized over so many years, you don’t value your own culture, even though we have so much pride” (Shah). Hiya further complicates this notion of authenticity, in that perhaps no ethnic food can truly be authentic. If food in minority-run businesses are “whitened” for easy consumption, it begs the question of how North

American palettes able to discern what kind of food is authentic to a specific country or region, and therefore disrupting the greater hierarchy of taste.

Despite this hiya first generation Asian Americans are reclaiming the space of the internet and social media as a way to (re)construct their relationships with food and share it with other people. This is done in a similar fashion of reclaiming racial slurs such as

“dogeaters,” in that young adults attempt to forge their own identity and community by taking elements of both cultures and making it their own. In answering the question of what prompts young adults to share their plates of food with strangers on the internet, the reason lies in the need to remember their past in a way that builds towards a more progressive future. While culinary travelogues are a popular source of viewing ethnic foods, the narratives are usually positioned in a way to exoticize and fetishize Asian cultures, creating bite-sized snippets of its hosts eating foods such as bugs or balut for

Western culture to consume. Through social media, the young adult creates their own culinary travelogue in a way that allows celebration and appreciation rather than appropriation. 30

Although emailing friends is now seen as a sort of relic from the 1990s, de la

Cruz’s novel uses the platform in way in which young adults would now use texting or

DMs (direct messaging). Vicenza exchanges emails with her friend Peaches, who is back in the Philippines, and greatly exaggerates her new life in San Francisco, choosing to leave out her family’s financial burdens and struggles to assimilate. It is not until the end of the book that she admits the truth of her family’s lifestyle. Instead of maintaining her family being wealthy and running a restaurant, she reveals to Peaches that she visits thrift stores and her family manages the Sears cafeteria: “Paul is the new guy I’m seeing. He’s a stock boy at Sears, where we have our restaurant—but it’s not really a restaurant—it’s more like a cafeteria. Actually, it’s the employees’ cafeteria at Sears” (203). With the internet, Vicenza is able to carefully construct her American nationality while picking and choosing what to display when discussing her parents’ more traditional Filipino lifestyle. Yet food is always present in her emails, which confirms food as a marker of not only culture, but also of class divisions.

With the rise of social media platforms, first generation young adults are not only able to mimic Vicenza’s level of storytelling, but can add to it with filters, images, and video. As food is also present in these images, young adults are not only complicating what it means to consume but changing what it means to be a modern-day foodie. But what is a foodie? According to Josee Johnston and Shyon Baumann in Foodies:

Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape, the basic definition of a foodie is

“culinary amateurs who are obsessively interested in the gastronomic...others associate it with a love of good food and the will to learn about it more than the average person” (53- 31

57). Now, the use of the word “foodie,” according to Forbes2, has shifted in meaning from highbrow to mainstream as technology became more accessible to document one’s culinary adventures.

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foodiesofsantaclara "If people are sipping mimosas at a cafe with friends, what are they not doing on Sunday mornings?

The answer: Brunch is secular church. Sunday service for the socially starved." - Sophie Egan, Devoured: How What We Eat Defines Who We Are.

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For the average millennial, not everyone can afford expensive camera equipment to take photos, nor do they have the time and resources to walk around the city for the purposes of interviewing, photographing, and uploading individual accounts of its residents. However, most people own phones and social media accounts. “Foodie” blogs, although you can pose and edit food photos, ultimately contain an inanimate object as the subject, and the food itself cannot speak or share its experience from farm to table.

However, behind the food are cooks a diner will most likely never talk to, despite attending the same establishment multiple times over. Meals are shared on social media not for mere friends to comment and like on but act as mini Yelp reviews meant for

2 See "How 'Generation Yum' Is Stoking the Food Frenzy." 32 strangers to see and determine whether or not to wait in line for the newest

Instagrammable dish.

The first generation crafts their identities through these social media channels, but in doing so they have also redefined how one eats and what it means for ethnic cuisine to be accessible. For example, Eddie Huang has maintained a blog titled, The Pop Chef, since 2009, chronicling the creation and eventual opening of his restaurant, Baohaus, where he sells baos with a variety of fillings. Although gua bao is a popular street food in

Taiwan, Huang placing it in a brick and mortar restaurant, while incorporating his

Chinese, Taiwanese, and American influences, raises its reputation as a dish worth its price tag. Despite the negative connotations regarding ethnic cuisines being cheap, social media and young adults have given culinary capital to inexpensive, yet delicious and accessible foods rather than what the space of the culinary travelogue does to exoticize and fetishize these cultures.

Other than his blog, Huang has used the internet to find like-minded personalities to employ at his restaurant and to also speak out about Yelp reviews. Although he considers Yelp reviews to be “doo-doo” (264), he does not deny the importance of online reviews and the visibility an online presence affords: “My main objective with Baohaus was to become a voice for Asian Americans. Whether you accept it or not, when you’re a visible Asian you have a torch to carry because we simply don’t have any other representation” (264). Wenying Xu refers to areas like Chinatowns as “pockets of resistance,” yet these sites of resistance can also be found online, where members of the first generation are most likely to occupy instead of their parents. Instead of completely 33 reforming their culture to fit an American nationality or hoping to return to their

“homeland,” spaces such as the internet that uniquely belongs to the first generation gives them the freedom to innovate and experiment rather than sticking to strict rules of either culture.

However, first generation chefs also utilize social media in order to elevate their platforms for food that is not sold in a traditional brick and mortar restaurant. Valerie Luu of San Francisco’s Rice Paper Scissors considers her business a food “pop-up,” and utilizes Instagram3 in order to let her customers know where she will be appearing next.

Roy Choi, a first-generation Korean American chef and creator of the LA-based Korean taco truck, Kogi, used social media to as an easy way to spread the word about his food in its early stages. The food truck’s popularity eventually leads to Choi being known as one of the founders of the gourmet food truck movement. On using social media for his business, he states that “Nobody was really using Twitter back then. It was free and we had no money. We were driving around, going block to block, selling our tacos and putting our innermost thoughts out there. Then we’d give them the tacos, their eyes would roll back in their heads, and we’d tell them to follow us on Twitter” (National

Restaurant Association). Here, Choi combines the storytelling, “stream-of- consciousness” methods of social media with food to create what he calls and honest use of social media. Although social media can be used to exaggerate such as how Vicenza uses it, it can also be an empowering method of crafting identity. The creation and curation process of social media reveals authenticity’s shortcomings; perhaps if there is

3 @ricepapersf 34 no such thing as an authentic cuisine, as Martin Manalansan asserts in his lecture “This is

Not My Mother’s Adobo!: Culinary Authenticity, Hipsters, Entrepreneurs, and Cultural

Heritage,” than perhaps the search for an authentic cuisine can shift to a search for a more honest means of consumption, in which the labor and culture of brown and black bodies are given as much consideration as the ingredients used in one’s cooking.

Despite the insistence of labelling the field of food studies as scholarship-lite, the trajectory of my research is not an attempt to validate the field of food studies, or for that matter, of the young adult literary genre, but to examine and challenge the hierarchies that imply these two fields, which often interact with each other, are not deemed worthy of higher academic study.

III. I’ll Have What She’s Having: Visualizing Consumption and Desire

In terms of visual literacies, the dominant site of texts, according to a study done by Janette Hughes, Alyson King, Peggy Perkins, and Victor Fuke, is now the screen.

However, although graphic novels function similarly in this realm of “new media” like film and television, graphic novels differ from television because “the reader is better able to pause and reflect or to move backward and forward in the text. It is also different in its juxtaposition of words and images and in the use of words as part of the image”

(602). This study, in addition to looking at the value of introducing graphic novels in school curriculum, also looks at the effects of having young adults create their own graphic novels about personal experiences. In addition to social media, the first- generation young adult utilizes visual spaces—such as graphic novels and television shows—to navigate culture and find similar stories to visually relate to through diverse 35 representation. Visual literacies help the young adult to see not only how their experience is being consumed by the media, but also how to better create their own narratives and stories. By looking at how graphic novels and television visually portray consumption alongside the first-generation experience of seeking identity, the young adult can not only visualize the story on the page or the screen, but also visualize the potential of their story­ telling to create more diverse forms of media.

This section looks at Vera Brogsol’s Anya’s Ghost as an example of a young adult who, in navigating between two cultures, must also deal her body and sexuality during a crucial time of development. This is contrasted with the visualized consumption of the more recent television show, Master o f None, in which Aziz Ansari’s character, Dev, is not only shown using food to tell his own cultural narrative, but how his consumption of the female body creates its own form of sexual othering and alienation.

Vera Brosgol’s Anya’s Ghost is not a typical coming-of-age story. Told in graphic novel format, Anya, a first-generation Russian-American high schooler, falls down a well and befriends a ghost who’s been stuck living there for half a century. Yet a story that can be mistaken for Casper the Friendly Ghost quickly veers into Turn o f the Screw territory as Anya uncovers dark secrets about her new friend. Although Anya’s story focuses on finding her individual identity separate from the conformist setting of high school and from her mother’s pressure of upholding her Russian culture, her anxiety about her environment is seen to reflect the anxiety found within herself, which result in Anya taking out that stress onto her body. Seen in her self-consciousness regarding her body image, and her choice to withhold food consumption, this is further complicated when 36

Anya’s ghost is at the same time trying to live a second life vicariously through the physical body of Anya.

To summarize the text, Anya's Ghost tells of the struggle of a Russian-American high schooler dealing with grades, her blossoming sexuality, and navigating between her

Russian and American cultures. Rebellious and yet eager to fit in the conventionally pretty and popular high school crowd, Anya, while absent-mindedly wandering around a wooded area, falls into an old well and discovers a corpse and its ghost. The ghost, named Emily, is not only able to verbally communicate with Anya, but finds a way to follow her home and live with her. Eventually, Anya and Emily become friends, with

Emily helping Anya with school and seemingly being content witnessing Anya go to parties and dates with boys. However, the plot gains traction as Anya finds out the true story of Emily: instead of being murdered, as Emily previously claimed, Emily killed a man she was in love with because he called her ugly and chose another woman to marry.

Anya later confronts her, saying she latched on to her to live out certain scenarios she never experienced: “You need me to go to school, and dress up, and chase boys because you never got to. But I’m not living your life for you. You had your chance, and you screwed it up” (196). Anya then spends the second half of the novel trying to return

Emily to the well before Emily can cause physical harm to her family.

Within popular culture, the term “ghost” has taken on a wide variety of meaning due to a plethora of movies, books, and, yes, even reality television shows dealing with the subject. However, “ghost” as I discuss in this section resembles that of Judith

Armstrong’s definition of ghost. In her article “Ghosts as rhetorical devices in children’s 37 fiction,” she writes that ghosts “...are psychological possibilities personified, placed as characters within a plot, and thus allowed development and influence which affect the protagonists, and therefore extend their perception of the possibilities of existence” (59).

Although Emily is a ghost, she can physically move around and verbally communicate with Anya, choosing when and where to appear. She is less a ghost of Anya’s mind, such as that of the ghosts in Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, but rather more of what

Armstrong defines as a being “.. .belonging to a different time from the living characters, similar in that their predicaments or their personalities are alike” (60). It is these similarities which eventually pose a problem for Anya: as Emily becomes stronger and more tangible, the more she loses touch with reality and humanity. This complicates the reader’s understanding of Emily as a character. Later on in the novel, Emily is seen to have repressed anger and vengefulness beyond the scope of Anya’s own personal struggles with assimilation and identity.

On this relationship between the ghost and the young adult, the mythical being of the ghost is similar to what Julia Kristeva states about the adolescent in her essay, “The

Adolescent Novel”: “The adolescent is a mythical figure of the imaginary that enables us to distance ourselves from some of our failings, splittings of the ego, disavowals, or mere desires, which it reifies into the figure of someone who has not yet grown up” (135).

Furthermore, psychologist Norman Kiell in his 1959 work, The Adolescent through

Fiction: A Psychological Approach, recognizes the important of studying adolescents through the scope of “imaginative writing,” as it sheds light on issues such as physical development, family relations, and choice. More importantly, in studying Emily and 38

Anya’s desires, both conscious and subconscious, one can have not only a more complex understanding of the young female desires, but also that of teenagers, teenage girls, and their search for identity. Similar to Vicenza’s treatment of food from de la Cruz’s Fresh o ff the Boat, Anya attempts to grapple with and control her identity by controlling her consumption.

' (2)

This image from the beginning of the graphic novel depicts Anya asking her mother what she is cooking for breakfast. While her mom answers in Russian, Anya not only chooses to reply in English, but also asks why her mom cannot buy low-fat pop- tarts. Her specific want of low-fat foods mimic Vicenza’s marveling over the amount of diet and low-fat foods she found in an American grocery stores. But it is interesting to note that while Vicenza in Fresh off the Boat is seen partaking in the consumption of 39

American foods, Anya is always seen smoking in an attempt to suppress her appetite and become thin. Although the means of consumption is different, Anya, like a ghost, is caught in a kind of limbo, albeit a cultural one:—to assimilate completely would be to cut herself off from what is familiar to her, and yet attempting to navigate both would leave

Anya not feeling Russian or American enough. By choosing not to eat, the young adult makes decisions that have different repercussions on both their cultural identity and the physical body.

It is through this gap between Anya’s Russian and American culture that mimics the gap Emily faces between life and death. Her in-between status as a ghost mirrors that of Anya’s first-generation status in that she is neither here, nor there, but somewhere in the middle. Emily’s repressed desires also find no other outlet than Anya, whom she uses to project disingenuous ideas of love and relationships for the sole purpose of manipulating her. Other than helping Anya deal with boys, Emily helps her cheat on school exams in a way that positively impacts Anya’s grades. As Anya appears to become more socially and academically inept, Emily deludes herself more and more into thinking her interactions with (and through) Anya make her more human. Her ideas as projected onto Anya come into conflict with Anya’s worldview, which ultimately threatens Emily’s perceived humanity and causes her to lash out at Anya as a type of defense mechanism instead of coming to terms with the pain she has inflicted onto others in her past.

In her book, Haunting Experiences: Ghosts in Contemporary Folklore, Sylvia

Grider writes about the role of gender in supernatural stories. Just as there are tropes 40 found within genres such as film noir, she explains the common types of gendered ghost renderings, with the one of the Deviant Femme being the most relevant to this work. The

Deviant Femme is ‘the antithesis of the traits traditionally associated with femininity... She is a manifestation of all that the Angel represses: rage, violence, mental illness, and eccentricity. Neither the Angel nor the Femme tradition presents an adult, female figure who is both strong and well-balanced” (82). Grider’s assessment of the

Deviant Femme is interesting when applied to the ghost figure of Emily. Although she has more infantilized desires such as staying and school and pursuing romantic relationships with teenage boys, she is physically over 100 years old and possesses the traits Grider lists of being violent and mentally ill. Emily’s neuroses, which culminated in burning down the house of her former lover and his fiance while they were still inside, is a result of her returning to two basic instincts. In his Outline o f Psycho-Analysis, Freud refers to these instincts as Eros and the destructive, or death, instinct. When Emily’s love was not reciprocated, she sought to destroy the one she loved, thus embodying the

Deviant Femme stereotype. While Anya’s desires do not result in death and murder, her actions are based in similar motives.

This projection due to repressed desires is what Freud spoke about in Five

Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. He states that “.. .the incompatibility of the wish in question with the patient’s ego was the motive for repression; the subject’s ethical and other standards were the repressing forces” (22). Again, this works in different ways for both Anya and Emily. Anya acts as Emily’s ego, in which Anya serves as a reminder that her wish, true human form and the power and freedom associated with it, is unattainable 41 and so she must repress it. Yet her unconscious comes through in her manner of dealing with Anya’s social life. When her motives are questioned by Anya, her justification comes in the form of denial. In an exchange between Anya and Emily, they discuss what happened at a party in which Anya ultimately rejects the boy whom Emily wants her to date:

Emily: “After all, why would you want to undo all my hard work?” Anya: “Again with this hard work of yours.” Emily: “Sure! Your grades, your outfit, getting you invited to the party.. .1 think we both know that without me you’d still be that weird girl who fell on her ass in gym” (132).

In addition to ghosts, there is a type of identity cannibalism at work in Brogsol’s novel. Here, I do not mean cannibalism in the traditional meaning of the word, but in how

Espeth Probyn discusses it in terms of how desire and hunger is linked to appetite.

Probyn’s book, Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities, discusses how hunger is part of the basic human needs regarding food, sex, and money (71). The reader sees this through

Emily appearing to slowly consume Anya’s lifestyle in order to be more of a physical force. As a ghost with limited physical capabilities, Emily seeks power and agency. This in turn speaks to Anya’s own lack of power and agency due to her looks and ethnicity, which results in Anya’s lack of physical and cultural consumption.

Overall, the idea of looking at trauma within young adult fiction is still relatively new. However, when applied to works such as Brosgol’s, it adds a new lens in which to view Emily and Anya’s actions. Kenneth B. Kidd, author of Freud in Oz: At the

Intersections o f Psychoanalysis and Children’s Literature, states that “realistic literature 42 for children and adolescents deals with traumatic experiences—divorce, racism, class struggle, and so forth—even when that literature is not tagged as “trauma” writing per se”

(183). A nya’s Ghost, while a young adult graphic novel, contains mentions of death, murder, promiscuity, and revenge. Yet I argue that Anya’s lack of consumption, a burgeoning eating disorder, is its own type of trauma within the greater search for one’s place in society. One example which has portrayed eating disorders within a young adult work is Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions. Despite the cultural differences between Dangarembga and Brogsol’s novels, Nervous Conditions highlight the young women’s struggle between her sexuality and burgeoning womanhood as well as the struggle of assimilation. Deepika Bahri states in her article “Disembodying the Corpus:

Postcolonial Pathology in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions,” that:

The teleology of Nyasha’s anorexic and bulimic practices is intimately linked to her revulsion at the mandate to represent herself as good girl and good native in particular instances of infractions against her sense of self in the novel.. .Appalled at this invasion of her rights, and what might be seen as a persistent barrier to her development into sexual agent rather than sexualized commodity, Nyasha.. .refuses to eat for the first time in the novel (5).

Like Nyasha, Anya’s lack of eating correlates to her sexuality, manifesting in ways

physical and metaphorical. However, it also relates to the expectations of upholding her

Russian culture. Nyasha’s revulsion at the expectation to not only be a “good girl,” but a

“good native” is like Anya’s conflict at being a good Russian girl in an American high

school. Unable to control others’ opinion of her, her culture, or her family, Anya chooses

to smoke and suppress her appetite to maintain control over her body. While Anya’s

mother states that, “Back in Russia, being fat meant you were a rich man,” Anya doesn’t 43

think that “American boys really go for girls that look like rich men” (3-4). Here, weight

and consumption are treated in socioeconomic terms like Nyasha being treated as a

sexual commodity:

Instead of having the space of the restaurant or the cafeteria for these issues to play out, Anya deals with this consumption, or lack thereof, on her body. As a ghost,

Emily, although lacking a physical body, helps choose clothing for Anya to impress boys that result in Anya feeling embarrassed over her physical looks and describing her new wardrobe as “loose-womany” (114). Anya, who avoids eating throughout the novel in fear of gaining weight, is only aware of the sexuality in her physical form when she listens to Emily’s advice on image and interactions with the opposite sex, realizing it is different from her mother’s cultural expectations. 44

Probyn also discusses the effects of this link between food, sex, and shame, similar to how the idea of hiya works in Filipino culture. Although hiya prevents

Filipinos in succeeding as entrepreneurs, Probyn argues that “damaging representation” can be helpful and are in its own way a “pro-fat statement of acceptance.” One example of this is the placing anorexic looking women on magazine covers:

.. .instead of skimming over the disgust and shame that the extreme thin or fat body may engender, these images compel the reader to pause on her own process of registering disgust, before then proceeding to disavow or be self-critical or having entertained these feelings... (84).

Arguably, one cannot have this kind of visceral reaction without a visual literacy.

The image of Emily, first as a ghost and later on as a skeletal figure, is a sharp contrast to

Anya’s human body, as imperfect as she portrays it to be. Although Brogsol wrote that

Emily was created as a sort of mirror to Anya, this contrast at the end of the novel is meant to highlight not only their physical differences, but to portray a statement of acceptance for one’s own body and cultural existence.

IV. Eating Bodies in Master of None

Just as how Brogsol created Anya’s Ghost to visually portray her Russian-

American upbringing, Aziz Ansari created Master o f None, a television series for Netflix, in order to give his own representation of an Indian-American childhood. Here, there are no ghosts or other supernatural beings. Ansari’s character, Dev, is seen consuming

American culture by partaking in different cuisines introduced to him by his diverse settings (in one flashback scene4, a young Dev is seen enjoying bacon, not realizing

4 See "Religion," season 2, episode 3. 45 bacon is pork). Like Anya, Dev uses food in order to navigate his dual culture. Yet like the ghost Emily, certain scenes point to Dev consuming the female body in a way that perpetuates an alienating sexualization of women while also losing his own individuality in the process. Ultimately, certain episodes of Master o f None work as another type of damaging representation that highlights the importance of a multi-genre and polyvocal literacy.

Although Master o f None has made strides in visual representation, particularly in

Lena Waithe’s character, Denise, the show portrays Ansari’s character as a true foodie within an urban setting, highlighting more of the problematic traits that go along with such a title. While Anya, like Vicenza in Fresh o ff the Boat, grapples with their identity within the American school system, Master of None deals with the first generation from an older perspective in a post-high school and post-college world. This not only takes the viewer to the urban setting of New York, but also portrays appetite and consumption within more diverse communities. Ansari’s show also poses the question of what it means to eat and how one crafts relationships with others using food as the catalyst.

In one particular Master o f None clip, “The Best Taco Spots in NYC,” the viewer is treated to a montage of Dev hastily researching the best taco restaurants in New York using online articles, suggestions from friends, and, of course, Yelp. Although comical, this clip exemplifies a common practice of watering down a specific culture by simplifying their ethnic foods and restaurants into “The Best [insert food of choice here]” lists. This kind of categorical exactness is what George Simmel ultimately blames on what he calls the money economy in his article “The Metropolis and Mental Life”: “It has 46 been the money economy which has thus filled the daily life of so many people with weighing, calculating, enumerating and the reduction of qualitative values to quantitative terms” (327-28). In studying Master o f None alongside Simmel’s article, one can see that foodie culture blossoms due to the calculating demands of a money economy, yet at the risk of losing one’s individuality in making real-life connections within the community they inhabit.

NYC’s 26 best tacos - Time Out ws*v* timeout com/ne^ork'festaurants/nycs*?B~b«*l-tacos-1 * Time Out Jan 12, 2015 * The tacos han am wrapped m a paper m m and served with a .. . .. BBQ prill masters Out

28 Killer jlaco Spots in New York City - Eater NY * Mar 18 2015 - Robert Sfatoetm names the best no-fnl!s taquenas in and around Wm city

Best tacos New York, NY - Yelp www. ye lp,com/search?firid__dfcsc » Best * Ta cos& i n 6 J oc» New ^ Yelp Reviews on Bast tacos in New York NY Los Tacos No 1 Tacos Grand Central, Taquona Diana. Pampano Taqwena, Otto's Tacos. La Esquma Corner Del*. ...

The 10 Best Taquerias in NYC | Village Voice

5

According to Forbes, foodie culture, or “Generation Yum,” has expanded to describe “not only those who eat at restaurants with three Michelin stars, but also those who spend three minutes taking artfully arranged photos of their Wendy’s meals”

(Howe). Despite Ansari stating that he despises the term “foodie” (calling it a “weird fetish-y sounding thing”), the foodie culture in his show ultimately functions similarly to a money economy within Simmel’s metropolis. From a metropolis springs a blase attitude which Simmel describes as “an indifference towards the distinctions between

5 Dev's search results for the best taco restaurants in New York (00:10). 47 things” (329). Although foodie culture appears to fight against this in its attempt to rate, review, and distinguish the best foods among similar restaurants, these types of reviews function like money “to the extent that.. .it hollows out the core of things, their peculiarities, their specific values and their uniqueness and incomparability in a way which is beyond repair” (330). As previously discussed, restaurants, especially local ones, suffer the most from this type of treatment. This may ultimately lead not only to loss of community, but of one’s individuality.

Ironically, Simmel asserts that too many choices, or, in this case, too much input from those with a foodie culture, may lead to this blase attitude due to overstimulation.

He writes that, “This incapacity to react to new stimulations with the required amount of energy constitutes in fact that blase attitude which every child of a large city evinces when compared with the products of the more peaceful and more stable milieu” (329).

Dev in the clip appears excited to do his taco-research, but his friend Arnie sits more relaxed, happy to let someone else research: as taco stands and restaurants are abundant in New York, he and Dev will enjoy tacos even if their first choice is unavailable. This proves to be true later on in the episode, as Dev has spent so much time researching, that by the time they venture out, their restaurant of choice has run out of tacos. If Arnie exhibits the more blase attitude common in a big city, Dev acts as an individual who struggles against the de-individualizing nature of the foodie culture.

Although faced with overstimulation through the overwhelming amount of taco restaurants, Dev is one that Simmel classifies as “the general human character” (333), in that he is one whose “striving for self-preservation set them in conflict with the broad and 48 general on the outside, as well as the freely mobile and individual on the inside” (333-4).

Dev engages in and with the foodie culture, but it is hard to classify him as a foodie in the traditional sense: he seeks out tacos for consumption, not for mere visual aesthetics to post on social media. This sets him apart as an individual within a culture obsessed with sharing pictures of the same avocado toast, but his use of the internet and foodie apps such as Yelp is what Simmel describes as him negotiating between his needs and the expectations of an overstimulated, overly tech-dominated society. One may have individual needs in a metropolis, but it is always informed by the greater needs of the city in which one occupies.

In addition to a loss of emotional connection due to overstimulation and indifference, one also loses a sense of community when engaging in this foodie culture.

One may argue that Dev is not losing community; rather, he is gaining a community by reaching out to friends for recommendations, reading (and maybe participating in) restaurant reviews, and ultimately supporting the establishment he is recommended.

However, this type of freedom can also be limiting. In his article, Simmel touches on the idea of independence within the physical boundaries of a city. Freedom not only comes from having one’s pick of taco restaurants or the abundance of resources to do so, but in the connections one makes beyond the physical restaurant or the act of eating:

The most significant aspect of the metropolis lies in this functional magnitude beyond its actual and physical boundaries and this effectiveness reacts upon the latter and gives to it life, weight, importance, and responsibility. A person does not end with limits of his personal body or with the area to which his physical activity is immediately confined but embraces, rather, the totality of meaningful effects which emanates from him temporally and spatially (335). 49

The space of a restaurant, especially in the context of Master o f None, functions in the same way as a grocery store. Although a restaurant’s physical space is a gathering place for people to exchange money for food service, its intended purpose is to foster community and conversation through food. Yet for Dev, the technology used to study the best restaurants prevents that kind of community from forming. This is seen in the quick cut shots of people’s Yelp reviews and the anonymity of the friends he reaches out to with his “EMERGENCY: can’t pick a place to get tacos! HELP!!!” (00:28) text message.

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Perhaps in response to this, the restaurant business operates on a similar level despite social media’s attempts to bridge those gaps. Simmel states that this is a common problem within a modern city, as goods, in this case tacos, are “supplied almost exclusively by production for the market...for entirely unknown purchasers who never appear in the actual field of vision for the producers themselves” (327). Indeed, after finding a suitable taco place, he chooses to go and engage with only the company of

Arnie, even after corralling the help of anonymous Yelp reviewers and nameless friends the viewer never sees onscreen. In turn, we know nothing about the restaurant Dev 50 chooses except that, choosing not to consider the indecisive Yelper, they run out of the very product they are supposedly the best at making.

Although foodie culture can be problematic, this clip from Master o f None, as well as the series, succeeds in both engaging and criticizing it by displaying various forms of individualism. By using the vessel of the taco, Master of None plays out anxieties of both wanting to fit in wanting to maintain individuality by having Dev hunt for a food so simple, yet hotly debated within the foodie community in regard to preparation, taste, and presentation. The clip also asks the viewer an important question: is there any way to negotiate being part of an imagined community such as the foodie community without “the atrophy of individual culture through the hypertrophy of objective culture” (338)?

In analyzing the structure of a city, Simmel believes there is a way to be part of a larger group while maintaining one’s individuality. He states that there needs to be a place “for the conflict and for the attempts at unification of both of these in the sense that its own peculiar conditions have been revealed to us as the occasion and stimulus for the development of both” (339). In the context of Master o f None, one can argue that these two needs can be unified in a different type of foodie setting: that of the kitchen. Within a kitchen, the process of making one’s food builds a different type of community than that of the restaurant setting that Dev seeks. This is turn creates a unique place for one’s self within a larger community, due to the subjectivity and creative nature of cooking. One not only becomes more familiar with the act of cooking and ingredients they are using, but it depends on a type of individuality when choosing ingredients while also depending 51 on a community of other people (perhaps that of cookbooks or food recipe blogs) in order to gain inspiration and ideas. However, this idea becomes complicated in Master o f

N one’s second season, in which new characters and a new city (Modena, Italy) is introduced. In addition to the foodie culture as portrayed in Dev’s New York, we have another type of consumption in the form of Dev’s relationship with Francesca.

At the start of the second season, the viewer is treated to idyllic scenes of the

Italian countryside and city explorations on Vespas. Immediately, the viewer is set up to view a new kind of culinary tourism, which Mannur describes as “the act of writing about one’s deliberate and engaged efforts to travel to other places to document the culinary particularities of non-normative subjects” (171). Yet instead of white bodies travelling to foreign countries, Ansari’s Dev is an Indian American traveling to Italy to be an apprentice pasta-maker, more likened to Mannur’s analysis of Harold and Kumar Go to

White Castle, in which Harold (a Korean American) and Kumar (an Indian American) go to extreme lengths for a White Castle cheeseburger. Dev, like Harold and Kumar with their elusive cheeseburger, embarks on his culinary adventures in Italy by using the trope of the masculine culinary travelogue previously set in place by white bodies. However, the presence of Dev in Italy forces viewers to again rethink the relationship between food and identity, as Dev does not travel to his parents’ India, but to Italy in order to create his own relationship with food and cooking.

However, keeping in mind the use of social media with first generation young adults, as well as the particularly heavy usage of Yelp in Ansari’s show, Italian food and cooking risk being used in the same way Dev uses cultural cuisine in order to gain 52 cultural capital instead of cultural appreciation. In Erica Lies’ article “A Sojourn Abroad and a Plate of Spaghetti: Pasta and Master o f None ”, Lies compares Dev’s Italian food adventures to the abovementioned taco scene in season one:

Dev’s desire to eat at the best restaurants in Modena is reminiscent of the season one, when he obsesses over finding the best tacos and deep dives into research that takes so long he misses out entirely... And while it’s certainly enjoyable to see these eateries many of us couldn’t otherwise access, Dev and Arnold’s searching for the absolute best tasty bites is a strikingly American attitude. It doesn’t allow for the sense of discovery while traveling or living abroad, even if it provides an enviable Instagram feed (Lies).

Although Dev is seen attempting to learn how to make pasta and entrench himself within the Italian culture, there is more of a need to conquer through cooking rather than make meaningful connections with food. In having more concern with maintaining his social media feeds, Dev is seen to not have changed much since the first season in that he is still struggling with his individuality. In addition to this struggle with cultural and personal individuality within an urban setting, Dev is also seen struggling to maintain his individuality as a single man after breaking up with his long-term girlfriend. However, the result of Dev’s relationship with both food and the character of Francesca is similar to

Emily consuming Anya, and therefore diminishing her, in order to be whole and human.

Although Master o f None attempts to portray itself as a tongue-in-cheek jab at the pretentiousness of foodie culture, in which the difficulty of choosing one’s food is equated with the difficulty of finding one’s next romantic partner, there is an issue when multiple characters attempt to casually consume another culture or individual for the sake of “finding themselves.” Regarding Dev’s season two relationship with Francesca

(portrayed by Alessandra Mastronardi), Dev is not only seen partaking in her culture via 53 language and food, but the viewer is not reciprocated with knowledge of Francesca’s own goals or desires beyond her impending marriage. The viewer has seen this kind of relationship before: In season one, not only does Dev travel to Italy for the summer, but only decides to do so because his white ex-girlfriend Rachel (portrayed by Noel Walls), has declared she is moving to Tokyo to enjoy her young adulthood before settling down.

Yet while the viewer spends most of season one getting to know Rachel, Francesca is largely absent from season two upon Dev moving back to New York. And while Dev is seen attempting to almost obsessively reestablish contact with Rachel at the beginning of season two, Dev later on attempts to make connections with Francesca in a way that is heavily based on food and his attempted mastery of pasta-making (here attempting as a stand-in for Italian culture) rather than a fully formed relationship similar to the one with

Rachel. This has caused debate whether or not Francesca resembles the trope of the manic pixie dream girl.

Within cinema, Nathan Rabin coined the term “manic pixie dream girl” after watching Kirsten Dunst’s character in the movie Elizabethtown. It famously described a female character as “that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely to in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” The term has since been applied to other movies such as 500 Days o f Summer and other young adult, coming-of- age-novels such as John Green’s Looking for Alaska. It is interesting to note that although

Rabin later publicly disavowed the trope of manic pixie dream girl, calling the label itself a “patriarchal lie” (Salon), the term continues to circulate around popular media. Despite 54 his call to write “more nuanced and multidimensional female characters,” the fact that the term continues to be applied to female characters in modern popular fiction and cinema confirms the continued easy consumption of women in media produced by and created by men.

Applied to a series such as Master o f None, the character of Francesca exhibits the characteristics of a manic pixie dream girl by “always ha[ving] endless time and patience and goodwill to indulge the protagonist’s whims. Just as Europe is often depicted as the land of vaguely-creative-guy self-discovery, the Euro pixie dream girl becomes the portal to that place: a cultured and sensitive aesthete who is able to unlock the mysteries of the European continent for our American rube” (Silman). Similar to how Dev uses the consumption of various foods to earn a cultural capital—a capital which eventually profits into Dev’s own cooking competition hosting gig within the show—Dev appears to consume Francesca in the form of her time, culture, and food, in order to validate his own desirability towards the opposite sex. In return, the viewer watches Francesca in various situations with Dev, including “eat[ing] tapas and engaging] in long Woody Allen-esque walk-and-talks”, while never evolving beyond her

Italian-ness.

In the position the viewer has of Dev acting as the main perspective on the show, one cannot help but apply Laura Mulvey’s use of the term “male gaze” in a similar way in which we ascribe the manic pixie dream girl trope to Francesca. Even Slate writer

Noah Gittell describes Francesca as “a fantasy, a mouthwatering photo on a restaurant menu.” As Dev has ascribed certain meanings to the food he consumes and the identity 55 he has crafted as an Indian American male, he has done the same with the women he has forged romantic relationships with. Dev’s relationship with Francesca visually portrays him as “free to command the stage, a stage of spatial illusion in which he articulates the look and creates the action” (63). Yet while this is an easy comparison to draw, such as the use of the manic pixie trope, Master o f None ultimately does not rely on Francesca to give Dev’s world meaning by fulfilling the role of the “castrated woman” (57) despite being exoticized by her foreignness. By the end of the season, Dev, in bed with a newly single Francesca, is seen to have finally “get the girl,” while the viewer finally is allowed some insight into Francesca’s mental thought process, as the ambiguous ending is fueled by her looking visibly uncertain about her decisions. This is contrasted by the ending of

Anya’s Ghost, in which Anya refuses to be consumed by Emily, admitting that, “Wanting how others look, what they have, who they have! Everyone else’s life seems so much easier...but that’s all you know. What you want! You don’t know what’s going on inside anyone else’s head” (209). While Anya is conscious of her body as a vessel that Emily and her American classmates can use to project their own ideas of Americanness, Dev, due to his obsessive consumption, is unable to see Francesca as a complex being, and

Francesca, seemingly unfulfilled in her engagement, looks to Dev for romantic satisfaction. Both stories portray different types of hunger, whether that be for love or acceptance, and the repercussions of being unable to control those impulses.

Perhaps in a bizarre case of art imitating life imitating art, Ansari and co-producer

Alan Yang created Master o f None in order to convey their experiences in the entertainment industry, with Ansari sharing with his character his love of different 56 cuisines. Similar to Dev co-hosting a culinary travel show with the Anthony Bourdain- like character of Chef Jeff, Ansari himself made an appearance in food writer and restaurateur David Chang’s 2018 Netflix food documentary series, Ugly Delicious, in which they both travelled to Japan to try a Japanese interpretation of pizza. And although

Ansari recently made headlines in January 2018 due to recent sexual assault allegations, viewers could not help making comparisons to the 2017 season two series finale, in which Chef Jeff was accused of sexual assault. Gittell describes Chef Jeff s sexual assault plotline in the second series as “...cast[ing] Jeffs hedonistic pursuit of the perfect meal in a more sinister light. If Jeffs indulgence of his own appetite also extends to women in the workplace, maybe his passion for food doesn’t come from the most healthy of places.” The image of Chef Jeffs “appetite,” alongside Dev’s consumption of Francesca, aligns itself all too well with a platform dependent on “binge-watching,” which serves as a contrast not only to Anya’s lack of eating, but how books, particularly those in the graphic novel format, can take years to develop and publish. I cannot help but equate these extremes to one we see within the food industry, i.e. the slow food movement vs. fast food, and how visualizing these differences can serve to either question or maintain certain hierarchies within the media we consume.

Although Master o f None deals with a coming of age experience peppered with

Dev’s interactions with food, this series, along with Anya’s Ghost, visually show the potential dangers of one’s appetite in figuring out identity. Whether or not one consumes or is consumed, visual literacies play an important role in questioning not only what consumption is, but what it looks like to equate food with one’s identity. First generation 57 narratives such as these question the hierarchies of an American consumption and culinary landscapes while also embracing the multiplicity of voices in young adult or coming of age media.

V. Coda: Getting a Seat at the Table

“Gastronomy then becomes [a] privileged space for interpretive contestation whereby he claims a voice, interpretive authority, and a significant stake in American culture.” —Wilson C. Chen on Eddie Huang’s Fresh off the Boat.

In his article “Rotten Bananas, Hip Hop Heads, and the American Individual,”

Wilson C. Chen cites Huang’s memoir as an example of “the mixed literary genre of food writing” (7). Like the rise of fusion cuisines, the prevalence of more diverse food writing—whether that be cookbooks, foodie memoirs, or first-generation narratives— gives young adults the opportunity to explore the empowering aspects of foodscapes through forming important individual identities within a larger culture. Within this chapter, my primary works all share the trait of building community and identity around food. However, food is not the only means of survival in a new cultural setting. Another means of consumption seen in these first-generation narratives is that of literature.

Amidst all the mentioning of food and eating in first generation novels, the importance of intertextuality as a cultural marker is overlooked, yet important in understanding how young adults continue to write themselves into fruition after seeing themselves represented. In Huang’s memoir, he writes at length about the impact of Jonathan Swift’s

A Modest Proposal. While the mentioning of Swift may appear odd, Huang acknowledges that “I wasn’t an Irishman, but I knew how it felt to have someone 58 standing over you, controlling your life and wanting to call it something else” (Huang).

By consuming Swift, Huang learned rhetorical and persuasive arguing skills he otherwise would not have by attending normal school classes. De la Cruz’s Vicenza mentions plenty of young adult novels with young women at the forefront: Harry Potter, Anne of

Green Gables, and Little Women. Yet it is her mention of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club which not only indicates the nature of her mother’s familial relationships, but also another aspect of her cultural heritage as the reader discovers Vicenza is American,

Filipino, and Chinese. Brogsol’s Anya is seen engaging with fashion magazines, whose visual depictions of skinny models popular within American culture mimics the dangers of misinterpreting visual representations. A scene in Master o f None depicts Dev’s father quoting Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, a coming-of-age novel whose food scenes represent an opposition to cultural and gender norms that Master o f None also grapples with. This mentioning of consuming novels relates to the idea of how we symbolically consume bodies or cultures. Just like food, one is never the same after consuming a certain piece of literature, for better or for worse, and literature acts not only as a cultural marker, but as another tool for survival in an otherwise unknown world. Intertextuality as another space of consumption not only allows the potential for young adults to discover new works of media and literature, but it gives them the freedom to write creatively and inclusively.

Just as food studies was once considered scholarship-lite, young adult literature and digital/social media is often understudied despite its prevalence and its potential for study and textual analysis juxtaposed with image. As more young adults use social media as a means to curate and remember, I am advocating for the study and implementation of 59 social media studies and looking at young adult novels to bridge the gap between higher learning and first or second generation young adults who may not seem themselves within the traditional literary canon. My readings of Anya’s Ghost and Fresh off the Boat not only look at the importance of studying consumption and the importance of food in culture, but in the different ways food and consumption exist for the first generation young adult. Although studying the ways in which first generation young adults engage with food is nothing revolutionary, emphasizing the study and use of social media in conjunction with first generation narratives ultimately encourages inclusive narratives while rallying for diverse methods of writing that involve a polyvocal and multi-genre means of storytelling. 60

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