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Happy Friday, friends! May is Asian Pacific American Heritage month which was officially commemorated as a month long observation just in 1992. It all started with one woman, Jeanie Jew and the experience of her ancestors being Asian immigrants in the US (spoiler alert, it was not an easy journey). You can read more about her here. May was selected because the first known Japanese immigrant arrived in the US back in 1843, on May 7th, and because the completion of the continental railroad was finished on May 10th, 1868 which over 20,000 Chinese immigrants contributed to. Growing up in Colorado, I was lucky to learn about my Japanese heritage through family and the community of Japanese-Americans in our neighborhood. Many of them congregated in the area I grew up in to escape internment and it was how they established tight bonds with one another. However, outside of that world, school and extracurricular activities did not expose me to many other Asian-American friends. I was only one of a few other Asian-American kids in school. It wasn’t until I moved to the Bay Area and made my first Asian-American friends that I realized the power of being part of this kind of community. Our immigrant family members came to the US not just with themselves but with the foods, traditions, and cultures of the countries they left behind. One of the ways I am most connected to my Japanese heritage is through food. Our family still makes mochi so that we can eat it first thing on January 1st of the new year. I can’t think of anything else I’d rather eat on a road trip then shoyu hot dogs and rice balls. I don’t think I’ve ever gone to a potluck without a plate of spam musubis in hand. And, learning how to cook what my mom and grandmas made brings me back to the kitchen listening to the stories of why we cook these foods. I could probably write an entire essay on how the foods we eat help define who we are and what we believe in but I’ll spare you the details and just share some recipes.The first one is for Japanese style dumplings, called gyoza. I can’t think of two other foods that sum up the Asian American experience more than dumplings, and spam (at least for me). Pretty much every Asian culture has some type of dumpling whether it’s Japanese gyoza, Chinese soup dumplings, Korean mandu, Tibetan momos, Indian samosas or Afghan mantu.They all have different stories but are made with the same love and respect for their cultures and ancestors as the other. Spam, encapsulates the Asian-American experience to me. Japanese-Americans and many in Hawaii started eating it during WWII. Government sanctions were unfairly placed on the population because of their race and they were no longer allowed to deep sea fish. In Japan and Korea, on the brink of starvation, spam was sent over and made into army stew or as Koreans know it, budae jjigae. Now, you see it pop up in fancy fusion restaurants and food trucks. It was almost a blessing in disguise because I can’t think of a life without spam. I believe it’s important to remember where, why, and how these foods came to be. Understanding that can open up a world of knowledge and acceptance. I hope you enjoy the spam musubi recipe below. Happy eating, Kelsey (don’t forget to tag me in all your dumpling and musubi creations) @hellokelccooks on Instagram!
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