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Thursday, June 13, 2019
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com MICHIGAN IN COLOR

In the opening scenes of “Always 
Be My Maybe,” Sasha Tran (Ali 
Wong) makes herself a lonely din-
ner. But soon, she leaves for her 
best friend Marcus’s (Randall Park) 
house, where his mom makes kimchi 
jjigae, the classic, spicy stew brim-
ming with kimchi, tofu and more. 
My mouth watered at the sight; it 
reminded me of all the times my own 
mom made kimchi jjigae, which was 
(and still is) the only way she could 
get me to eat kimchi.
Food is central to the new Netflix 
rom-com “Always Be My Maybe.” 
Sasha herself is a chef, but even 
then, food is a way for characters to 
reconnect (as Sasha and Marcus do 
at a Chinese restaurant) or become 
hyper-aware of their differences (as 
Sasha and Marcus do at an upscale 
restaurant that serves questionably 
pretentious food). Food is more than 
just what’s set at the table: Food tells 
a story, shares a history, is a culture.
(Side anecdote about how food is 
more than just food: before a meal, 
Koreans say something that roughly 
translates to a conveyance of grati-
tude for their meal. When I say this 
out loud, I sometimes remember 
that Koreans didn’t always have 
easy access to food, especially after 
the Korean War. As my parents told 
me, there was a shortage of rice 
after the war, and flour was cheap 
because Americans sent flour as aid 
⁠— guess it was the least they could 
do after splitting the Korean penin-
sula in two. Koreans started mak-
ing a ton of noodle dishes to keep 
their stomachs full like my favorite, 
kalguksu⁠ — if you haven’t seen Net-
flix’s “Street Food” yet, which fea-
tures this dish in its “Seoul” episode, 
then go watch it.)
As I watched “Always Be My 
Maybe,” I was not only taking in the 
beauty of Ali Wong and Randall Park 
excelling at their comedy and being 
sexy and funny and all the things 
that might not check the boxes of 
your stereotypical Asian-American 
character; I was taking in the food 
and the conversations around it. 
There’s a scene toward the second 
half of the movie where Marcus 
confronts Sasha about her high-
end restaurants and how she caters 
to rich white people, abandoning 
the authenticity of Vietnamese and 
other Asian cuisines.

This is another example of how 
food is more than just food and how 
it can often get tangled in identity 
politics. It made me think of all the 
times in Washington, D.C. last sum-
mer that I walked past fast food 
fusion Asian places. Growing up, my 
mom and I drove forty-five minutes 
on the New Jersey turnpike (a night-
mare) to go to the nearest H Mart 
and to a street in Palisades Park that 
was dotted with Korean-owned, 
traditional Korean restaurants on 
every block. So when I saw fast 
food fusion Korean places in D.C. 
catering toward white middle-class 
Americans, I was surprised and 
maybe, admittedly, a little annoyed.
Maybe I was annoyed because 
these places catered to an audience 
who, in my experience moving to 
a predominantly white neighbor-
hood, only ever turned their noses 
to exotic foods like mine (I’m that 
classic Asian-American kid who 
never brought Korean food to school 
again after another student made 
a comment about it). Maybe I was 
annoyed because these places didn’t 
show the less glamorous dishes that 
I ate nearly every single day (Korean 
food isn’t just nicely plated, color-
ful bibimbap and sizzling KBBQ) 
(not that many Americans know 
the kinds of various meats that go 
into KBBQ) (it’s not just one type 
of meat, y’all) (by the way, did you 
know that we use the bones of meat 
for our broths?) (talk about exotic 
and not wasteful!).
Maybe I was annoyed because I 
(wrongly) assumed that all of these 
businesses were owned by white 
people trying to make money off 
of more “approachable” or “clean” 
Asian food — the most recent exam-
ple of which was Lucky Lee’s in 
New York, whose owner marketed 
“clean” Chinese food that didn’t 
make you feel “bloated or icky” 
(guess she didn’t know, or chose to 
ignore, the history of Chinese res-
taurants being called “nuisances” 
and full of “stench” as part of anti-
Chinese sentiment in the late 1800s 
— hello, Chinese Exclusion Act! — 
and early 1900s). Another golden 
example: remember when The New 
York Times “discovered” boba?
But I soon found out that some of 
these chains were Asian-American 
owned, and I felt slightly embar-
rassed by my original thoughts but 
also felt better about these places 
— though this opened up a new set 
of questions. Were these owners 

abandoning authenticity and cav-
ing to the average white American’s 
palette (as Marcus accuses Sasha of 
doing)? Or was it more complicated 
than that?
As I contemplated this question, 
I thought of my mom’s budae jjigae, 
which includes American cheese. 
You can’t get more American than 
American cheese, and it wasn’t like 
it suddenly turned my mom’s dish 
into an inauthentically Korean one 
(who draws the line, anyways?). I 
certainly felt Korean while eating 
her budae jjigae. Besides, cultures — 
and foods — change all the time.
It doesn’t (and shouldn’t) have to 
be either you’re authentic, or you’re 
not. As this Refinery29 article 
shows, Asian-American fusion food 
is more nuanced than meets the eye. 
Asian-American chefs who grew 
up in America ate traditional foods 
from both their heritage and classic 
American dishes; Priya Krishna, a 
Bon Appetit contributor, would eat 
her mother’s roti pizza, saag paneer 
with feta cheese and dahi toast with 
sourdough bread. Her family had 
to make do with the grocery stores 
available to them (we can’t all have 
an Asian food market near us!) to 
bring to the table their favorite Indi-
an foods.
“Always Be My Maybe” is part of 
this conversation around food, and 
authenticity and identity. While 
Marcus is initially angry at Sasha 
for her restaurant’s inauthentic 
menu, he’s awed by the place when 
he visits for the first time. And 
though Sasha’s first two restaurants 
serve less traditional Asian food, the 
third restaurant she opens at the end 
of the movie is an homage to Mar-
cus and his late mother, the center 
of which is his mother’s exact kim-
chi jjigae recipe. Sasha can move 
between all three restaurants, serv-
ing both “authentic” and “inauthen-
tic” food. She’s not stuck in some 
binary — she’s all her own.angry 
at Sasha for her restaurant’s inau-
thentic menu, he’s awed by the place 
when he visits for the first time. And 
though Sasha’s first two restaurants 
serve less traditional Asian food, the 
third restaurant she opens at the end 
of the movie is an homage to Mar-
cus and his late mother, the center 
of which is his mother’s exact kim-
chi jjigae recipe. Sasha can move 
between all three restaurants, serv-
ing both “authentic” and “inauthen-
tic” food; she’s not stuck in some 
binary — she’s all her own.

Food, authenticity and heritage in 
“Always Be My Maybe”
“Daughter of the 
Nile”: A poem

MONICA KIM
MiC Columnist
NADA ELDAWY
MiC Assistant Editor

My tears flow like yours

As does my blood when you cut me

Tearing the color off my skin

Slicing the culture off my clothes

Scraping the accent off my tongue

I tell you the Nile flows through my veins

My hands as textured as papyrus

My skin as brown as the desert sand

And my hair as black as the kohl

That my ancestors invented

And you took as your own

In ways I was never taken as your own

I scream at you

Just because you insist

The opposite of light is dark

Doesn’t mean

The opposite of dark is right

With the grace of my ancestors

The pharaohs of vast empires

Prospering ages before yours

I grow where I was planted

And I’ll let you cower under my branches

While my roots dig deep

Into the banks of the Nile

