Wendy's Cherry Farm

My family often jokes about my “world class palette”.

Italian, Japanese, Korean, German, and French—my home cooked meals growing up never strictly adhered to the Northeastern Chinese diet. They were often more representative of a United Nations Conference—-spaghetti noodle soup with soba concentrate topped with kimchi and meatballs. Baguettes dipped in olive oil and balsamic vinegar as a starter, and sauerkraut and tilapia soup stewed with enoki mushrooms as an entree. 

I do not come from a mixed heritage background. Rather, my culinary nostalgia is credited to my mom’s child rearing philosophies and her limited cooking experience. During my early years, she worked to sustain the only source of income supporting our three generation household, leaving her little time nor energy to earn her white coat. When our household demographic changed from eight to just two, her lack of experience became amplified. But instead of consulting online recipes and cookbooks, she decided to transform the kitchen into a research facility and I became her lab rat. 

My mom was never excessively concerned about preserving my “authentic” cultural and ancestral ties, and her palatable creations are just one tangible reflection of this attitude. She was never overbearing about my grades, college acceptance, or desired career path. And that’s not to say her parenting strategies were purely laissez faire—rather, she pushed me to think for myself. Rather than seeing me as an extension of her cultural origins and nationalistic upbringing, she hoped that I would become a passionate and empathetic individual, to live a conscious life full of vibrant clarity. She never had a rigid idea of what I should be, and rather led me to understand what I could be—someone with endless potential to pursue a boundless cascade of realities. 

And so I have and will continue to carry this philosophy close to my heart as I navigate the undulating trajectory of my young adulthood, through my daily life and various academic domains. While it is important for researchers to be grounded and confident in their own ideas, it is just as important that we do not forget the ontology of our intellectual pursuits—to build towards answers to what we do not know and what we may not ever fully understand. I am a strong advocate for Kumashiro’s framework of norm-critical education, in which we embrace the gap between teacher and student as an opportunity to face the potential of what may emerge from the unknown, encouraging the formation of agentic perspectives rather than traditionalist and cyclical environments of learning. We cannot work towards equity and inclusion without creating equitable and inclusive environments in which cultural and intellectual humility can be objectively practiced through open minded and empathetic conversations. Challenging ourselves to ask difficult questions in difficult conversations. And perhaps most importantly, working to bridge ostensibly bottomless chasms, chasms in which we do not know what lies below.

 When the low murmur of self doubt comes out of hibernation, my mother’s concoctions always transport me right back to our black granite dining table—-too big for two but, in her words, is a “good quality investment”. She calls out to me from the kitchen— “迪啊 (dí a), it’s time to eat.” I punctuate my last thought and enter an unexpected world of flavors, so far from each other yet brought so close together by faded ink wash floral bowls. Sometimes melodious and sometimes discordant, I finish dinner with my heart and stomach both satiated, a hint of a smile tugging at my lips.