How Thanksgiving helps Asian-Americans celebrate their culture and identity
- The looseness to Thanksgiving makes it a great platform for Asian-Americans to celebrate and inject their own, sometimes complicated, identities
- Kimchi stuffing, pumpkin sticky rice – there are no wrong dishes
Mina Park has a lot on her plate. As the chef and owner of Sook in Hong Kong, and co-owner of the recently closed but pioneering Baroo in Los Angeles, Park is at the cutting edge of modern global Korean dining. But this time of year her mind drifts from her work in food to her family table and preparations for her favourite holiday of the year, Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving can be a complicated time for immigrants and their children in the United States. The holiday’s very Americanness can be alienating. Most people anywhere in the world have at least some conception of what is expected for more global holidays, such as Christmas, but Thanksgiving remains a strange bird.
Even many multi-generational Americans find the holiday confounding: why does the nation pretend to like turkey one day of the year? What precisely is a pilgrim? And what do they have to do with pie?
For more recent immigrants, the holiday can serve to highlight their otherness, the seemingly insurmountable distance they still have to travel for true assimilation.
“I’m Korean-American, and during my childhood, my family moved often all over North America,” says Park. “My parents moved to the US from Korea right before I was born, so they weren’t familiar with American traditions like Thanksgiving. I distinctly recall being in primary school and being slightly mortified that we didn’t celebrate this thing called Thanksgiving.”
On the other hand, Thanksgiving is something of a great equaliser. If there is a central message – other than being “thankful” – it is that everyone in the US, with the exception of actual native Americans, are immigrants.
