Adrianna TanMy wife has a snarky theory about the emotional regulation skills of Chinese people like me: all of it is food-related. We can’t say anything difficult or emotional, but we will plan meals outside together. We can’t deal with how sad or angry we feel, but having a good bowl of noodles helps us feel better. When we have some mega family feud, nobody ever apologizes, but will plan some kind of huge dimsum or banquet gathering. The apologizing person pays. In some ways I think she’s right. It captures my own experience perfectly. I know I’m not alone.
There are many deeply encoded messages and meaning in meals we plan with other people, and meals that we have on our own. When I left that environment and I lost the ability to map all of my external food based emotional regulation skills to a type of food or restaurant (because eating out is rarer / more expensive / doesn’t map to the same things), I felt like I lost access to a major part of myself. I no longer had the one dish that I ate every time I felt sad, because they don’t have it here in exactly the same form, and everything closes too early in San Francisco. It took me a long time to learn how to untangle my cultural and emotional expectations of food in this way.
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