On Failure and New Beginnings

2001. The first official year of the new millennium, the year of the World Trade Center bombings, the year before the term fusion cuisine entered the OED and the year Gastronomica was first published.1 On a smaller scale, I was beginning my last year of graduate school and in the thick of writing a dissertation about food in South Asian American cultures. Though I did not realize it at the time, these events would impact the trajectory of my work, and my world, in significant ways. Sometime in 2000, I had learned about a new journal that was being launched about food studies: Gastronomica. I remember the palpable excitement I felt. An entire journal about food that cut across disciplines? I even loved the way the word Gastronomica felt on my tongue. As a comparative literature student who worked across disciplines, the creation of this journal lit a fire under me. It gave me the permission to write my dissertation at a time when food studies was not widely recognized as legitimate academic work. During my prospectus defense, I persuaded my committee that it was not foolish for me to write about food—that writing about food was not just for the anthropologists. My work could find an audience in traditional journals but also in new journals like Gastronomica. When asked which journals would want to publish my work, I discussed the chapter about fusion cuisine that felt like the centerpiece of my overall dissertation. I noted that I planned to draw from media and television and cookbooks and to center the study of food. I added that I had seen nothing in Asian American Studies or food studies that dealt with fusion cuisine in a scholarly way. With this focus, it would make logical sense for a food studies journal to be a home for my future chapter. The calls for papers had asked for work from interdisciplinary scholars to submit new work. If not a young graduate student writing about fusion cuisine in Asian American culture, then who? Enough to convince my committee, I left the room with an approved dissertation prospectus and a concrete idea of which two chapters would make for good standalone pieces. One chapter did indeed find its way into a standalone piece, becoming the lead article of a special issue of the journal MELUS: Multiethnic Literatures in the United States on food.2 The other chapter, “Model Minorities Can Cook: Fusion Cuisine in Asian America”…well…this short essay is a story of that ugly stepsister of a piece.In September 2002, I was awarded my doctorate and later that year, while on the academic job market, I revised “Model Minorities Can Cook” and submitted it to Gastronomica. From there, things unraveled. The paper was summarily rejected and deemed not to be a good fit. I received little by way of an explanation from the editor and just like that, it was done. This injury would have felt more like a bruise had I experienced some success on the job market. In the same year, not a single tenure track job offer came my way despite interviewing for eight jobs at the Modern Language Association convention. I was even told by one unhelpful mentor at the R1 I was employed at as a post-doctoral fellow that they did not see a path to tenure for someone like me. In the case of the journal rejection, I was told my work was not a good fit, and in the case of the job market, I was told that food was not a serious enough literary subject to earn me even the opportunity to be hired into a secure tenure-line job. I was crushed in the worst way possible and did not see a way forward other than to keep trying to do what I did. But before I continue, I want to backtrack a little to contextualize the work I had been trying to do in the article that never made it into the pages of Gastronomica.When I started thinking about food, I found the emergence of fusion cuisine most exciting. I had recently learned about the successful Chinese American chef Ming Tsai and was obsessed with his Food Network show East Meets West. Though his name has now faded a little into obscurity, the late 1990s was a new era for Asian American cooking: an Asian American chef seamlessly integrating his training as a French chef with Asian ingredients and flavors had a TV show. Tsai’s style of cooking resonated with young Asian Americans like me because he was showing how the foods and flavors of our culture and heritage could be added into high-end American food. Ming Tsai was serving up this fusion at his restaurant Blue Ginger, while also instructing home cooks how his food was decidedly Asian American.Ming Tsai was not the kind of Asian chef we were accustomed to seeing on TV. For most people my age, we had seen very few Asians represented, and the only person we associated with Asian food through much of the 1980s–2000s was Martin Yan and his show Yan Can Cook that aired on PBS through KQED in San Francisco. Though Yan obviously made huge strides for Asian Americans by putting our food on the map, his persona on TV still felt irreducibly foreign and almost cartoonish. He was on TV for white entertainment and quite simply, he wasn’t a chef for Asian American audiences. When Ming Tsai entered the scene in 1998, it felt like a breath of fresh air. Here was a young Asian American chef who knew about his Chinese roots but also knew how to make his food exciting and innovative. Simply put, he was making the food my generation of Asian Americans didn’t know we wanted to eat. Still, the Asian Americanist in me was wary of the way Tsai leaned into being a model minority. This sat uneasily with me and formed a major arc of my article “Model Minorities Can Cook: Fusion Cuisine in Asian America” that would later be published in the edited collection, East Main Street: Popular Culture in Asian America.But let’s also remember the time I was writing. This was the fall of 2001. When the towers fell, everything changed, including how the United States, as a nation, talked about food. Nationalism and xenophobia reared its ugly head and almost in a flash, it felt like the media was no longer interested in fusion flavors. Writing my dissertation, I no longer felt that it was possible to think about cosmopolitanism and transnationalism in the same way, and I did not—indeed could not—simply celebrate Asian Americans as model minorities while so many among our communities were being racially profiled and detained. In 2003 (after the piece that came from my dissertation had been rejected and I was still trying to think about what to do with it), I presented on this work at a conference. A food writer on my panel told me, “No one cares about fusion, young lady, we’re in a moment where comfort food is what is in. We care about traditions and communities and foodways and resilience, not trendy fads.” And perhaps he was not wrong. At times of national crisis, nations retreat to what is familiar. At times of heightened xenophobia, our cuisines can take a turn for the conservative—immigrants may be less inclined to bring their flavors to the table. For many Muslim-owned restaurants, for example, merely staying in business was more relevant than trying to create innovative flavors in the kitchen. And so, from my perspective, there was a cruel convergence of forces at play. Just as Asian American chefs were beginning to innovate and do fabulous things in the kitchen, just as the United States was moving toward greater ethnic diversity, just as the term “fusion cuisine” had officially entered the OED, the brakes had been applied. I liked my chapter, but I didn’t know what to do with it. It had been rejected by the place I thought would welcome it, and my American literary studies compatriots had little interest in it. Wanting to see it in print and not think about it any longer, I ended up submitting it to an edited volume, East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture. To my surprise it was accepted. To my even bigger surprise, people read it and liked it. And to my continuing surprise, people continue to read and teach it in 2025—long after I have moved away from agreeing with some of my initial points about the essay.And yet what remained was that my work on fusion had not registered: not for the academic job market, not for the opinionated food writer, and not for the food journal I so longed to see my work in. I remember feeling very lonely in my pursuits to explore food in Asian American Studies. Owing to a long legacy of food being an easy and often racist shorthand to understand Asian Americanness, I was treading in somewhat murky waters. There’s a reason no one is writing about food, I was told. It’s just not serious. While I had sat through job interviews and addressed questions about why literary scholars and scholars of race should think about food when there were so many other more serious and erudite things to think about, all I could think about then was how much sense it made for me to write about food in Asian America. Still, I felt I had failed. For the job market, I was not literary enough. For the food studies world, I was too literary.3 For Asian American Studies, I was too apolitical. What was a girl to do? Though it took some years and regrouping, I did what any ambitious young scholar who did not respond well to gatekeeping would do—I recruited two of my best friends, also writing about Asian American foods in a broad sense, to create our own field. All of us had struggled with making our work legible in traditional fields, and the interdisciplinary field we knew we could participate in didn’t really want us. Around bar stools and dining tables, we talked and decided we would make our own space. We worked together with an editor, Eric Zinner, and cooked up the idea to do an anthology called Eating Asian America.4 We recruited friends and colleagues who wrote about food but didn’t identify as food studies scholars. The book came together, and it was a resounding hit. Over the next decade we would hear from so many young academics about how much they loved the book, how much it had helped clarify their thinking about food as a central heuristic in Asian American Studies. My friend Nicolyn Woodcock, then a young graduate of Kenyon College, came to study with me at Miami University because she had read the book and wanted to do more. She ended up being one of the first people I asked to contribute to Eating More Asian America, but that is another story.In 2025, we saw the publication of Eating More Asian America, the follow up to Eating Asian America. In the same year I was invited to join the Editorial Collective of Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies. Earlier in 2025, my fellow traveler in Asian American food studies, Mark Padoongpatt invited me to give a talk to his students at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas via Zoom to reflect on the fusion cuisine piece I wrote that never made it to the pages of Gastronomica. One of Mark’s students noted that they were surprised my piece on fusion cuisine was so “old” because it felt very relevant to them today. The student asked me a question about archives, how I settled on my sources, and how I was able to make such a unique but important argument about fusion cuisine in relation to Asian American racialization. The student was surprised that I was able to think about fusion cuisine so clearly twenty-five years ago and that it felt ahead of its time. This student’s words brought me to tears. I was reminded in that moment of a young food studies scholar who, a quarter century ago, sobbed inconsolably when this article was rejected for not being relevant.A twenty-fifth anniversary is a time to celebrate all the milestones, all the knowledge, and all the scholars whose work we have uplifted. It’s also a time to reflect on what we can and should do better. How many other moments of failure have we unwittingly participated in? With four books to my name, it surprises me that my field of Asian American Studies is still not well represented in the pages of Gastronomica. None of my books have been reviewed by the journal, and to be honest, it’s a surprise and a letdown. How can it be possible that the major interdisciplinary food journal in North America is one that Asian American Studies does not contribute to in a significant way? A search through Gastronomica reveals very little engagement with Asian American Studies. While the journal cannot be everything to everyone, it is also important for a journal to know and recognize when we need to confront the limits of our knowledge and to see what else is out there and how we can appear on new horizons. After all, a journal like Gastronomica was created to hold space for thinking critically about food and gastronomy. It is a space for scholars across disciplines to find an intellectual home when traditional disciplines have deemed our work as “scholarship lite.”And yet, we have room to grow and to think about who gets to be at the table. At Gastronomica I’m the new kid on the block. But I’ve been around for a very long time now, and I’m no longer the one banging on the door but the one deciding who gets to come in and break bread with me. Somewhere out there is a graduate student who is excited about something they’re thinking about in the culinary world. They too will experience failure and disappointment. As we look to the future, I hope that young scholars working on things we cannot yet conjure will knock on the door and share that world. I’d like to meet them at the door, welcome them in, and ask them to have a seat at our table.