Eat A Peach

 is the name of a memoir written world renowned chef David Chang. It's a little weird because Chang is only in his 40's.

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I started this post almost a week ago, then forgot to save so I have to start over pretty much from scratch. After a couple days of grieving losing that many hours of effort I'm restarting. Though in retrospect, it may not be a bad thing because I've had some time to meditate/contemplate on what I've read (I've since acquired and read/re-read Eat A Peach) and I think what's coming out is a bit more thought-out vs. stream of consciousness/initial response in what I wrote originally. 

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Now almost a year has passed and I let this drift, mainly because I began this in the wrong blog and I'm copying and pasting it into this blog.

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Even though it was published in 2020, I only discovered it because the original topic of this blog was going to be about ethnic food shaming, and I was going to include a quote by David Chang who once said something along the line of that one of the worst things in life was to be made fun of because of the food you eat, especially if it's the ethnic food of one's culture. I was searching for the quote when I found a transcript of an interview of David Chang about this memoir. As I read the transcript, I was further drawn in by references to specific memories described beyond the foods shaming, which included how Chang as a young child broke his leg and because of his father, tried to gut it out and walk on it and cried for at least five days before his leg was eventually x-rayed and it was determined that Chang had suffered a greenstick fracture which ran down most of the length of his femur. I also learned that Chang has been diagnosed as bipolar and has frequently dealt with suicidal thoughts and he describes his success as a byproduct of dealing with his shame (though he doesn't identify it as such) and associated anger and depression.

(NOTE: shame as it's defined in therapeutic terms is IMO something the average westerner just doesn't grasp in terms of its impact as well as its severity. It's not limited to Asian cultures, but it's also a fundamental part of Asian cultures, in how Asians are motivated to perform by being inoculated with the sense that something is fundamentally wrong with them, typically by being compared to some standard that can never be matched. It's fundamentally different from guilt, which are bad feelings which result from some sort of action of behavior. Guilt comes from doing, while shame is being.)

Chang also refers to han, which is a term unique to Korean culture popularized during the last century. There are varied descriptions/definitions of it, but I personally would categorize it as collective cultural shame for not being whole, which again is a concept westerners will likely have difficulty in grasping because the concept of a holistic/community based world view is totally foreign to them. But when the community is everything, families separated into North/South Koreans are irrevocably fractured. And when things identified with one's culture are defined to be inferior as the Japanese did during their occupation of Japan, their culture is fractured and han is a symptom of that trauma. And each Korean will experience it in their own way, so that one particular Korean's experience/description will not necessarily be prescriptive. But it's interesting that Chang points out that his grandfather was essentially Japanese in his preferences and ways of thinking because his grandfather had been educated in Japan. Chang also mentions that his parents were originally from North Korea and fled to the south.

Chang goes on to document how he coped with his anger/depression/shame/sense of inadequacy by essentially killing his meek, soft-spoke persona and adopting a workaholic set of behaviors that fueled the success of his restaurants but left nothing scorched earth behind when it came to dealing with subordinates. He also abused drugs and alcohol as part of his coping behaviors. He has since recognized the damage he's done and is trying to adopt new behaviors while maintaining the success of his restaurants. We'll see how that goes. 

I have more thoughts, but I'll stop here after noting that while Chang was raised in a devoutly Presbyterian household, he states that he won't ask for forgiveness from those he's hurt and he knows that he has to earn their forgiveness, which reflects a lack of understanding about forgiveness; forgiveness is not about the transgressor, it's about the one who was transgressed against being freed from holding any grudges. But I suspect his shame prompts him to continue to think the way he does. And I'm pretty sure a lot of Asian Americans who profess to being Christian still allow their sense of shame to dictate their thinking and behavior.   

Again, I (and David Chang) want to emphasize that his experience is not prescriptive, but I'd be comfortable wagering a sizeable amount that these stories create a lot of emotional resonance for a large percentage (if not a majority) of Asian Americans (perhaps more for males than females - there's another potential topic for a future post). But at the same time, I suspect Chang's shame plays a factor in this, he's quoted as thinking that other Asians will read his story and respond that they went through something similar and they didn't choose the same coping behaviors that Chang did, and basically say "grow up, you baby".