culture

Don’t yuck someone else’s yum

I once asked my wife how she learned to eat chicken feet, something I have never developed a taste for. She said, “When I was growing up, we had three generations living in our home and, in my country, the oldest people eat first and the youngest people eat last. If we had chicken for dinner, my grandmother took the pieces she wanted first, then my parents took the pieces they wanted, and the kids ate whatever was left. So we learned to eat every part of the chicken and, unlike here, we didn’t just buy chicken pieces. We bought and cooked the whole chicken. From the head to the feet with everything in between, nothing went to waste. I learned to eat everything because I had to. It’s all we had.” 

Hearing this was not only enlightening, but also humbling. It made me realize how easy I truly had it growing up. Not only did we generally get to eat food that we liked, albeit within reason, but we also had such an absurd surplus of food that we never really felt the burden of having to eat anything we didn’t like out of necessity or threat of going hungry. We could afford to be picky and, with junk foods, snack foods, and frozen foods abound, our cupboards reflected this fact. 

My wife, on the other hand, having grown up in post-genocide Cambodia, had way fewer options. Her family shopped, cooked, and ate, first and foremost, for survival. One chicken had to make multiple dishes, feed multiple generations, and had to last across multiple meals. They cooked and ate every part, perhaps grilling the legs and wings, making a stir-fry with the diced up breast meat, and making soup with the thighs, feet, neck, head, and the carcass. Even the organs and the blood were cooked and eaten. 

The more I thought about this, the more spoiled and insulated I began to feel. It wasn’t a sense of guilt or even shame, as I knew that I did not choose to grow up where I did, how I did, with the family I had, and the luxury to choose my food from day to day and meal to meal. We were each born into the worlds we were born into and we only knew what we knew. Rather, she helped me to understand just how little I knew about the world outside of my own culture and upbringing. 

Now, whenever I see someone eating something I don’t eat or wasn’t exposed to growing up, instead of judging or criticizing it, I take a moment to think about what my wife said when I asked her how she learned to eat chicken feet. Even though my mom encouraged us to try different things, I think about how there are entire cultures and customs that I simply don’t understand because of how I was brought up. But most of all, I am reminded, as my daughter says, “Not to ‘yuck’ someone else’s ‘yum,'” because you have no idea what life circumstances led them to develop the tastes and preferences they now have.

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Community sandals

There are many aspects of Cambodian culture that took me a while to get accustomed to. In fact, there are many aspects of Cambodian culture that I’m still not used to, even after being with my Cambodian-American wife for nearly seventeen years. For example, the idea of community sandals still baffles and sometimes irks me.

It is customary in Cambodian culture, as in many Asian cultures, to leave your shoes at the door prior to entering a home. Because of this, outside of any Cambodian home, you will typically find a pile of shoes that will include everything from dress shoes to sneakers, sandals, and flip flops, lots and lots of sandals and flip flops.

Being born and raised in an American where a person’s shoes are only that person’s shoes, my assumption has always been that a person wears only the shoes that belong to him or her. If I wear a pair of shoes to someone’s home and I take them off at their door, I expect that I will find them where I left them when it is time for me to put them back on. However, in my experience, this is not always true with Cambodians, especially when it comes to sandals or flip flops.

I have been at many Cambodian cookouts where I have left my flip flops outside, gone in the house to get something, to use the bathroom, or simply to get out of the heat, only to find that my flip flops were missing when I got back. At first, this thoroughly confused me. I had no idea where they went and I thought I had misplaced them, or that I was losing my mind.

The first time this happened, as I walked around looking for my missing footwear, I saw an older Cambodian woman walking around with giant black flip flops that looked like mine on her tiny Asian feet. I asked my then girlfriend, now wife, if the woman was wearing my flip flops. Confused by my question, she looked at the woman’s feet, then looked at me, and said, “Yeah?”

“They are my flip flops,” I replied, “Doesn’t she have her own shoes?”

“Probably,” she said, “Just grab another pair,” and then she walked away.

My black-and-white mind could not understand what was going on. It did not compute. These were my flip flops. That woman had her own shoes. Why was she wearing mine? Furthermore, why would I want to wear someone else’s shoes? Why would she want to wear my shoes, for that matter?

As I settled down a bit, I began looking for another pair of flip flops that I could wear. This created another problem. I have size thirteen feet and absolutely none of the people at this cookout, especially not the Cambodians, had feet, or shoes, that big. I grabbed the biggest pair of tiny flip flops I could find, squeezed my giant Dutch-American feet into them and shuffled around looking as weird as I felt. Eventually, I got my flip flops back and, the next time I took them off, I was sure to leave them out of the path of any Cambodians who might innocently slip their feet into the most conveniently located pair of shoes.

Over the years, I have come to understand that, while everyone comes to and leaves a Cambodian home with their own shoes, as long as those shoes are not currently being worn, they are community shoes. That is, if a member or guest of that household needs a pair of shoes to complete some task, they are going to grab whichever shoes are most convenient on their way out the door. When they are done, the shoes will be returned, maybe not to the same spot, but they will be returned. There is nothing malicious or inconsiderate about this custom. I suppose many Cambodians just see shoes as a tool, not an extension of personal identity or even property.