The year is 1925. The war is over. The depression is yet to come. Cauliflower and broccoli are aboard a ship to America, like two hopeful lovers. My grandma is nine years old with golden hair. She’s living in Wisconsin with Uncle Doc, Auntie Dee, Aunt Patty, Oma Olga, and Opa Raymond. My father’s family is in the Philippines, where the country is still under American rule.
In Wisconsin, it is important to have bread and butter at every meal. Homemade, of course. It is dairy country, and my grandpa wakes up at 5 a.m. to milk the cows before he goes to school. My grandma lives in town, so this is not one of her chores.
In the Philippines, it is important to have rice at every meal. My dad is the youngest of eight, and has to eat quickly, or else there will be no rice left for him.
Heart disease runs on both sides of my family: my Opa passed from leukemia when I was a baby, and there is diabetes and high blood pressure on my dad’s side. Enter: cauliflower.
Cauliflower is lower in carbohydrates than rice, and, critically, it can be sliced into small cubes to resemble the staple. It’s also pretty bland and absorbs flavor well, just like white rice. This method of preparing cauliflower is called “ricing,” and the dish itself is “riced cauliflower.” Because it looks and, to some extent, tastes like rice.
I think my mom was the first to find it, in the frozen vegetable section of the grocery store nestled next to the broccoli (looks like they stayed together after all these years). Five minutes in the microwave, and out comes a low-calorie, low-carb rice substitute. This is what I would eat growing up, and now when I go home: not rice from a pot-bellied rice cooker, but riced cauliflower. Actual rice is reserved for special occasions: holidays, restaurants, particularly strong cravings. For when my dad makes vegetable pancit and chicken adobo. For birthdays, and maybe Easter or Christmas.
I was talking about this with a good friend of mine, who, like me, is Asian and white. She asked me, “Why not eat brown rice?” I was stumped at first, because we did eat brown rice sometimes, just not as often as riced cauliflower. And I think the answer is the calorie count: brown rice may be higher in fiber, but cauliflower is lower in calories. And then there is the quality of simulacrum.
Simulacrum: to be the same but not the same. And that is where riced cauliflower’s strength turns into its weakness. It is not rice, it only looks that way.
I, of course, do not have the advantage of cauliflower: I do not look Asian. Neither do I look particularly German. I did not inherit my grandmother’s blonde hair and sky-blue eyes. This is something that my sister, who is adopted, and I have in common: neither of us looks like our parents.
So I’ve searched over the years, starting in my own body, looking for something to tell me who I am. It’s the same search that drives people to take genealogy tests, and those companies know it—they lean into the rhetoric to suck people in. Those percentages won’t tell you who you are, I think. But still I examine my hands. See those wrinkles? I get them from my mom’s side. Look at the width of my fingers. They’re narrow like my dad’s.
My hair is something of a conundrum: for years I thought I got my waves from my dad’s side. Its color is like that of my skin—somewhere between my parents’. But the waves, where are they from? My dad, whose hair is straight and black, claimed that he had wavy hair as a child. But visiting my Tita Aida, my dad’s oldest sister, a few summers ago proved otherwise: rare baby pictures show him with straight hair. My mom usually straightens her strawberry blonde hair, but one day after she let it air dry, I realized that her wave pattern is the same as mine.
I’ve become more at peace with it over the years. But there are still things that nag me: When the first question people ask me after I tell them I’m Filipino is whether I’ve been to the Philippines. When their next question is whether I speak Tagalog (like this is the only language in the Philippines). Or when their reaction is “Well, you don’t look Filipino.” This last comment usually comes from other, older Filipinos, followed by an explanation from me of my German heritage, followed by a slightly colorist remark from them complimenting my complexion.
Feeling like a simulacrum is part of what it’s like being in a diaspora and part of what it’s like being multiracial. Whether you claim multiple heritages or live in a culture that’s different from your family’s, you have to navigate multiple cultural contexts. You might feel like an impostor, like you’re not enough, or not authentic. Simulacrum. Is it a coincidence that the friend I mentioned earlier, who is white and Japanese American, was the only one who didn’t bat an eyelash when I mentioned riced cauliflower? That when I told her about this essay in her apartment kitchen, she just said, “Oh yeah, I eat that, too”?
Perhaps it is just that: coincidence. She did, after all, have a rice cooker chugging merrily away on the countertop.
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Simulacrum: to be the same but not the same. To want to be the same? To be forced to be the same?
Simulacrum carries notes of assimilation, too obvious not to mention. The classic lunchbox example: immigrant children begging their parents not to make “ethnic” lunches because they are “too smelly.” Because it will make them stand out. Because America can accept your money but not your identity.
During the days of FDR, accessing social welfare programs required one to be American, that is to say, to show that they have mastered white American culture. Societal messages exhorted Asian Americans to join the melting pot by erasing their heritage. Throw in your sisig, your balut, your Bratwurst, and out comes the perfect American chicken noodle soup. Affirmative action programs opened public schools to minorities, where students were taught to be American in a certain way, a white way. And not just any white, but a specific American white: in those days after the World Wars, my mother’s family started hiding their German language for fear of being taken as the enemy. This is one type of assimilation.
Yet just forty years later, Reagan tax cuts discouraged this melting pot kind of assimilation: the state wouldn’t care for you anyway, so no need to perform. People kept their culture now because they could. The distinction between assimilation under Roosevelt and Reagan is not my idea; I came across it when I was reading Anna Tsing’s book The Mushroom at the End of the World, which describes the journey of the matsutake mushroom, from forest to plate. Tsing shows how coercive assimilation (FDR) and neoliberal multiculturalism (Reagan) shape the Asian American experience, explaining the difference in culture between Japanese American Nisei and Southeast Asian American mushroom pickers. The Nisei belonged to the older generation of FDR assimilation, and their lifestyle was similar to what Tsing herself grew up with: striving towards the “model minority” myth. The Mien mushroom camps, however, were full of more recent immigrants and reminded Tsing of China and Borneo rather than Asian America—the food and languages recreated home rather than recreating a “poster” America.
Seeing Tsing’s explanation of something I had long wondered about—how the Asian American experience is different for different generations—helped me understand some phenomena in my own life. For example, why so many of my Chinese American friends went to Chinese school, and why there was a Japanese school that used my high school over the weekends. But it didn’t quite explain why there was no Filipino school. That has another history: American colonization.
America doesn’t like to admit that it is an empire. Not only is it on stolen lands, but it also has overseas imperial holdings. While the Philippines received its independence in 1946, Guam and Puerto Rico, the other islands the U.S. took after the Spanish-American War, remain territories today. In the 1940s, when my mother’s family was hiding their German under FDR, my father’s family was learning English under American rule. This, too, affects my cultural upbringing.
In today’s world, I feel that there is pressure to show your heritage, prove your membership. Let me see you eat rice. I am not entirely sure where this comes from. Many places, I suspect, but likely the racial reckoning of the last few years plays a key role. Is this something people are using to avoid facing their guilt? Some flavor of “If I am a minority, I cannot be racist.” Then there is moral policing of another kind: If you assimilated, you are bad, you gave in to your oppressors. Other voices say: Don’t you know that was how we had to survive? Or: Don’t you know that was my choice?
Why do only some people have the luxury of choosing when they make their personal political?
Let it be known: these barely scratch the surface of assimilation stories.
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I eat more rice now than I ever have before. I still don’t eat a lot, just more than I have in the past. In part, this is because it is easy for me to acquire East and South Asian food through Brown’s meal plan. In part, this is because my partner is Chinese. If we continue building our lives together, I suppose rice will take on new meaning through our cultural fusion.
I spent the summer of 2022 traveling around the U.S. visiting family. After losing my Oma and great aunt the previous fall, I realized how important family was and how you never know how long you have with someone. Concurrently, I realized how little I was connected to my Filipino side compared to my German side. While I don’t blame my parents, these facts were results of how they chose to engage with their families, heritages, and their children. Parenting is hard. Part of growing up is realizing how you are different from your parents. And also how you are similar.
During my first semester at Brown, I felt like I was floating, untethered. A first-year college student away from home with no living grandparents, my feet barely scraping the ground. It’s a hard feeling to describe, but it was as if everyone had been airlifted from their previous life and dropped onto Brown’s campus, like the rest of the world didn’t exist. As the semesters went on, I started to feel my new life becoming more integrated with my past. College is a crucible of identity formation, and just because many people go through it doesn’t mean it isn’t hard.
Simulacrum: to be the same but not the same. Isn’t this just how life works? As each moment passes, you are the same but not the same. You are a tiny bit older. You are a tiny bit changed. We are all ships of Theseus, sailing the seas of our lives. We can’t eat the same cauliflower twice.
Maybe, then, we are all simulacra.
Sole Magazine