At long last, we have reached the final month of 2020. With only 30 (!) days to go, it’s time to start looking back on the year that was, remembering the highs and lows of our given year. More than any other year of my personal life, it’s a time where Christmas feels special because this isn’t just a day where we get together and open presents. It’s another day to look back on what we’re thankful for, what we still have in a year where Coronavirus has taken over a quarter-million people’s lives. It’s going to be a bittersweet one, but I think it only emphasizes more clearly what still matters. I understand that many’s narratives will be sadder and emptier, but I hope you find some solace. If you’d like to reach out and talk to me, feel free to.
That is why, in one way or another, I’m planning to use Writer’s Corner this month to explore the stories of families and traditions. I am not intending to draw specifically from the greatest hits of holiday tales but instead find contemporary ones as well that will convey how differently everyone celebrates the holidays. To start off with, I’ll explore one of the first stories I ever read by Amy Tan in a college Freshman English course. What I find incredible with “Fish Cheeks” is that as I remember the prose, I imagine it to be several pages long, detailing every awkward detail of her trying to navigate an embarrassing Christmas Eve dinner with her family and this boy named “Robert.”
What I’m pleasantly surprised to know is that it’s much shorter. To have this much concise detail packed into such a small space is personally impressive. As a writer, I am personally always struggling with knowing how long is too long, and when I’m just being vague. There’s so much that goes into conveying a story, and I tend to side with the idea that “specificity is universal” and think that few have done it quite as effectively as Tan.
This could just be that she has a hook. When you read “The Joy Luck Club,” you get an incredible understanding of the Chinese-American perspective, especially through the guise of food. Considering that they had to ration food in China, their journey to America comes with a small irony. They meet every week to have lavish meals that symbolize something indicative of their culture, allowing the various generations to share stories of their lives. To read Tan is to see a community at their most comfortable. Sure you’ll get hungry, but you’ll also come away realizing how big of a divide between the two sides of Tan’s culture are.
If you want a condensed version of this idea, then “Fish Cheeks” is a very good place to start. In a short story for Seventeen Magazine, Tan’s dinner story ends with the cute revelation that she is secretly embarrassed about her favorite foods. But what does it all mean? As Robert fades from the picture, it’s clear that all Tan has left is her family, her identity. At the end of the day, that is what the story is ultimately about, though the way it gets there is brilliant.
You can argue that Robert is a generic figure. While it’s logical that Tan was in love with a blond-haired white boy, it feels so much like a stereotype. Her description of him is the stereotypical form of beauty. It’s easy to understand where that young love came from. However, considering that this is based around a Christmas Eve story, it would make sense to argue that this is more of a clash of culture, inviting the white perspective into her Asian one and feeling embarrassed with how they’ll judge her. Her guilt makes her dream of whiteness, erasing her whole identity.
This is itself perfectly rooted in the always awkward story of meeting the parents. No matter your background, there is this concern that your love life and family life will fail to understand each other, causing a miserable evening that reflects an inability to be happy on either front. What makes it something more substantial is that the Chinese-American perspective has rarely been given a platform like this, so there is pressure in Tan being personal. What would the readers of Seventeen think of her “strange” foods, or that they’re not the least bit conventional? It’s an engagement with the reader asking “Why do you find this strange?” while exploring the psychological struggle to be happy with your own identity.
In some subtle ways, Tan discusses identity through the food. They’re being served by her parents, itself reflecting a personal connection to her family. Before we know that these are considered her favorites, there is the reality that she’s looking at it not from her own perspective, but from an outsider, the white audience who doesn’t have any experience. It’s something vulnerable that causes us to sympathize with her. We’re subliminally embarrassed because of her parents not picking up on the social cues. It’s the idea that they’re not catering to the white perspective when that’s all that Tan wants to do. Anything to make the evening easier to tolerate.
With only a few paragraphs to convey this, it’s amazing what the reader comes away with. Whereas she could’ve just mentioned how her culture was different, Tan plays to emotions by making her experience feel normal. It’s the pressure of being accepted by a boyfriend, who in this case also serves as the audience she wishes to be most forthright with. It’s likely that they’re like me and have no familiarity with Chinese cuisine. To see people using chopsticks alone shows a difference from the more western version of forks and spoons. In these small ways, Tan is constantly finding ways to revel in embarrassment not in foul behavior, but in people acting differently.
We have to ask why this is considered unbearable to her. It’s likely that it extends beyond the Christmas season and to her life in general. Everything about her is considered an “other” in the American perspective, and this is attempting to grapple with a lot of different emotions. Like “The Joy Luck Club,” it’s best when it’s finding parallels between the Chinese and American, revealing that they’re both crucial to her identity.
Soon we’re asking what she sees in Robert, who is more an idea than a person here. She imagines him judging her for every decision. The reader has to wonder why Robert can’t accept her for her, or what exactly Tan has presented to him that would make this difficult. It’s the trouble of code-switching, where publicly she’s become more accustomed to believe that the white perspective is more attractive, that anything else is disgusting and worthy of ridicule. Again, she’s asking why this is acceptable when there’s clearly a psychological toll on her. While she uses food to establish this, she eventually finds something more insular at play, and something that Asian audiences have likely experienced their whole lives, especially if they’re the first American-born generation.
Like the dinner, Robert eventually ends. There isn’t a whole lot in the actual text that suggests that he did anything wrong or that he’s a negative figure. It’s an impressive juggle because despite being a very critical story, it never actually attacks the white perspective. It just happens to be there, observing the whole thing happening. Instead, it pushes beyond that and finds a familiar story of a teenager struggling to be proud of their identity. As the parents bestow advice on Tan, it’s clear that this was all an exercise of love.
This wasn’t some test for her to eat “gross” food, but to celebrate what makes her unique. If Robert couldn’t accept the dinner as a gesture of love, then he probably wasn’t going to like other things about her. It’s a quest for the reader to notice Chinese-American families as normal, no different from any of us on an emotional level. The tapestry may be different, but otherwise, teenagers fall in love, have awkward dinners, and the parents are full of wisdom. Over the course of a page-long story with selective language, Tan reveals so much about how everyone relates to each other, and how storytelling can hope to bridge the gap with understanding.
At the end of the day, “Fish Cheeks” is about the value of family and cultural identity. Even at a time where a lot of the media highlights the white perspective, it’s important to note that there are others out there celebrating in their own special way. It doesn’t make them any less right or wrong, though how outsiders react has consequences. There is no reason that Tan should be ashamed of the food she eats, nor should we be judging her for being “different.” The story is a great conversation about understanding that does it quietly and with an impeccable technique.
As you can guess, “Fish Cheeks” is one of those stories that has stuck with me since that class. It helps that Tan has slowly become one of my favorite writers with every new thing I read. Still, if you need to understand what makes her an essential voice, I’d start here. I’m envious at how concise every paragraph is, working as an engagement that forces us to question why this bothers her, why it bothers us. If you don’t come out of this wanting to grow as a person, then I don’t know what to say. Everyone deserves a happy Christmas, Do your part to make that happen.
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