There’s a sort of primal satisfaction that comes from eating a chicken foot—biting around for the knuckle, pinching off a joint with your incisors, sucking ferociously at what little cartilage, skin, and sauce can exist on a centimeter-long segment of chicken toe. I have no way of knowing how satisfied the Paleolithic man felt lounging by the fire after his dinner of freshly slain mammoth, but, as I admire the mound of chicken bones on my plate, I feel that I’ve come pretty close.

Of course, some would disagree: those who would prefer a drumstick or the sterile civility of a chicken nugget to the jagged realism of the chicken foot. These are the people who cut the crust off their sandwiches, who don’t like onions on their burgers, who call themselves sushi lovers but only ever order the California roll. I know, because I went to high school with these people. 

Despite being one of three Chinese kids at my high school, I never really thought about race. I didn’t get called a chink or have my lunch money stolen or anything—the Hydroflasks plastered with Bernie 2016 stickers precluded such behavior. The only time the cultural rift manifested was when I—like countless immigrant kids before me—brought lunch to school. Even my staunchest white liberal peers couldn’t resist commenting. “What is that?” “That looks disgusting.” “Are you going to eat that?” (No, I was actually going to blend it up and make a face mask).

My friends were even more direct. In four years of after-school homework sessions, sleepovers, and birthday parties, never once had they come over to my house for dinner. The most common (and most eloquently worded) reason: “Hell no, your mom’s gonna make chicken feet or some shit.” If I were more oblivious, I wouldn’t have cared. Chicken feet isn’t exactly my family’s typical dinner, and not everyone is a hardcore hunter-gatherer like me. 

But it was never about the chicken feet.¹

It was about their conception of Chinese food, of Chinese culture. The dirty Chinatowns and shady Chinese restaurants. The squalid, authoritarian, communist police state on the other side of the Pacific with surveillance cameras on every corner and portraits of Xi Jinping in every living room. The depictions of China that color the collective American imagination and—despite what CNN or Fox News or even the New York Times say—were far from the truth, far from the China that I knew. 

Of course, I couldn’t expect them to know that. Liam didn’t grow up watching Chinese cartoons and Ryan never ran up and down the snack aisles of H-Mart. Nonetheless, it still bothered me. These were my friends. These were my best friends! Sure, they didn’t have Chinese parents, but they had me.

I studied abroad this past summer in Beijing—a polluted, aggressive, energetic, wondrous city that actually does have surveillance cameras on every corner, but also, more importantly, the equivalent number of restaurants. With me were a few other students, all Chinese-American, who, as one does when the dining hall serves the same thing every day, ate out whenever we could. We ate Japanese food made by Korean people and Pakistani food made by Chinese people and lots of Chinese food made by Chinese people — those who say America is the immigrant capital of the world have yet to visit a night market in Beijing. One night, we ate at a dim sum restaurant, and someone suggested we order chicken feet. For the first time in life, I heard not one, not two, but an entire table of nineteen and twenty year-olds proclaim, “I love chicken feet!” 

I felt validation, pride—I had found my people. 

The feeling, however, was short-lived, because not two seconds had passed before someone asked something that I had not expected: “But have you tried duck intestine?” Then, someone else: “Yes, that’s so good, but once I had pig brain!” “Not as good as pig blood though.” “What about fried crickets?” “Snake soup?” “Sheep penis?” It was like this culinary cold war, a pissing contest for who’d eaten the weirdest animal appendage. Of course, it was more than that: it was a contest to see who was the most in touch with their culture—who was the most Chinese. 

I was hurt, not just because I had lost the war (my mom was never able to find frozen sheep penis at the grocery store, not even at Whole Foods), but because we were fighting it in the first place. We were like Remus Lupin and Sirius Black, squabbling while Peter Pettigrew escaped unnoticed. The schoolyard bullies and whitewashing Hollywood producers and xenophobic politicians—they were the real enemy. We should have been touting our Chinese culture to them, not each other. We should have been calling out the snide remarks and challenging the biased media coverage and asserting our Chinese-American identities in America, because if we didn’t, who would?

Most of the Chinese-Americans at that table were second generation, which means our parents were the ones who first immigrated to the United States. They carried with them the thousands of years of culture of their ancestors—the history, the values, the food—but they faced challenges much more pressing than cafeteria taunting. They had to survive, to adapt to this odd country where people say exactly what they’re thinking and eat rice with a spoon and don’t take off their shoes indoors. Our parents still face that struggle; my mom, to this day, never feels confident enough to go to the doctor alone.

We, as Chinese-Americans, are the Avatar, the bridge between the two worlds—it’s right there in the name. We dress and talk like Americans, but we also grew up in our parents’ house and, often, in China. We’re the only ones with that ability to share and translate not just language, but culture. So why weren’t we doing that?

I did, however, sympathize with them. The feeling of being too Chinese to be American and too American to be Chinese? It sucks. And people cope by picking a side, or trying to. Some choose to talk to their parents in English and order Starbucks instead of Boba. Others study abroad in Beijing and master sheep and pig anatomy. Balancing two identities is hard, and being an ambassador for one of them is even harder. 

But if we don’t do it, who will?

I think about those high school lunches often, about what might have happened if I hadn’t ignored the comments, but instead I had called out my peers, if I had brought a chicken foot to school and offered them a sweet, delicious toe. Sure, they might have spit it out and called me crazy. But I like to think they also might have had an epiphany, a complete change in worldview, a spiritual transformation that could only be triggered by the singular primal satisfaction of eating a chicken foot.

¹  And it also couldn’t have been. Preparing chicken feet, according to Wikipedia, requires frying, steaming, stewing, and simmering—more effort than my mom would have been willing to put in even at Chinese New Year.

Cover photo source