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Qipaos, Chum Chums, Taiwanese Pearl Guava, Dumplings, Mendhi, and Doing the Most: Celebrating Our Favorite Cultural Treasures This AANHPI Heritage Month
Note: This AANHPI Heritage Month, we’re celebrating with a variety of pieces that honor the month. You can read more in the series here.
From Jackii Wang:
Each year, for formal events, I put on my mother’s qipao. It’s a traditional Chinese dress that’s bright, cerulean blue with silk floral patterns. And it’s the real deal: heavy, long, high-collared, and exquisite. My mother had the qipao specially made in China thinking she would need it when she arrived in America for fancy events. But after she immigrated, she never once wore it—how could she when people here wore suits and gowns at formal gatherings? When she pulled it out of storage for me, we marveled at how beautiful it was. I’m proud to wear something she invested her heart and hope in.
From Tanuja Tase:
As a child, my prized possession was my silver chum chums, anklets that jangled with each step—announcing my presence like a cat with a bell on its collar.
There was a picture book I loved in which a young Indian girl is playing dress up, wrapping herself in towels, draping a bedspread over her head, borrowing her mother’s too-big clothing and exclaiming “I’m an Indian Princess!” That’s how I felt whenever I had the opportunity to place a sticker bindi on my forehead, bangles clinking at my wrists, a dupatta draped around my neck and cascading down my back. It would billow out behind me as I frenetically raced around so I felt like a Bollywood starlet twirling in the middle of the dance floor.
Even now, clothing is an opportunity to play pretend, to transform, like reincarnating yourself every day by deciding how to present yourself to the world. It’s a ritual passed down: I think of my maternal grandmother, with her pristine sarees and my mother laying out all her jewelry on the bed so we can look over it together. Now, I fuse the Indian and American parts of my culture whenever I can, putting on jhumka earrings with my everyday Western-style clothes, like it’s a party, like I’m an Indian princess.
From Airin Chen:
The topic of favorite Asian snacks recently came up among my friends. And for those of you who grew up eating plates of cut fruit when meeting with aunts and uncles you were supposed to impress, who helped your parents pick and wash fruit for hours, or wished for the possibility of a dessert other than orange slices—you’ll understand that fruit isn’t really just a snack. But Asian fruit is my favorite snack and brings me so much joy. Specifically, Taiwanese pearl guava (or bā – lā) is the crisp, earthy, cool, and sweet fruit of my dreams. And if I could wrap up all my joy in its shimmery light green, consuming bā – lā every day, I absolutely would.
From Selina Tran:
Food has always been the thing that brought my family together. Whenever I visit home, the minute I step through the door, I’m offered food. At any family gathering, I can always expect copious amounts of homecooked food. Dinners would last hours as we slowly ate, chatted, and laughed the night away around a big table with many plates on a lazy susan. I don’t live near family and only see my parents once or twice a year, so something that keeps me close to my family and culture is cooking my comfort foods, especially dumplings. Once a year, around Lunar New Year, I gather my chosen family to do something I used to do with my grandma, make dumplings. I love the process of it, the symbolism behind it, and the community that comes together to share a meal.
From Asma Akram:
The tradition of applying mehndi was the best part of my childhood. It brought me so much joy when I got to adorn my hands and feet with beautiful designs for Eid or weddings. Mehndi, often called henna tattoos, is a temporary body art used for celebrations, holidays, and weddings. The dye comes from a plant whose leaves are crushed into a paste and put into a cone, which is like a piping bag, for application. I learned the art of mehndi in middle school and went on a beautiful journey into the depths of my culture.
When I learned the art form, I could finally draw whatever designs I wanted on myself, and it felt especially meaningful to be a part of wedding festivities. The Mehndi ceremony is an important part of South Asian weddings, and a person getting married gets mehndi designs of flowers or paisleys all over their hands and feet to celebrate their new chapter in life and bless them. As a mehndi artist, I am integral to this ceremony and the celebration. The mehndi will bless the couple but is also a symbol of beauty and the beginning of a new chapter of life.
It feels empowering to give this gift to someone and contribute to such an important day in their life. Mehndi is more than just art to me; it is how I connect with people and my culture.
From Uzma Chowdhury:
When Marcel the Shell said “COMPARED TO WHAT?” I think my life changed. I sometimes say that I come from a people who do a lot, the most even. But when I heard that little shell with shoes on point out that doing “a lot” is relative, I realized that maybe everyone else should take a note on how to live life to the fullest and appreciate all of the beauty in this world. Maybe millennial beige is just BORING.
The saris have inherited are all at once neon pink, beaded, sequined, and glittering and I wear them with enormous chunky sets of bangles, chokers, chandelier earrings that I have to attach to my hair with bobby pins. When I cook, my base recipes involve five to nine 5-9 spices from my dabba—and while I appreciate the flavors of a lightly seasoned fresh farmer’s market vegetable, I will always prefer a long-stewed curry with a base of onions, garlic, ginger, tomatoes, cumin, turmeric, coriander, kashmiri chili—and that’s just the base. My preferred curry is finished with even more razzle dazzle—a sprinkle of garam masala (mine includes cinnamon, cardamon, cumin, black peppercorns, cloves, and more), a squeeze of lime, and a ton of chopped cilantro. Sure it’s “a lot.” Bbut compared to what? It’s what generations of my family grew up cooking and eating, and our handy masala dabbas keep everything we need at arm’s reach. Even our home decor, our art, is as vibrant as our food and clothes, ornate calligraphy, rich contrasting colors, jewel tones and embroidery that consume all five senses with incense smells and technicolor textures.
All of this might be “too much” for the Western gaze, but for me, for my family, it is a celebration of being alive. Through war, colonization, the difficulties of immigration, and the pain carried in the history of a diaspora, celebrating life and all it has to offer, appreciating every color, flavor, smell, and sound, has kept us going, and will continue to do so.
