I sat down on the long table with some of my classmates and opened my book bag to take out my lunch like everyone else on the table. In my backpack was a brown paper bag with a plastic see through container inside of it and a Poland spring bottle. My plastic container had a divider so it was split into two sides. There was pork fried rice on one side, with kimchi (fermented cabbage) and marinated baby anchovies (a soy sauce and red pepper paste marinade) on the other. I took out the Poland spring bottle in my bag to find that it had been filled with bori cha (barley tea). I looked around at the lunches my friends and classmates had brought. I remember thinking it was weird that there wasn’t a single other person who brought Asian cuisine, or rice at the very least. The table was filled with sandwiches, fruits, and cereal.
Strange, but I loved the food that I brought. My lunch was all things I would eat often at home and my mom was a great cook. As I began to eat, David, was pointing at me as I began to eat. I looked up to find him pinching his nose and giving me a disgusted look. He began to make fun of me by stating that I ate stinky fish that smelled worse than the camel poop nearby. Being the kids that my classmates were at the time, everyone joined in on the fun of saying ‘ew’ and pinching their noses. David was Taiwanese and my classmates were a mix of different ethnic
backgrounds, but my friends nearby that day were Korean. I quietly lifted the divider so that I could eat just the fried rice and closed the lid of my lunch container to minimize the smell from the anchovies or kimchi from escaping. It may have been a joke for my classmates, but it ended up shaping what I perceived as an appropriate school lunch in elementary school. It couldn’t have been my classmates’ first times seeing or smelling this kind of food, but it was appropriate at the time to want to be white. Or at the very least, that’s what I learned I had to try and become.