Chicken Feet by Kalos Chu
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—as 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 1
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.
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