Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America by Mark Padoongpatt (University of California Press)
Thai food has become a staple for American eaters, with Thai restaurants found in the most unlikely places throughout the U.S. Even more surprising are the number of Thai temples in America, but as Mark Padoongpatt points out, food and Buddhism are tied together in Thai culture. Thai immigrants want the guidance and community found in their temples but “Thai people must have Thai food.”
With the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965 which replaced the draconian Exclusion Act, young Thai students came to attend U.S. universities. Soldiers who served in the Vietnam War came home with Thai wives who gained entry under the War Brides Act. (By 1980, 40% of Thai women in America were the wives of veterans.)
Los Angeles became a popular destination for Thai imigrants, who rapidly found that the food of that city wasn’t what they wanted to eat every day. Worse yet, they were unable to find the ingredients that are the crucial underpinning of Thai food.
American women who had lived in Bangkok came home with recipes that they gathered into truly blood-curdling cookbooks, with dishes that substituted sour cream for coconut cream, anchovy paste for fish sauce, and cayenne pepper for Thai chile. Thai people found a better solution, although a risky one. They smuggled ingredients back to the U.S. in their luggage, ones that were often confiscated by customs officials. The result of this culinary deprivation meant that by 1971, there was only one Thai restaurant in Los Angeles, and no Thai or Southeast Asian grocery store, until Pramote Tilakamonkul opened the Bangkok Market.
Realizing the precarious nature of smuggling food, whether in a suitcase or a container vessel, Tilakamonkul turned to Mexico and its Free Trade Zones, along with its climate that fostered the cultivation of Thai ingredients, grown from Thai seeds. The Bangkok Market flourished and attracted Thai small businesses to its neighborhood, including a large number of Thai restaurants.
This coincided with America’s love of dining out, which went from being a special occasion to its transformation into a regular event in the ‘70s and ‘80’s. Once it was discovered by food writers, Thai cuisine became a sensation with its distinctive, sophisticated flavors and its healthful dishes. Thai restaurant owners brought Thai art and artifacts to set their businesses apart from those of other Asians and brought the civility of Thai culture into the front of the house, while employing young and attractive waitstaff who were predominately female. As the owner of an upscale Thai restaurant said, “Whether we like it or not, we represent Thailand culturally.”
When the first official Thai Buddhist temple, Wat Thai, was opened in 1979, its suburban neighbors were surprised at how jovial and social an entity it turned out to be. Thai people from all over the region came to participate in everything a Thai temple offers, including the traditional temple fairs which in America became frequent food festivals. The food sold at the fairs was cooked for Thai tastes, not adapted to American palates, and it became wildly popular with all residents of Los Angeles. Neighborhood parking was soon a contentious issue, as was littering and live music sent out from loudspeakers. This wasn’t the quiet and deferential mood that diners found in Thai restaurants and the neighborhood rebelled, with the result that the festivals no longer took place once a week. Instead that facet of Thai culture found a more congenial spot, in the area near the Bangkok Market, which has been given the official title of Thai Town.
Second-generation Thai American Mark Padoongpatt posits that Thai Americans are constrained and stereotyped by the American Empire’s placement of them as purveyors of food, “privileging Thai cuisine over Thai people.” He points out the cultural appropriation practiced by David Thompson, whose encyclopedic volume, Thai Food, collected recipes from aristocratic Bangkok sources and launched Thompson’s mini-empire of Thai restaurants, and by Andy Ricker, who did the same thing with Northern Thai food and spread his chain of Pok Pok restaurants from the Pacific Northwest to New York City. He excoriates the bamboo ceiling that has driven Thai Americans into making their fortunes in kitchens and the naivete of Americans who take the image constructed by those restaurateurs and apply it to every Thai person they meet. He blames the adaption of Thai food into a bland and sweet bastardization upon the culinary colonization that the American palate has forced on an unfamiliar cuisine. His argument is passionate and wide-ranging, raising issues that have been ignored for much too long~Janet Brown