cheap there! I find it insulting.

could I please not use fish sauce. I told him there was no way to make it without fish sauce. He said that fish sauce upset his stomach, which I took to mean turned his stomach. My grad-school friend asked that I not use canola oil but olive oil instead. I tried to explain that olive oil was not used in Thai cooking, and that the two oils cook differently in addition to tasting quite different. She said something about her holistic doctor. Some girl, who was trying not to get pregnant for the fourth time by douching with lavender oil, asked that I not use chicken because she was vegetarian. Another guy asked that I not use egg because he was vegan, although I watched him and the vegetarian both drizzle fish sauce onto their noodles. Someone’s boyfriend had just finished shaving his head and was walking around in a skirt; he told me that he had a Thai girlfriend once who was very sexy and

But I still can’t figure out why an authentic pizza, made in the Neapolitan style, with real mozzarella and real dough, is a sign of snobbery.

Yeah, I knew you were. Really? How did you know? Because you’re Mexican, she said. I wanted to say, Oh, well, you must be part hippo—they were, all of them, rather large—but I refrained and, as is the Thai way, I thanked her for giving me information about something that I didn’t know.

I was young and a hard idealist who romanticized about crossing Brooklyn Bridge, but I never once crossed the bridge by foot in all the years that I lived there.

my parents provided for us very well. We had two cars, and my father owned his house. We had the Valley-Hi home layout that had two baths and four bedrooms, instead of the smaller one-bath, three-bedroom model. We had central air instead of window units, and we never used fans during the summertime or even had our windows open. In the winter, we could turn on the heat. I would visit other kids’ houses and find that they bundled themselves in sweatshirts, and if someone showered, they had to open the door to let the hot steam into the house. We had it very well, and we knew we had it very well. It wasn’t until I went to college that I realized that I did not have it so well. And it wasn’t until a Thai friend was showing me Thai music videos that he had just picked up during his last visit to Thailand that I realized that there were different varieties of Thai

I want to know when it became trendy to go out for Thai, because growing up, I do not remember anyone wanting to go out for Thai, and I certainly do not remember anyone knowing what Thai food was or even what Thai was

Although I was Asian, and although Asians are stereotyped as being smart and hard working, I have never gained any money for being Asian.

speak to me in Spanish and I told him that I didn’t understand and he looked at me sternly and said shame on me because I didn’t know my mother’s language shame on me. And although my mother’s language was not Spanish but rather Thai and I knew that language very well, for the rest of the day, I carried a shame within me and felt, quite acutely, that I had done something very wrong.

although I didn’t cook the pad Thai with fish sauce, I had added some to his bowl. The next day, he would complain of blue balls; however, he never once complained of a tummy ache.

we were on the hunt for fresh rice noodles. We came up empty, disappointed and empty.

You don’t show others their errors—you let them eventually come to learn the errors of their ways and have them come to you for forgiveness later

In the end, they would thank me for saving their lives, and I would mourn that rice had been wasted and I would mourn that the red pepper had been wasted.

In the end, I accepted it. I didn’t eat it, but I accepted it; I was charged $12.99 plus tax and tip for a dish that tasted of syrup and tin.

more often than not, the pad Thai that I order in restaurants, even if it’s made by someone who is Thai, is orange and served in a syrup so thick that I’m sure there’s high-fructose corn syrup in it

No, they say, what’s your nationality? We had never heard that word before, and although we had never heard that word before, we answered that we were Thai, although our nationality was American.

And even though she knew I was Thai and even though she knew that I was born in Thailand and had been back numerous times and even though she knew that my mother raised me to speak Thai and still spoke to me in Thai, I thanked her for correcting me.