Cultural Comfort

Today's dinner consisted of refried beans (my box finally came in) mixed with sauteed onions and garlic, and a big bowl of rice steamed together with sliced up carrots. Then a swig of milk straight from the carton.

And I got to thinking about my culture. I've been a tad homesick lately. And as much as I'm aware of Japan, have lived here before, know the language, the customs, all that jazz, I'm no stranger to days where I just want my life back home.

But it's not that simple, there's many reasons why I'm not "home," and there's so many reasons as to why being here is exactly where I need to be and what I want to be doing with my life.

We all have culture. And for a few seconds as I opened my fridge to get some milk after having my meal, I felt comfortable, and I felt a part of my culture. My chosen, yet highly socialized into, culture.

Of course I think about culture all the time, duh, with all the language study I do, it's kind of a byproduct/contributor to my wealth of knowledge and my willingness to persue it. I'm proud of who I am and where I came from, but I'm never too stubborn to realize that this life should be about sharing and better understanding, not who's better than who, or who remains more authentic than the other.

I feel lucky that I have my own culture to fall back onto when I'm feeling a bit blue. And culture can be small, it doesn't take millions of people to make a culture, there are many cultures around the world, and cultures within cultures within cultures. I don't use the word "microcultures" because this not only downplays a culture's importance, but also implies that it exists only within or because of a certain dominant culture.

I felt like my kid self again. I felt like when we lived in Juarez, and there was nothing to do. Where dinner was simply beans and rice, maybe some tortillas. And the activity for the night was chatting around the table, or finding some game to play or some dessert to make.

And I fell into my culture. The security I get when I have a good bowl of beans. A bowl of beans is not a bowl of beans to me. Very rarely do I ever associate food as being "just food." More oft then not, I associate the food I'm eating with certain emotions, certain people, certain life experiences, and of course, certain cultures.

It's like when I associate caldo de pollo with being at my great grandma's house after school before making our trek back home. It's how I associate tamales with that christmas where we actually made them from scratch all together, everybody pitched in. It's how I associate burnt tomato rice with my mother, because she always burns her food, yet it always comes out so good. Or how I associate her vegetable soup with the raising of my siblings, the soup they kinda didn't like, but ate it anyway because it wasn't half bad, especially since mom let them pour gobs of shredded cheese on and eat it with tortillas.

It's how I associate flour tortillas with being cared for by my grandma, when she'd give me a ball of dough, but told me not to drop it because then the cucarachas would come. It's how I associate slightly burnt tortillas with one of my tias' stoves, and how my grandma and I would stay in Juarez late late at night and I would just sit there and listen to all they had to say. Much of my wisdom and patience comes from listening in on those conversations. Doing is an art, but listening is the product required to conduct masterpieces.

It's how burnt tortillas also remind me of my grandma's stove, and how well I know that kitchen appliance. The thousands of meals I have cooked on that thing, and the thousands of lessons I've learned about food because of that stove. It still works, and it'll be a sad day when it must retire.

It's how the perfect miso shiru reminds me of the comfort I felt in my host mom's cooking those many years ago. How being so far away from my born into home was not an issue, because my new adopted home was now so familiar and warm. It's the corn arepas that piedad in costa rica used to make, that filled the house with the corn smell I know so well.

And for a brief moment, I was taken to those sweet memories after my bowl of beans for dinner. And I felt safe and at peace. I felt like the energy I was giving off is helping to make this box (well, slightly bigger anyway) I live in a home. That despite the thousands of miles and long months of living far from my cherished beans and tortillas, I could still access my culture, if only sometimes mentally. And that's what culture does for me. Sure, I grew up with many traditional "mexican" fare and foods. But it's what people do with these foods and it's the emotions and memories you associate with these foods that matters. My stomach and my soul were left quite happy. After all, it was no ordinary bowl of beans.