Almost every Tuesday evening, a small group of students gather in the basement of Marsh Chapel for International Student Fellowship (ISF). The group of us gathered would prepare an international dish together and share the meal afterward. When I helped run ISF last year, most of the time this group was small; only a few people were generally able to come each week. Some of them were international students, but anyone who came was always welcome.
There is something very comforting about cooking and sharing food with other people. The act of preparing food, talking while eating it, and cleaning up afterwards carries a certain kind of closeness, one that connects the individuals who do all of these things. I experienced this sensation again at last night’s International Student Fellowship. One of the graduate international students who regularly comes made steamed Chinese food with a few other international students who soon joined us in the small but cozy kitchen.
After several people had arrived, some began speaking to each other in Mandarin. As they spoke to each other and to us, they would switch back and forth between Mandarin and English. I had studied some Mandarin during my last year of high school, so I could pick out a few words here and there. For the most part, though, I couldn’t understand what was being spoken, yet I felt very close to the language all the same. Somehow, the conversation seemed both familiar and unfamiliar to me at the same time.
This sensation may bear some relation to my upbringing. My mother would often take my sisters and me out to dim sum for lunch on Sunday afternoons. Incidentally, I would consider a lot of the food at ISF to be kinds of dim sum. If you are unfamiliar with it, dim sum is a kind of food served in small dishes. You order several of them at a table, and then you share small pieces of food with each other. It’s a very social way of eating and sharing food, one which is associated with southern regions of China, where Cantonese is highly prevalent. At home and at lunch, my mother would teach us short phrases in Cantonese and words for the different kinds of food. I still remember them now, despite the fact that I can’t speak Cantonese or Mandarin fluently. I asked some of the students what they called certain foods, and I told them some of the equivalent names in Cantonese. The names sounded very different, and yet they still felt close and connected somehow.
Language and culture are hardly static entities. They grow, change, evolve, and intersect over time, and in that intersection they form boundaries that fluctuate. Sometimes, these boundaries are almost impossible to cross. This can happen, for instance, if you travel to a different country and know nothing about the language at first. But occasionally, the boundaries meet and blur, creating an environment that is neither entirely in one culture nor entirely in another. I think I experienced this environment in ISF this past week. The mix of languages, dialects, and food created both a sense of closeness with the students who came and a distance at the same time. I’m not exactly sure what to call this ambiguity, this fluctuation and melding of cultural boundaries. But I do know that with it there was a warmth, a comfort, and a familiarity in the hospitality that these students showed to each other in preparing the food, and to the rest of us in the sharing of the meal. That is something I am glad to have taken part in.