Asian studies blog by Elijah

This week I will be talking about the campaign I am working on. The Candidate is Otto Lee, who has a unique story for someone running for office as an Asian American immigrant. Here is Otto with his two younger daughters, Hillary and Stella. Otto spent his childhood in Hong Kong, however at the age of 15, his family was forced to make the hard decision to immigrate to California due to rising political upheaval. Like many immigrant families, his parents made massive career changes in order to provide for the family. While his father was an attorney in Hong Kong, he became a restaurant owner in America. Due in large part to those sacrifices, Otto was able to attend and graduate from University of California, Berkeley with a B.S. in Chemical and Nuclear Engineering. After graduating UC Berkeley and the ROTC program, Otto was commissioned as a Lieutenant in the United States Navy.  He first served active duty during the Gulf War on board a Guided-missile Cruiser as the Ship...

Often when people say "fusion" after any sort of food, it is a murky mix of flavors thrown by a chef trying to edgy. Further, it has been used as an excuse for chefs to wholesale rip off the culinary traditions of a culture, that is not theirs. However, at the heart of "fusion" food is the globalized world in its most beautiful form. A jumbled mix of flavors, techniques and ingredients being shared, combined to create something, new and unique to itself. There are many great (and not so great) examples of fusion food in the United States, but in Houston a truly great new form of food has become massively popular, Viet Cajun. The cuisine has been developing below the radar for a few decades now, as the Vietnamese community in around Houston gained prominence. Viet Cajun crawfish is really the signature dish of the emerging cuisine. It differentiates itself from Cajun style in a few ways, mainly the Viet-style crawfish are defined by the spices and herbs added aft...

Potstickers with puerco pibil with pineapple salsa This time I veered away from comparing things, and decided to look into how different food cultures combine and intermingle to create something new and unique. My  story  features how  the food of China town in Mexicali, the capital of Mexico's Baja California, inspired one of Los Angeles hottest new restaurants. The chef John Sedlar was inspired by the amazing food he found, and decided to shift his restaurants focus to this specific cuisine. Sedlar decided to change his ingriedients, and his cooking methods so he and his team could transform traditional Mexican dishes with Chinese ingredients and techniques. The result is what many call fusion, but Sedlar seems to take offense to that notion, instead insisting he is recreating an established tradition in Mexicali. There is a long history of Chinese influence in Mexico that started around 450 years ago, when Spanish traders aboard the "Manila Galleons", b...