With Jade Snow trials to assimilate into mainstream culture, she still finds it difficult for a member of racial minority to be accepted by the discriminatory dominant society. Therefore,she manipulates food as a critical medium for acculturation to represent a “hyphenated American identity that is informed by ancestral roots in Asia and complicated by American national loyalities”(Ann Ho, 3). Like many Ethnic American protagonists whose “relationship to food represent their struggle to embrace an American identity, forcing them to acknowledge their bi-or multi-cultural status as hyphenated peoples in a country that historically has dealt with race in black and white terms”(Ann Ho, 3), Jade Snow expresses her strong interest in food as her acceptance ticket into the American society and to represent the ambivalence that she is struggling with to balance her Chinese and American-born Chinese identities. She concentrates on the connotation of Chinese food and meals. Consumption of food, as well as the creation of recipes, become a critical means for Jade Snow to create a pristine dual identity or what W.E.B. DuBois's calls“double consciousness”(20). S.Qiao explains that “foodways provide people, such as …show more content…
Wong admits that she “could take pleasure in rediscovering the Chinese community only after she was moving with confidence in the Western world”(Wheeler, 124). She succeeds in idealizing the past and reinterpreting the present under the former's light.“The title of a chapter in Wong's book, 'Rediscovering Chinatown', aptly epitomizes one way American-born Chinese may make peace with their cultural background in the face of intense assimilative pressure: to return to one's ethnic heritage with selective enthusiasm, reassessing once-familiar (and once despised) sights and sounds according to their acceptability to white tastes” (Cynthia