This cooking series is both playful and cathartic. Frankie Gow has come up with fun brand names and designs to match each meal.
Frankie Goh Hide Caption
Toggle caption Frankie Gow
Cheerios flavored with roasted sesame seeds. Pop tarts topped with strawberry lychee frosting. There’s also a lunch menu that includes fried pork bao, cucumber salad, and Yakult.
Frankie Gaw’s social media pages are full of videos of works like this. It’s a product you won’t typically find at your local American grocery store.
That’s the key, says Gau, a Taiwanese-American food creator and author of the cookbook First Generation.
“I asked myself, in a different world where the world is more inclusive and accepting of all these diverse flavors, what would Asian Americans want to see?” he said. .
Gau spoke to NPR about how his popular social media cooking series, “Turning American Classics Asian,” was born and its origins as a tribute to his family and Midwestern upbringing. .
The grocery store seemed stuck for time.
This idea was born after a trip to the local supermarket. As she walked through the aisles, Gow noticed that many of the foods on the shelves looked similar to what she saw as a child 20 years ago. Meanwhile, ingredients like soy sauce and miso were still categorized strictly in the “Asian” or “International” aisles.
“Restaurants are incorporating more Asian ingredients, but I feel like grocery stores haven’t changed,” Gau says.
For many immigrants and children of immigrants, food is an intimate part of their identity. For Gau, the straddle between the “Asian” aisle and the rest of the grocery store was also symbolic of his childhood in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Growing up, Gau felt like he was living a double life. Mr. Gow enjoyed McDonald’s chicken nuggets and fries in public. At home, I often ate beef noodle soup that my grandmother made. It took time for him to embrace his two-taste palette.
Years later, Gau began experimenting with his childhood favorites in his Seattle apartment. He played around with Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup and turned it into porridge. He infused miso into his mac and cheese. He even went so far as to design each meal’s packaging as if he were the owner of a food company.
Gau shared his concoction on social media. It took off. His food and grocery store experiences resonated with people, especially other Asian Americans.
“It was a surprise. I didn’t realize how many people had the same experience as me,” he said.
A love letter to my childhood self
By “transforming traditional American cuisine into an Asian one,” Gau is not only appreciating Asian flavors and ingredients or rejecting American staples. Instead, this is Gau’s way of paying homage to the Asian American experience on both sides, and on a larger scale.
“I’ve always straddled this kind of in-between space,” he said. “Growing up in the Midwest, I never felt fully Asian. But when I was around an Asian family, I never felt American enough. .”
He thinks if matcha-flavored Twinkies and strawberry-lychee Pop-Tarts had existed when Gau was younger, it would have helped him embrace the in-between experience.
“If I went to a typical American grocery store and saw mochi, I think I could break down the wall of, ‘Oh, this only exists in my house,'” he says. “And I could have existed as myself in the world.”
The project is also connected to his family and his time growing up in the Midwest.
Gau’s culinary journey and first cookbook was sparked by his father, who passed away from lung cancer in 2014. Revisiting the old dishes of her father and paternal grandmother was a way to ease her grief and keep her father’s memory alive, Gau said.
In this cooking series, he also reminisces about the time he spent with his mother. She is the reason Gau was able to enjoy Lunchables, Twinkies, and Pop-Tarts as a child. She wanted to see if he could fit in and make friends.
“My mom would stock the whole pantry with groceries, so when it came time for lunch, I was like the kid who had the best lunch in the cafeteria,” he said.
The project also stems from Gau’s Midwestern roots. In his neighborhood, restaurants were synonymous with fast food, and Olive Garden was the place to go for special occasions.
Gau said that as a child, he would often go to the McDonald’s drive-thru with his parents late at night because they were often exhausted from long hours at work. “It was a reminder of how hard they had to work,” he said.
Gau’s version of the Happy Meal involves steaming buns, mixing them with ground pork, green onions and ginger, and topping them with Chili Crunch ketchup.
As he cooks, he thinks about his father, mother, and grandparents and the comfort these dishes may have given them as they were adjusting to life in America.
“I think they always felt like they were invading from the outside. I think seeing their food in a fast food restaurant made them feel like they were sitting at the table,” he said. Said.
