Every family has its myths and stories, they constitute the family’s collective memory. It’s important to families to have stories that connect you to the ancestors and to each other. Immigrant families treat story-telling in different ways– either mythical “old country” parables that create a perfect world of tradition and beauty that has been lost, or else a void.
These last believe mostly in the new. “We left the old country and its myths behind”. My mother, my grandmother, and my mother-in-law subscribed to the leave-it-be school of immigrant story-telling. We have no old-country stories from these women. All of the stories of the Samioses and the Chins are new land tales, about what happened here in the country that they chose, rather than there in the country that they left. The only thing that really came with them was the food, so my husband and I know nothing almost about our immigrant heritage except how to eat.
So this is what we will pass to our children. I mourn the cultural subtleties we have lost, but there’s something about food that brings out the stories anyway.
I lured my daughter over here to make pastitio (recipe tomorrow), and of course, as one does, built up the wonderful revelatory, iconic interaction we were going to have. We’d share stories and be close, and we’d remember this forever and ever, plus I’d get a great blog post out of it.
But that’s not what happened at all. We just…cooked. We had an ordinary conversation. I remembered things about making pastitio that I forgot I knew, it’s so automatic to me. We got rushed at the last minute when she had to go to work and we hadn’t quite planned out the prep correctly. There was no revelation. There was no Kodak moment.
And that’s the point. Cooking just is. “Real” isn’t special. It’s just the ordinary things you do every day. Women in kitchens is iconic enough, without my ambitions gumming up the works.
Living about 500 miles away from my mother, things sometimes feel anticlimactic when our gatherings aren’t these phenomenal events that I’ll remember forever. Instead they’re always just as if we picked up where we left of last time we saw each other, but with maybe a few extra or fewer pounds and always an extra gray or two.
I think the magic really comes in when we remember our time together, and the stories that come along with those times.
Jen, the silly thing is that my daughter only lives about 3 miles away and we share a car, so I see her all the time and talk to her every day.