I began teaching Amy Tan’s “Fish Cheeks” to high schoolers in 2018, and every year the story resonates with my students on a deep level. Tan so effectively touches on the universal teenage experience of feeling embarrassed by your family. My students relate to Amy’s despair towards her family’s customs and manners when sharing Christmas dinner with her crush, the white pastor’s son, and his family. But by the end of the story, they align more with Amy’s mother, who, through her food, demonstrates pride in her Chinese heritage. “You must be proud you are different,” Amy’s mother admonishes her after the meal has ended. “Your only shame is to have shame.”

The vast majority of my students are immigrants or the first generation of children born in the United States to immigrant parents. They carry deep pride in their culture and heritage, and they know firsthand the emotional weight that food carries and how it represents a lasting connection to home, family, and belonging. Tan’s story provides a rich opportunity to reflect on the importance of food as a key part of our identity. Its short length, robust imagery, and tight narrative structure serves as the perfect inspiration for the students’ own food-based personal narratives. 

To write of the foods that are important to us is to write of our loved ones, our homes, our past.

What makes this project so worthwhile is that stories about food are overwhelmingly ones of joy. Food is tied to some of our most cherished memories, and its remembrance can bring happiness even across distance, time, separation, or loss. To write of the foods that are important to us is to write of our loved ones, our homes, our past. 

Planning

Crafting a narrative as tightly-structured as “Fish Cheeks” requires clear and intentional planning. We begin the brainstorming process in class by listing as many foods as possible that we love and enjoy. I add foods that are near and dear to my own family so I can model each step for the students:

Then we dig a little deeper to narrow down our lists. We consider which foods are most meaningful to us, asking questions like, Is this food special to me because of who makes it? Does this food remind me of a familiar place? Is it special because it is part of my heritage or culture? This, I tell students, is where we uncover the story that our narrative will tell.

The students ultimately choose one food from their list as the fulcrum of their narrative. I select the cake made by my grandmother for every family member’s birthday.

Once the focus of their narrative has been selected, students begin collecting details about the Five W’s that will help structure their stories. This step of the writing process is crucial to help students feel equipped with the information they need to flesh out a draft. 

One of the strengths of “Fish Cheeks” is Tan’s use of vivid language to portray her family’s Chinese dishes. Teenaged Amy, viewing these foods through the lens of her white guests, describes a “slimy rock cod with bulging eyes” and “tofu, which looked like stacked wedges of rubbery white sponges.” The language Tan chooses to depict her mother’s dishes is intentionally repulsive: through the use of figurative speech and connotation, Tan sets up a surprise for the end when she reveals the repellant foods were prepared for that meal because they were her favorites. The “surprise twist” leads the students to carefully consider which words they’ll choose in writing about their own food and the specific effects those word choices will have on their readers.

My classes are a mixture of native and fluent English speakers and students whose English proficiency is still developing. Embedding speaking activities into the planning process helps all students better access and formulate their ideas while also expanding their vocabularies. To facilitate this, we complete an activity called New Ideas Only, in which students work in small groups to brainstorm as many words as possible to describe the birthday cake that my own food narrative is about. They focus on words that describe textures, flavors, the cake’s appearance, and details of where the cake might be served and eaten. For additional support, I provide word banks with descriptive words to choose from. 

Each group then shares one word from their brainstorm that hasn’t yet been provided by another group. We keep a running list on the board of all the descriptive words and use this as a jumping-off point for students to select sensory details and imagery to describe their own chosen food. 

As students complete a chart of sensory details describing their chosen dishes, I encourage them to look up pictures for a visual reference. Around the room, conversations bubble up between students from different countries sharing a love of baleadas and pupusas and trading questions about their native foods. This is one of my favorite parts of the project—circulating the room, listening to conversations, and sitting next to a student to say, “Tell me all about this.” Here, students often slip into their home language, reminiscing and connecting over their shared experiences. This ability to connect across food, identity, and culture strengthens the students’ connections to the people, places, and memories they will write about. 

After this extensive and valuable planning, students are ready to begin writing their drafts. Their food narrative is split into three paragraphs, each with a distinct purpose, and we go through them one at a time.

• First paragraph: introduces the person or place this food most reminds them of.
• Second paragraph: describes the dish using all the sensory details and imagery they brainstormed.
• Third paragraph: zooms in on a specific memory tied to the food and includes a reflection of what makes this food so memorable and meaningful.

First Paragraph

I show students my version of each paragraph to model one approach to structuring their own. Here are two example introduction paragraphs for my food narrative about my grandmother’s cake. One places her at the center, since this cake reminds me most of her, and one focuses on her backyard, the place I most associate with enjoying this traditional family food:

Suela L. chose to introduce her food narrative by placing readers with her family in the mountains of Albania:

I’ve always enjoyed the warm summer nights in my home country, Albania. Me and my family would lie beneath the beautiful sunsets upon the mountains as we heard the chickens and cows cluck and moo around the night. We lit a mini fire as we chatted the night away with one another. As my family chatted, the cows’ mood and chickens clucked like they understood and were taking part in our conversations. However, what really completed the enjoyable nights were my grandma’s speca te mbushur (stuffed peppers). Speca te mbusher isn’t just a traditional food I enjoy, it is a core memory I will pass on to my future children to give a perspective on how happiness is achieved through numerous other ways through family and the small moments.

Second Paragraph

The second paragraph introduces the food using the sensory details the students brainstormed to describe the visual, textural, olfactory, auditory, and gustatory elements of their special food. Here is an example I provide students that describes my grandmother’s cake. As a class, we identify and highlight examples of figurative language and imagery in my paragraph so that students can envision ways they could incorporate these elements into their own writing:

Jeison Z. chose to write about the coffee that his father makes every morning before work: 

Although the coffee my dad makes is as basic as a child’s reading book, I see it as a very complimentary drink to the breakfasts I eat, the last piece needed to finish the puzzle. The smoothness of the liquid makes it easy to digest as well the warmth it gives me during a cold morning. Some mornings my dad switches up the bitter and strong black coffee with sweet,warm, and calming milk coffee.

Third Paragraph

In Tan’s narrative, her mother’s Chinese dishes are a key part of a childhood event whose emotional impact and life lesson lasted long after the dinner ended. Inspired by this structure, the final paragraphs of the student narratives depict a clear memory that features the students’ food and a reflection of what makes it so important to them. To illustrate this, I show students a picture of a time my grandmother made her traditional birthday cake in an unusual way:

Already familiar with the cake from the planning phase, students immediately recognize and name all the ways in which this cake is different. Then I flesh out a brief recollection of this time:

Similar to my example, Nailea C.’s grandmother once unexpectedly changed a beloved classic: 

One of my favorite memories of her cooking was during a family visit to Bolivia. We had all gathered at my relatives house, and, like always, my grandmother wanted to make pupusas for everyone. Normally, she made a mix of flavors, but my favorite had always been the cheese pupusas. This time, though, when I looked at the tray, I realized they were all filled with beans and meat with no cheese at all. I was surprised because she always separated them so we’d know which ones to grab. I won’t lie, I was a little disappointed, but I still ate one because I knew she had made them with love.

To end their narratives, students are asked to conclude with a deeper consideration: what makes this food so integral to their memories and identity? Beyond the ingredients and the preparation, what does this food represent to them? Why is it important to them? We explore the personal meaning that my grandmother’s cake holds for me first:

In this section of the narrative, students’ familial and cultural bonds shine through. For Edwin S., panes con pollo remains a vital connection to his parents’ home country:

Although I’ve had many different styles of Panes con Pollo , none of them have the same taste like the ones that my mother’s side of the family prepares. I’ve always had Panes con Pollo every holiday or birthday, and they are significant to me because it’s part of my family’s background and culture. It brings me closer to my culture to my parent’s sweet country of El Salvador.

At the end of this unit, students have written a narrative that allows them to share their memories of family, culture, and heritage through the food they love most. In “Fish Cheeks,” teenaged Amy is reminded of her love for her culture after experiencing shame of her family’s traditional foods, but today’s students exult in the way foods such as speca te mbushur, dulce de leche, tacos al pastor, bolsani, pupusas, bun bo hue, and ayimolu represent their unique heritage. The lesson that Amy’s mother shares at the end of the story is one they carry and share through their words and memories: “you must be proud.” They are proud.

Featured photo by Alex Bayev on Unsplash.