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In 1989, after the publication of her novel, The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan admitted, "there is this myth that America is a melting pot, but what happens in assimilation is that we end up deliberately choosing the American things - hot dogs and apple pie - and ignoring the Chinese offerings." (Wang 69) Tan's choice of food as the indicator of racial difference is significant, and it encapsulates a tension that plays out in the hyphenated lives of the AsianAmerican characters in her fiction. Nowhere is this sentiment more apparent than in her early short story, "Fish Cheeks," published in Seventeen Magazine in 1987. Tan's setting of Christmas for a traditional Chinese dinner, shared with the American boy on whom the protagonist, Amy, has a crush, emphasizes the girl's dual identity as an Asian American, a reality she is confronting head on. Although the story delivers a clear message to Asian American teenage girls to see beauty in their Asian features and celebrate their cultural heritage, the story is pervaded by an overwhelming sense of discomfort. Amy fears her guests will be repelled by the strange menu and offended by her elders' eccentricities at the dinner table. But her discomfort goes deeper, revealing anxieties about growing up and the struggles involved. These fears are amplified in one passage that contains a detailed description of raw ingredients in her mother's kitchen - piles of uncooked prawns, pale blocks of tofu, a slimy whole fish. This focus on rawness can be read as symbolic of Amy's own rawness and immaturity, recalling anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss's theories on the categories of the raw and the cooked. Just as cooking signals a shift from a more natural and primitive state to a more refined and cultured one, Amy experiences a shift of her own. What she undergoes is a rite of passage, prompted by a meal shared between two very different families.
Tan's short story - and it is short - a scant 500 words - uses food to show the striking differences between the Chinese hosts and their American guests. Although they gather on Christmas day to share a meal, this is no traditional Christmas dinner of "roasted turkey and sweet potatoes," (57) and the adolescent Amy fears...