#CALIFORNIA PIZZA KITCHEN FULL#
One hazy Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1997, though, my parents, my brother, and I were over at a family friend’s house - also immigrants from Hong Kong, but who had assimilated seamlessly, their English flawless, their kids costumed in sunflower baby doll dresses and bucket hats while I still wore full sweat suits decorated with cartoons. Instead, we wore hand-me-downs from cousins in Hong Kong and dined out exclusively at Chinese restaurants where my parents knew the staff - who would pinch my cheeks, tell me I was getting too fat, and then send out extra food anyway. The exercise, rather than affirming my identity, just made me want to be more like the white kids and second-generation Asian Americans at my school, who had easy access to the cultural touchpoints that felt far out of reach for me and the rest of my immigrant friends, like getting an allowance, going on vacations, having grandparents who lived in the same neighborhood, and eating out at McDonald’s. “Throw in some heat and now we’re all one! America is a giant melting pot!” my teacher explained as we all flailed inside the circle, bumping into each other. In fifth grade, my teacher drew a large chalk circle on the black asphalt, then told us to jump into the circle and run around, so that we were “mixing” together. The message drilled into us throughout elementary school, that America was a melting pot and we were all a part of it, only ingrained how fully I needed to assimilate. For a long time, my brother and I felt like we had a lot of American catching up to do. And while I grew up with a lot of Chinese friends in Torrance, their parents been educated in the West. My whole life mimicked how it would have been if we had grown up in Hong Kong, albeit within the spacious environs of a California suburb.
I was born and raised in Torrance, an LA suburb just 10 minutes from the beach, but the Beach Boys never had a song about the way our house looked: The entryway was bordered by two calligraphy scrolls, and during Chinese New Year celebrations, we had a table dedicated to our ancestors whose legs buckled under the weight of oranges, red paper envelopes, and sweets. While the setting was slightly out of my parents’ comfort zone, it was pure California to me - the California I lived in but, as a child of immigrants, never felt like I belonged in, except at California Pizza Kitchen. While my mother pored over the photo, pleased that an American restaurant was using ingredients she was familiar with, I stared at the BBQ Chicken pizza, slathered with a gloopy, taupe sauce and sprinkled with red onions, then took in everything else: the beach-montage walls that separated the airy space from the rest of the mall, the blond waiters who looked like they spent hours surfing, the palm trees in every corner. It was 1998, and my family was celebrating the beginning of the school year at California Pizza Kitchen. “They know that we like to eat here, so they have this on the menu.” The Thai Chicken pizza, with its orange carrot slivers and lush green herbs, rendered in near-neon, popped off of the menu. “See?” my mom said, pointing to a photo of a pizza topped with cilantro.