During our early years in America, my family, like all “good” immigrants, made many attempts to blend in. Food was the most accessible avenue, and so we went down it . . . or at least tried to, but the so-called American dream of assimilation tasted terrible. The worst was the time when we saved up for months to treat ourselves to fresh lobsters from Maine and realized Americans boiled their lobster. Boiled!!! we cried in astonishment to each other. To Chinese people, boiling your food was about as impressive as pouring water into a glass. It was something a child could do blindfolded. It was what you did if you were ever in the position to serve dinner to your enemy. It was like kicking dirt into the air and saying, Here you go, enjoy.
But we made an exception for Sizzler. This was the early nineties, during Sizzler’s heyday, when it aired commercials targeted at the segment of the population who wanted to have three-course meals but could only afford Cup Noodles, a.k.a. people like my family. Sizzler embodied the very essence of America—that even the poor could be greedy, overstuffed even, as they filled themselves on endless plates of food. At Sizzler, flavor and skill were beside the point, as the point was to eat as much food as possible. For my parents—who were born into a decade-long famine that killed somewhere between thirty-six and forty-five million people, who were so malnourished as children that they would sometimes eat expired plain flour fried in oil that had been reused dozens of times for sustenance, and who were unable to grow hair on their arms and legs even after the famine ended—for them, the phrase “all you can eat” was intoxicating. It was like being told: anyone could win the lottery! The concept was unheard-of for people like my parents who grew up in China, where there was never enough to eat. My father was the first to try it after being taken there by some colleagues from work. The next weekend, he took my mother and me to try it, and from that point on, we were hooked.
It was $5.99 for the all-you-can-eat salad bar and $7.99 for a steak dinner, and because I was so small I qualified for the even more reduced children-ten-and-under pricing. At those prices, and with the buffet selection, which included an ice-cream-sundae bar, we could tolerate any amount of underseasoning or oversteaming. My father would always order the steak dinner, and my mother and I would get the salad bar buffet, the scam being that, in the end, there was nothing stopping all three of us eating from the salad bar. As long as my father kept his plate of steak at the table, we felt free to bring plate after plate back, heaping with chicken wings, french fries, rubbery filets of unidentifiable white fish covered in a mustardy, buttery sauce, spaghetti and meatballs, macaroni and cheese, every permutation of raw vegetables and salad dressing, ice-cream sundaes with whipped cream, fudge, caramel, sprinkles, and chocolate chips. It was at the Sizzler salad bar and buffet that I was finally permitted to try Jell-O and realized, to my great disappointment, that it was horrible. It was at the Sizzler salad bar and buffet that I became addicted to shrimp scampi, a dish that bore no affinity to the flavor or texture of the fresh shrimp I was used to having in Chinese restaurants and at home. This kind of shrimp was merely a vessel for butter and parsley. It was at Sizzler that my father developed a taste for sirloin steak, medium rare, and my mother discovered she liked ranch dressing. Sometimes the two of them would hover by the salad bar and wait for the next batch of king crab legs, a hot commodity that lasted exactly a minute before it was all scooped up. My parents were hell-bent on eating as much king crab legs as possible. Anything that expensive, we’d eat. Whether it tasted good or not didn’t matter; all that mattered was that we ate double, triple, and quadruple what we paid for. We’d eat until our bellies were distended, until even the last notch on our belt was too constrictive. We’d walk laps around the salad bar for ten minutes to speed up digestion so we could eat more. Once, when my grandparents from Shanghai were living with us for six months, we took them to Sizzler, and my grandfather, so overwhelmed and giddy at being presented with the concept of all-you-can-eat, ate until he had to vomit, then came back and proudly declared, “Now I can eat more!” It was a marathon sport for us, it made us feel like we had beat the system. “We’ve earned it all back,” my mother would say, beaming after polishing off her tenth plate of food.
In our early years, the kind of American food that was accessible to my family, who had come over to New York by way of Shanghai in the late eighties and struggled at the edge of the poverty line, was fast food and the occasional TGI Fridays–type establishment where the cost of a meal would have been exorbitant if it weren’t for a family friend or two who moonlit as waiters and slid us free appetizers and drinks. Neither were worthy competitors against the Chinese food my parents cooked at home. Sizzler, however, was the exception. It appealed to my parents’ thriftiness, and it appealed to their desire to embrace the American fantasy that there was plenty to go around for everyone!
As my family started to become upwardly mobile, our trips to Sizzler became less and less frequent. It was no longer satisfying to eat until we wanted to puke; it no longer felt like we were robbing the restaurant of its profits; it felt instead like we were robbing ourselves of health, comfort, taste. Like all things too good to be true in our consumer-capitalist society, the quality of food went down as the prices went up. Eventually, in 1996, Sizzler went bankrupt and closed a ton of restaurants. Around the same time, my family moved out of the mostly Asian and Central American immigrant enclave in Queens to a far wealthier, majority-white suburb on Long Island, where there weren’t any Chinese supermarkets or restaurants serving the kind of Chinese food we knew and loved. The white kids in my school mocked me whenever I brought Chinese food in for lunch. Just as my family placed American food on the lowest of rungs, the white kids I encountered did the same with Chinese food—it was too oily; it produced the kind of flatulence that shook heaven and earth; it had primitive flavor profiles; it was unhealthy. Everything we thought about American food was mirrored back to us with regards to our food. The Chinese food I grew up eating was so abundant, varied, fresh, light, bursting with flavor, and yet somehow always cheaper than American food. This is what I knew, but at my new school, I had no allies to back me up on my claims. My classmates mostly ate greasy Chinese take-out that had no resemblance to the Chinese food we ate at home or in restaurants. Whenever my family went to Chinese restaurants in our mostly white neighborhood, the Chinese restaurant owners would apologize profusely in advance for catering to American tastes. “That’s how they like it,” the owner would say, shaking his head while we waited for our order—“slathered in flour, drowning in MSG, and deep-fried. That’s what these people want.”
Over time my parents eventually developed a gag reflex against “American” food. The sight of a chicken breast made my father queasy, whereas my mother became unilaterally opposed to white food, as in food that was literally the color white. With the exception of white rice, my mother could no longer tolerate any and all white-colored foods—mashed potatoes, cream of broccoli soup, Alfredo sauce, even her once-favorite ranch dressing was now repulsive. As for me, I still craved, from time to time, that garlicky, buttery shrimp scampi, picking it out of the linguine, since carbs had to be avoided at all costs when partaking in a Sizzler’s buffet (they filled you up too quickly and were a waste of money). Even more, I continued to dream of drinking fruit punch that tasted like bubble gum—two things that were so all-American, whereas I was so not. Constantly, I was reminded of how not all-American I was. From the way my eyelids looked, to the way my last name sounded, to the way the back of my head sloped, to the dances I wasn’t allowed to go to, to the homes of my classmates that I wasn’t permitted to hang out in—and even if my parents had let me, no one was inviting me anyway. I was a lonely, strange teen who lived mostly in the past and the future, as both were more romantic than the present.
The loneliness of being different turned out to be more than bearable, it spurred an interest in wanting to learn about the deep roots of racism and xenophobia in this country, and anyway, adolescence ultimately did not scar me,
but fortified me. Though there wasn’t much that could penetrate my teen angst during those years, I do remember one particularly low evening, when I couldn’t wait for time to go any faster, when all I wanted was to skip forward in time, when I was in the back seat of my parents’ car, driving through Queens, and we drove past the Sizzler on Northern Boulevard, abandoned and lifeless, but still with the old sign intact. Seeing it again, the part of my brain that felt pleasure and joy lit up like crazy, remembering how when we pulled into the parking lot, the three of us would become ebullient, knowing that we were about to have the most special of nights—a night when we could eat like a bunch of sloppy Americans and come home, happy and in pain, vowing to never do it again, knowing we would surely do it again.
Bambadjan Bamba is an actor, filmmaker, and immigrant activist. He is the proud son of Ivorian immigrants.
Bambadjan Bamba
WHEN I WAS TEN years old, in the winter of 1992, my family moved to the South Bronx from Côte d’Ivoire in West Africa. For my family, moving to America meant falling from upper-middle class to poverty. Back then, my pops was a high-level banker and we were “balling.” We lived in the best neighborhood in Abidjan, we attended posh French private schools and spent Christmas Eve at the Hotel Ivoire ice-skating rink. Yep, ice skating in Africa. Imagine that! When I landed in the cold concrete jungle that is the South Bronx, nothing could have prepared me for the brutal culture shock I was about to experience. We lived about a mile away from Yankee Stadium. Right off the 167th Street stop on the 4 train. It was the hood but a step above the projects. It was a predominantly Puerto Rican, Dominican, African-American, and African community. This was pre-Giuliani era, so you could get robbed for your sneakers and MetroCard just walking down the block. Not speaking a lick of English and having a name like Bambadjan Bamba definitely didn’t help.
My first day of school at James McCune Smith P.S. 200 was probably the worst day of my life. The only advice or warning I was given by my pops was “Il ne faut pas te battre sinon tu va en prison.” Translation: “Don’t get into a fight or else you will go to jail.” It was the first week of January in 1993, right after the winter break. I was three weeks shy of my eleventh birthday, which meant I belonged in the fifth grade, but I ended up in the fourth—probably because my parents didn’t speak English either. But that one little mistake made me lie about my age throughout all of grade school. I didn’t want my friends to think that I was left back a grade and therefore I was stupid. I was the biggest people pleaser in the world, but we will get to that later.
If getting left back wasn’t bad enough, I was thrown in a Spanish ESL class because that was all there was for someone like me. The school was primarily African-American, Puerto Rican, and Dominican kids. The only other French-speaking person in the entire school was a kid named Alpha, who was from another African country. The teacher called him from his class and asked him to hang with me the entire day to show me the ropes. When I met him, he seemed thrown off by my excitement, but I was hyped because I wasn’t the only African kid anymore. Alpha was going to help me figure this whole thing out. I started asking him mad questions. When I spoke French to him, he responded in monosyllables as if he wasn’t proud of speaking French. I’d say, “Why are the kids in class coloring and not learning multiplication tables?” He just shrugged. I kept the questions coming. “Why are there police officers in the school?” And “Where the heck are all the white kids?” He just shrugged again and said, “Je sais pas.” Translation: “I don’t know.” Then I asked him how to ask the teacher to go to the bathroom. He told me to raise my hand and say, “Kiss my ass.” Not only did I raise my hand, but I also stood up like we did in Côte d’Ivoire and said, with the thickest African accent you can imagine “Kiss. My. Ass.” The entire class was on the floor rolling, including Alpha, who couldn’t contain himself. The teacher got a bit stern with him and the entire class and said, “Bambadjan needs everybody’s help to adjust.” Yeah right! Then, the bell rang and all the kids jetted out of class, just like in Saved By the Bell. The teacher told Alpha to escort me to the bathroom and then to the cafeteria for lunch.
Of course he tried to lead me to the girls’ bathroom, but I didn’t fall for that one, because I saw the pictures on the doors. He was having the time of his life misleading the FOB (fresh off the boat) African kid. What he didn’t know was that I had a reputation for being a trickster in Abidjan, but since I promised my parents I wouldn’t get into a fight and I didn’t want to go to jail, I played it cool. As we headed to the cafeteria I was so excited to have American food. Until then, all I had in Abidjan was our version of overmarinated French-style pizzas and hamburgers. The cafeteria looked and smelled like a hospital. There was nothing appetizing about the way the food was presented either. The food looked like it had been in the freezer forever. I chose lasagna, because it looked like spaghetti. I also got the cup of mixed fruit. For drinks, the only options were small red and brown cartons. I asked Alpha which one was sweet, and he told me the red carton. When we sat down to eat, I almost puked! The food had no taste at all. The lasagna was dry as hell, and the cheese inside smelled disgusting. The mixed fruit was slimy. How can people eat this? Alpha was laughing so hard he was almost crying. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the unsweetened, cold white milk. First of all, I couldn’t get the carton open! After trying a few times I just ripped it. Now, mind you, in Abidjan milk has to be warmed and sweetened before you drink it. As soon as the nasty cold milk hit my tongue I spit it out. It was almost like a gag reflex. Alpha was laughing out loud by now with tears in his eyes. That was it. I grabbed the chocolate milk off his tray, ripped it open, and tried it. It was sweet. I guzzled it down quickly. Alpha wasn’t laughing anymore. He took his tray and jetted outside in a fit of anger. I was actually smiling now, because I had finally given him a taste of his own medicine.
I didn’t see Alpha again until the final bell rang when school was letting out. When I got outside to the playground, kids were coming up to me telling me something about Alpha. I didn’t understand anything other than the word Alpha. I felt kind of bad and wanted to talk to him. Before I got to the exit I saw him with a group of kids behind him. “Alpha il y a quoi?” Translation: “What’s going on?” I tried to talk to him in French, but he pushed me back and started swinging. I was completely caught off guard, because I never imagined that he would go from zero to one hundred over chocolate milk. He kept swinging at me, and I kept backing up, trying to talk some sense into him. He wasn’t hearing it. We were surrounded by a crowd egging him on. I wasn’t used to boxing, because in Abidjan we would wrestle. I grabbed him and tried to hold him close, but he broke free and clocked me with a couple of good ones to the chin. My temper started to rise, but I couldn’t allow myself to fight back and get arrested. An officer stopped the fight, Alpha said a few things, and they let him go home, but I ended up in the principal’s office. I was upset because I couldn’t express myself, and I was scared because I thought I was going to end up in jail. Plus it was guaranteed that my pops was going to tear my ass up when we got home.
When my pops showed up, he was visibly angry. I did the one and only thing he told me not to do. I tried to explain to him how I didn’t fight back because he told me not to. He yelled in the most disappointed tone you could imagine. “La ferme!” Translation: “Shut up.” “Quand j’avais ton age, je ne laissais pas mes amis me frapper.” Translation: “When I was your age, I never let my friends beat me up.” That statement broke my heart. He disregarded the fact that I kept my word to him in the face of being ridiculed in front of the entire school. I guess he, too, was trying to teach me what he had to learn the hard way. In America, he didn’t have any family around, or a family village as a plan B in case it didn’t work out in the city. He went from traveling the world and making huge financial deals for the bank to driving people in a gypsy taxicab. He was alone in a new country with new rules and he was doing his best to provide for his family. He had enough on his min
d and didn’t have time for any additional unnecessary nonsense. Even Alpha was probably trying to take some heat off his back too. Now that I was here, he wasn’t the only African kid anymore. They say hindsight is twenty-twenty but in my ten-year-old mind I didn’t understand any of this. All I felt was betrayal from my pops and that I needed to teach Alpha a lesson.
The next couple of weeks in school were like breaking out of jail every day. After the final bell rang I had to run as fast as I could to catch the train because a mob was after me to jump me. I had become the punk African kid who didn’t fight back. They called me African booty scratcher and Kunta Kinte. They asked me if people wore clothes in Africa and if we slept in trees with monkeys. The jokes were never ending. I kept trying to figure out why it was mostly African-American kids I had the most beef with. I finally caught up with Alpha and actually kicked his behind, but beating Alpha down didn’t help me much because I was still African. Back then, being African made you a target. We didn’t have Akon, Idris Elba, or Black Panther. All people knew of Africa in the hood was Roots (the TV miniseries, not the band!), African safari programs on the Discovery channel, and charity ads about starving kids. Those ridiculous stereotypes about Africa were perpetuated everywhere you turned on television and in the movies. The way that dehumanization manifested in the minds of kids was that since Africa equals war, disease, and poverty, then being African made you an easy target for bullying.
My new MO was that if I was to survive in this new world, I had to learn English and be as American as possible. My solution was to watch a lot of television. I would not miss an episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Gargoyles, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Family Matters, and Martin. Those television shows were instrumental in the beginning—especially for learning what was cool in America and what wasn’t. For example, being smart made you a dork. I couldn’t understand the logic. Dumb guys were popular and got all the girls. It was the complete opposite in Abidjan. There, it was a ranking system, and if you were last in class you were humiliated.
American Like Me Page 4
