I Do Not Like Crab Rangoon

Some fragmented thoughts on American dumplings, authenticity and appropriation, markers of identity, loathing and longing, and stunning almost-Vietnamese cuisine

Apr 18, 2024

Thursday, April 18
Grand Rapids, Mich.

Crab Rangoon is one of my least-favorite dishes of all time.

I have eaten one bite of crab Rangoon in my entire life. Perhaps the context doomed the dish for me: July 2011, Topeka, Kansas. After a long day of interviewing members of Westboro Baptist Church (yes, that Westboro), my friends who had accompanied me on the reporting trip mentioned a craving for Chinese food. I must have been weak or delirious—maybe both. I said, “Yes.”

We found a near-empty restaurant with fraying carpets, sad lanterns hanging in the corners, and a proprietor who seemed surprised to have an actual Chinese customer. We slid into a booth. Once the Mandarin-speaking proprietor and I had established that we didn’t speak the same dialect—where exactly does every Chinese mom learn that same disappointed shoulder slump, that same dismayed sigh?—my friends and I got on with the work of ordering. One of them insisted on crab Rangoon.

A plate of what looked like fried wonton appeared soon afterward, accompanied by a fluorescent-orange sauce. I took a small bite of the dumpling; it tasted like sorrow and regret. I had sinned against my people, and my body knew it. The exterior—crisp, hot, and fresh from the fryer—was fine; it was that gooey, strangely sweet mixture of cream cheese and “crabmeat” within that triggered a gag reflex. It took all my willpower not to spit it out.

Ever since we moved to Grand Rapids, I’ve lurked in a Facebook group about local food. Every so often, someone will pop in and request recommendations for Chinese restaurants. I’m no longer surprised by what happens next. Inevitably, someone will praise their favorite Chinese restaurant—and then they will gush about the crab Rangoon. Every single time, I bristle. Every single time, I remember Kansas.

Crab Rangoon has never been Chinese. From the outside, it looks Chinese. But that filling? It belongs on a bagel, not in a Chinese dumpling.

Cheese is uncommon in modern Chinese cuisine. It wasn’t always so; in medieval times, cheese was featured in some regional Chinese cuisines, but for unclear reasons, it faded from popularity. As a young kid, I only knew three types of cheese: Polly-O string cheese, whatever cheese was on pizza, and the government cheese that my grandmother got for free in five-pound blocks (she kept in the freezer, and if I had a craving for cheese, she’d hack off a piece with her cleaver and hand it to me).

“Rangoon” isn’t Chinese either. It’s an archaic name for Burma’s capital. But crab Rangoon isn’t Burmese either. It’s a purely American dish, believed to have been invented by Victor Bergeron, proprietor of the tiki bar Trader Vic’s, during the post-World War II craze for “exotic” cuisine.

Crab Rangoon is now ubiquitous on American Chinese menus. This forces me to admit that most Chinese restaurants exist not to uphold some imaginary notion of culinary fidelity or to expand the palate; they’re businesses that survive by giving the diner what they want—and what they want is often crab Rangoon. Frederick Buechner once wrote that “the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” I don’t know about the world, but apparently Americans have a deep hunger for crab Rangoon, and American Chinese restaurateurs have gladly met them there.

“Chinese Restaurant,” Theodore Wores, 1884, oil on canvas. From the collection of the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California

My parents often help out at their friend Stephen’s American Chinese restaurant. After hours and on holidays, Stephen will cook the food that he and my parents prefer: hand-pulled noodles, stewed beef tendon, a whole duck poached in water seasoned with little more than salt and Sichuan peppercorn. But the restaurant’s patrons are overwhelmingly non-Chinese. None of these dishes appear on the menu.

My mother is an excellent cook. Not once in my entire childhood did her kitchen produce a crab Rangoon. But now, ahead of especially busy days, Stephen will send my mom home with all the ingredients to make hundreds of crab Rangoon. Recently, she told me that she was making a meal for (non-Chinese) friends: fried rice, fried wonton... and crab Rangoon.

In her book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, the journalist Jennifer 8. Lee confronts the cultural intermingling embodied not just in the American Chinese food she loves but also in her American-born Chinese self. Traveling in China, she repeatedly tells people that she is American. They repeatedly reply: “No, you’re Chinese. You were just born in America.” “Maybe the same thing was true of Chinese food back home. It’s Chinese. It just happened to be born in America,” she writes. “Or maybe the truth was closer to this: It’s American. It just looks Chinese.”

This isn’t really about crab Rangoon. The hapless dumpling is just a convenient symbol. Beneath my loathing is longing: for my people and our traditions to be recognized; for our culture to be respected; for my people to be embraced for who we actually are, not just for how we can please the American palate.

Last week, as I scrolled through Instagram, I came across a provocative post from the French writer Edouard Louis. In a few brief paragraphs, he punctured extremely common notions of identity, asking profound questions about ownership and belonging. Louis is unapologetically leftist, and he sees so much of the current discourse about identity as being disappointingly conservative.

The impetus for his full missive, which was published in Jacobin: Not long ago, he received a letter from a theater director who wanted to stage an adaptation of one of Louis’s works. Louis is gay. His sexuality is integral to his storytelling. The director, who is straight, wondered whether it would be “legitimate” for him to bring one of Louis’s stories to the stage.

Louis seemed utterly unbothered by the director’s lack of personal experience with the story. “Experience is not truth. It can be a source, it can help, but it’s never a guarantee,” he wrote. What mattered more than the director’s identity were his motives, his methods, and his results. “So, the question is never who is talking, but what they are saying,” he continued. “It’s about the content.... Are you saying something that helps gay people or something that insults them? Are you saying something that can help working-class people or something that makes them more invisible? Are you saying something that gives them weapons or something that reproduces their situation of oppression?”

Louis didn’t stop there—and this is, to me, where his argument got especially interesting. “People who think about identity as something that belongs only to a certain group of people... talk about identity as a little private property—my house, my car, my purse, my identity, my queerness,” he said. “This is a mistake. My identity doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to you as much as it belongs to me. My homosexuality is not something I own, so anyone can talk about it—again, the only question is what people say about it, rather than who is talking.”

When we speak of identity, we can either do it in the spirit of illumination and invitation or we can draw harder lines and build more distance.

As I read Louis’s letter, I’ve thought back to the many times people have used markers of identity against me. They’ve said, occasionally to my face but more often behind my back, that I am insufficiently queer. For some people, I’m too Christian, and for others, not Christian enough; for some, too liberal, and for others, not liberal enough. Then there was the Asian student-group leader at Princeton Seminary who pulled me aside after a public forum at which I’d said something he found unacceptably confrontational. “That is not how our people speak,” he said, reprimanding me for bringing the seminary’s Asian community into disrepute.

As I read Louis’s letter, I realized, too, that I’ve often used “authenticity” as a claim to legitimacy, and not even just legitimacy but also ownership. I’ve seen what’s Chinese as “mine,” appointing myself a cultural gatekeeper. I’ve circled the cultural wagons because I have feared erasure. I’ve felt possessive because I have felt dispossessed—of belonging, of recognition, of respect, of ease.

Problem is, this is at odds with how I wish to show up in the world. Having experienced identity as a weapon, I’ve used it myself. I have let my fear of being misunderstood overshadow my courage simply to be who I am—and to let others be who they are. I have not been as openhearted as I would like to believe.

At the heart of Louis’s argument is an expansive view of society and self that I find both chastening and appealing. Even as he holds fiercely to his vision of justice, he has a spacious way of looking at the world. He rejects superficial purity tests in favor of a hospitable posture that points us toward deeper healing. Enough with the gatekeepers. Enough with the scarcity models that underlie the inflexible labels. Enough with the fixation on what is mine and what is yours. Enough with narrow views of identity and ownership.

Do we live this life in a spirit of solidarity or one of selfishness? Are our ideas truly and deeply liberative, or do we settle for the veneer of freedom? Do we move through the world with an ever-greater sense of mutuality and possibility, or will we remain stuck in jealous tribalisms that have never fostered flourishing? Can I rest in my own belovedness, my own God-given worth, enough to let gratitude fuel grace?

I don’t know, but I do know this: We can become so distracted by what we loathe that we lose sight of what we love.

There’s another layer of grief to all this.

Except in conversation with my parents and the rare occasion when I’m in a Chinese restaurant, I rarely speak Cantonese anymore, and my proficiency in my first language is fading. For various reasons—some political, some personal—my ties to Hong Kong are weakening. Crab Rangoon represents something I have never wanted to become: something that looks Chinese on the outside but is anything but on the inside.

My own narrow-mindedness, my own struggle to accept change, my own refusal to accept the ways in which my identities evolve, startles me. There is no one way to be authentically Chinese, no one way to be legitimately queer, no one way to be truly American. We do adore our little boxes, though, with their tidy labels, and even as we furnish them to keep ourselves comfortable and tell ourselves that we’re safe, it’s so hard to admit that we are actually building prisons with ever-higher walls.

There’s a line in Louis’s brief missive to the theater director that I’ve been turning over in my heart: “I’m sure you are willing to say emancipatory things.” Louis meant it in a particular context, but I am going to appropriate it (he believes, after all, in what he calls “positive appropriation”) and reframe it for mine.

Perhaps the emancipatory thing that I want to be willing to say is that the identity that I most wish to live into is that of a decent, generous human.

Perhaps the emancipatory thing that I want to be willing to say is that I will spend less energy judging others and put more effort toward being the kind of person I wish to encounter—curious and compassionate, loving and kind.

Perhaps the emancipatory thing that I want to be willing to say is that I will one day eat a crab Rangoon with gladness.

What I’m Eating: Tristan and I spent last weekend in Denver, where we attended our friend Nadia’s wedding to her dear Eric. (Let me tell you: It is a true friend who agrees to preach your ordination six days before her own wedding.) We were only in Denver for about 48 hours, but that was enough time for a few excellent meals: tacos at a hole in the wall called Taqueria La Familia; good coffee at Middle State and Blue Sparrow, with outstanding pastries from Hearth Bakery at the latter; a very fine breakfast at Fox and the Hen, whose chef, Carrie Baird, was one of my favorite contestants on season 15 of Top Chef.

The highlight: Sắp Sửa, which was a James Beard award semifinalist for best new restaurant in America this year. Its proprietors, Ni and Anna Nguyen, describe it as a “non-traditional Vietnamese restaurant.” “Sắp sửa” is a Vietnamese phrase that means “on the verge of,” “almost,” or “about to be.” And the emancipatory thing that its chefs are willing to do is to play with their food, pushing the boundaries of Vietnamese cuisine and exploding our stereotypes.

So you’ll see the word “phở” on the menu, but you shouldn’t expect a bowl of noodle soup, because it isn’t. And while many of us think of bánh mì as a sandwich, the Nguyens remind us that it is also Vietnamese for “wheat bread.” Sắp Sửa’s bánh mì cà chua is a thick slice of toast topped with roasted tomato, soaked with tomato vinaigrette, and festooned with crispy shallots and fresh herbs.

I didn’t expect to like the bắp cải luộc, which literally means “boiled cabbage.” But after being boiled, this cabbage is then deeply charred, topped with anchovy breadcrumbs, and placed atop a wondrous condiment made of egg yolk, mayonnaise, fish sauce, and lemon. Gorgeous to look at, gorgeous to eat.

My favorite dish: a deceptively simple, oh-so-satisfying bowl of perfectly cooked rice topped with eggs soft-scrambled in brown butter and seasoned with fish sauce. (A fancier version includes trout roe.) I told Tristan that I could eat that every single day.

I’d love to know what you think about the questions of identity and authenticity that I’m wrestling with. Do you agree or disagree? Also, what have you been eating that is giving you delight?

Notes of a Make-Believe Farmer

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