Netflix and cry
Living our worth can be a recipe for "weird"
Ever cry watching Netflix? I don’t think I ever have until I was watching a new Netflix show entitled Street Food USA. Surprised? I know I was.
Street Food USA tours American cities searching for street food specialties in a particular place. It seems to try to answer the question, What defines a city’s food?
As I was drooling over all the fantastic food featured, I ran straight into a tear-jerking reminder of the importance of valuing ourselves as we engage the world.
In the episode in Portland, Oregon, viewers are introduced to a young Asian restauranteur. Thuy Pham runs Mama Dut. ‘Dut’ means ‘feed’ in Vietnamese, and the name Mama Dut comes from a phrase her daughter Kinsley would say when she was a hungry toddler. “Mama, feed!” or Mama Dut! Adorable right?
Pham came to America as a refugee with her mother in the 80s. It’s a raw story of escaping south Vietnam with her mom in a fishing boat at two years old. When she eventually went to school here, she did what she could to fit in—unfortunately, fitting in meant trading much of her Vietnamese culture for her new American one.
Hamburgers and hotdogs were the order of the day for 1980’s Pacific Northwest kids, who would ask questions when Thuy opened her lunch. “Who brought smelly food?” She knew what they meant.
The ‘smelly’ lunch of fermented cabbage called kimchi and flavor-filled noodles her mother had lovingly packed soon went straight into the garbage daily. Thuy says, “Going hungry was much easier than not belonging.”
Let me read that again: Going hungry was much easier than not belonging.
And that’s where the misty eyes started for me. We all want to belong. It’s a deep fundamental desire for all humans. We need community, connection, and acceptance. But if our sense of worth is vulnerable, we will collapse around ourselves to get them.
I thought how Thuy’s lunch tossing was sometimes like a lot of our lived experience. I think we will take the love-filled bundle of ourselves, the nourishing inner value, and throw it out to have the momentary acceptance of the fickle, watching world. In the face of potential rejection, we deny who we are, go hungry in our souls, to belong — it’s just easier.
How many of us have made ourselves small to fit in? Or negated a part of ourselves, drawn ourselves in, to become what passes for normal?
The goal of fitting in or passing for normal has cruelly vague standards. Being normal and fitting in can be an assortment of shifting, foggy ideas, yet they can be our bullies.
Let me turn the tables on ‘normal.’ If you’ve felt harassed or challenged by the task of being ‘normal,’ let me say: Normal has fallen on hard times. Normal’s results? They aren’t great. The proverbial phrase: That’s how things work, might well be challenged by saying, “maybe they shouldn’t.”
Take, for example, pulp-free orange juice. I never knew about its existence until the early nineties. The world only offered pulp-filled juice. Aren’t you glad things changed? Oh no, I like pulp! Ok, weirdo. My point stands.
Thuy’s story is one of triumph as she now has a wildly successful brick-and-mortar restaurant. Of which she says:
“I wanted to create an unapologetic love letter to the Vietnamese kid who had to throw away her lunch because she was being made fun of.”
The poet Atticus says:
We will never get back the life we waste trying to be normal.
Mary Oliver has written that “the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around but forward,” which is something different from the ordinary or normal.
Living short of our worth will lead us to serve the normal, the expected direction, the inertia of all things. We’ll try to give way to the steady, reliable spinning of everyone’s expectations instead of stamping our own, separate, lovingly created uniqueness on the days we live.
This isn’t a call to go out of our way to be odd, but rather a call to live authentically. To live authentically whether it passes for normal or not. Whatever normal even is. Hopefully, it’s not tossing out a flavor-packed lunch of healthy, fermented goodness that years later has people in Portland lined around the block to buy.
Be well Feral Souls.