EPISODE 55: MY CHINESE PARENTS DON'T UNDERSTAND VEGETARIANISM

Sep 24

Takeaways

Being vegetarian and vegan is really difficult when you’re coming from an Asian family - especially from a traditional Chinese family. Eating meat is a luxury and so not eating meat is seen as a very weird thing.

In this episode of Fck Saving Face podcast, I share my story of struggles encountered when I was shifting my diet to become vegan and how the culture of where I came from is a big factor of these struggles.

This episode is also an introduction of Wednesday’s interview with Chi Pham so don’t miss this episode.

We also cover:

Transcript:

Judy Tsuei 0:06

Welcome to the F*ck Saving Face podcast. I'm your host, Judy Tsuei, and together we'll explore mental and emotional health for Asian Americans, especially breaking through any taboo topics. Life may not always be pretty, but it is indeed beautiful. Let's make your story beautiful today.

Judy Tsuei 0:22

Alrighty. Season One is getting ready to wrap up. And there are a few more exciting interviews that are in queue, as well as a bunch that are recorded and ready to go and scheduled for season two. So I hope you will continue to tune in.

Judy Tsuei 0:38

We're going to wrap up this season with this week we'll be talking about a feature triathlete who is also plant based and works for Google to create this health equity initiative.

Judy Tsuei 0:48

We'll be talking with a trauma therapist who works with the Red Cross, and really helps us understand you know that you can go through your trauma with a capital T, or a trauma with a lowercase t and how to manage that, as well as a ketamine therapist. So a doctor who administers ketamine therapy as a way to break through repetitive PTSD and stress and conditions mental and emotional health challenges that are really difficult to break through when it comes to other healing modalities.

Judy Tsuei 1:19

They're going to be really informative and insightful interviews that I hope you experienced this kind of expanded consciousness and can share with your friends if you find that relates, or just simply understanding that there are so many ways in which we can become healthy, thriving human beings. And if it works for you, great, you can let it fit. And if it doesn't work for you, then you can just let it float on by.

Judy Tsuei 1:44

For this week, we will be interviewing Chi Pham. You can go to her Instagram and find all of the incredible races that she's participated in. She was living on Hawaii when we were having our conversation and really goes through and talks about what it was like for her Vietnamese parents who emigrated over to the US how that impacted her as pursuing and becoming an endurance athlete and you know, developing a body shape that wasn't what was considered traditionally feminine or beautiful.

Judy Tsuei 2:17

If you do go to her Instagram at fit_pham, to say that she's representing diversity in sports, she competes an Ironman triathlons, and that she works as a UX designer at Google, creating a health equity tracker, which is all about providing a detailed view of health outcomes based on race, gender, age, socio economic status, and more. With the end goal to contextualize health inequities facing communities of color and to empower policymakers with the information they need to advance health equity in the US. It was a remarkable conversation, and I hope you'll tune in on Wednesday to learn more from her.

Judy Tsuei 2:56

For today's personal essay, I want to kind of explore one of the things that we talked about in the interview as well, which is becoming plant based. Growing up in a traditional Chinese household. Not eating meat was seen as a very weird thing. I went to Berkeley, I discovered that you can be vegetarian and vegan. And so I started exploring some of that, and you'll hear in today's story how that didn't really fly in my family of origin they just didn't understand no didn't really support it.

Judy Tsuei 3:22

It's interesting because my sister married a man who is vegan. And so now my parents have made a concerted effort to create more plant based foods to accommodate this relationship in this dynamic. They've also become more health conscious as they age, which maybe you've also experienced with your parents. And so some of the foods that we ate growing up, which I love are not really things that we eat anymore.

Judy Tsuei 3:45

However, my parents have also become expert dumpling makers and been makers. If you went to my Instagram, wild hearted words or fck saving face, you would see the buttons that my dad makes where they look like Restaurant Style quality, is making jelsa boards, the shorter hoods that all of these incredible things, and it's become a passion of theirs as they also learn how to adapt it to be more organic and healthy.

Judy Tsuei 4:13

Already for today's essay, the only experience I had with vegetarianism growing up was going to the Buddhist temple, and then understanding that Buddhist monks don't eat meat. They were provide this amazing buffet of food. And all of it was vegetarian. I always felt so good. So nurse so loved going into the temple and eating those meals. I could feel that they were prepared with a different kind of intention and how wonderful the food tasted even though it didn't have any meat.

Judy Tsuei 4:45

When I later went to go visit my aunt in Taiwan and my mother came from California to meet me there. As I was living in China and working as an editor. She took me to this famous vegetarian restaurant at the time of Suffering from my eating disorder. So my whole perspective with food and body image was completely skewed. And yet, once again, I marveled at how delicious vegetarian food could be.

Judy Tsuei 5:12

When I got back from college at Berkeley, I told my mom, I had become a vegetarian. Then she made a bunch of homemade cooking with pork bits in it, and I kind of forgot. She also kind of made fun of me, being vegetarian was silly. Chinese immigrant parents didn't have access to me when they were growing up. So by the time they got to the states and could afford it, and they wanted it as much as possible, it was a sign of success. You didn't suddenly choose to become a vegetarian for no reason.

Judy Tsuei 5:37

Why would you do that? It must be similar to the way that they fled Communist China, his children grew up as outsiders in Taiwan then came to the US to raise their children to have hopefully a better lifestyle than they had, and then feel so weird that their eldest daughter, me, chose to then move to China to teach English, then become an editor of a magazine, then choose to move to Taiwan with her young daughter so that she could learn Mandarin.

Judy Tsuei 6:00

They did ask me, why are you doing these things? I thought I was doing these things that they would be proud of, but they didn't get it. Taiwan is so dangerous. Now. They said, identifying now with their Chinese roots. Wait, I said to them, You live in LA? Do you know how dangerous living in LA is? I wouldn't let my daughter run around by herself in LA but in Taiwan, I would let her roam about in the MRT subway stations. I wasn't worried. I knew that everyone had an eye on her.

Judy Tsuei 6:29

One time when we were trying to board the subway. Both of my hands were full of groceries. And so I couldn't help my daughter. When she fell into the gap her leg fell into the opening between the platform and the train. So before I even had a chance to drop my bags of groceries, someone else immediately picked her up and then put her in the seats that were reserved for pregnant women, children or the elderly.

Judy Tsuei 6:55

When I was a yoga teacher and a travel writer in my early 30s, I went on a press trip with the first family ever to summit Mount Everest, Jordan Romero was 12 or 13 at the time, and he and his father were featured in outside magazine. One of the triathletes at the race asked Wait, you're a yoga teacher and you eat meat. This triathlete was fit, he was vegan, he didn't get the contradiction. I tried to be vegetarian, and then vegan again when I got back from that trip.

Judy Tsuei 7:23

But when I was teaching yoga, it just didn't work for my body, I would go from a cat Cow Pose to a standing pose and in front of my entire class, I would block out for a second because my blood pressure would drop too fast. Maybe I wasn't doing it right. Or maybe my body simply wasn't designed for this. Either way, I couldn't stay vegan for long. Even though I believed in the reasons why people do this. I honor the premise. I honor people's choices.

Judy Tsuei 7:51

And I also started learning that we were all doing the best that we can and maybe someone else's expectations or wants for us isn't actually the right fit for what our physical body needs, what our emotional body needs, what our mental, spiritual energetic body needs.

Judy Tsuei 8:09

This week, I interviewed Chi Pham. And we talked about what it means to be physically strong as a woman, as a woman of color, an Asian American Pacific Islander, of how to pursue the things that you want and meet your parents halfway in a conversation that she had when her parents came out to visit her. And she asked them what they wanted to do as they were on the Big Island and they didn't have a response for her.

Judy Tsuei 8:35

You'll hear that beauty and health and your personal pursuit of your passions can be redefined in so many ways. I'm looking forward to sharing her interview with you and I hope you will tune in on Wednesday. Connect with you then.

Wilder 8:52

Please rate my mom's podcast. Give her five stars. If you want to chat with my mom, go to goodpods[dot]com. That's where you can follow and talk to your favorite podcast hosts like my mom.

Judy Tsuei 9:12

Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. If you liked what you heard and know someone in your life who might also benefit from hearing this episode, please feel free to share it with them. Also, if you'd like to support our show, you can make a one-time donation fcksavingface.com. Or, you can make a recurring donation at patreon.com/fcksavingface. That's “fck” without the “u.” Subscribe today to stay tuned for all future episodes.