Community Recipe Storybook

A creative prompt kit exploring the meaning of place, belonging, identity, and personal memory using audio, video, and written stories to facilitate storytelling. My research methods allowed food as a vehicle to facilitate conversations between multi-generation Asian American families and encapsulate food memories as a cultural artifact.

I want to do a project that can encourage people to tell their stories. The idea of food itself is a complex amalgamation of our memory, identity, the passage of time, and emotions perfectly preserved through our personal lived history. Food is also a neighborhood building block; many immigrant families' first jobs are in the food, manufacturing, or service-oriented industry. It's fair to say anywhere we go, food is not just a necessity to survive but an integral role in the community identity and a sense of home and belonging. 

    1. How might we use a time-based narrative to preserve the values of people's sense of place, lived experiences, and identity with their surroundings to continue shaping the community's future?

    2. What method might we use to provoke dialogue among multigenerational groups of people?

    1. Thomas Holton’s 15 years of documentation of a multigenerational family in Chinatown that spoke about building trust with your subject.

    2. Elia Alba’s Supper Club to stage an environment to generate conversations.

    3. Rirkrit Tiravanija’s 1992 performance piece, Untitled(Free), explores the interaction of art in a sociable and participatory way.

    4. The Center for Urban Pedagogy’s tool kits in collaboration with designers, advocates, and policymakers to tackle complex issues.

Sketches

01—

My first prototype focused on telling my own story of belonging and disconnection to the Asian communities with a monologue recording of my life story complemented with a video of family photos.

This led me to ask my siblings to share their stories which all had a lingering sense of diaspora and how that has shaped our upbringing. Putting myself as an active participant in this sketch gave me a comprehensive point of view of the reason behind my interest in this project.

01— a clip of the video that goes with my monologue recording.

02—

I interviewed a first-generation American-born Chinese small business owner in Chinatown, Karho Leung, who opened up a Barbershop on Pell St—which is known for its clusters of hair salons and barbershops.

We spoke about his connection with the Chinatown community has intensified since the start of his business, the resurgence of the importance of civic engagement that he never felt growing up on these streets, and to learn more about how his parents' generation socialized through different local associations. I created a collage of photos I took during my Chinatown neighborhood walk with a quote of Karho’s story to give form to our conversation.

02— moving image collage with interview quote.

03—

Inspired by food as a recurring topic of conversation in my earlier sketch, I asked my parents to share recipes that were sentimental to me. Through our talk, I realized I wasn’t trying to capture the actual recipe itself but instead allowing the process of recipe sharing to encourage past memories to surface.

For this next sketch iteration, I created a storytelling experience that involved me making a coffee tea drink (鴛鴦) that my dad ordered all the time in Macau. I invited participants to join me for this drink after sharing a culinary dish that brought up a memory of family, culture, or identity. The intention for a staged environment was to test the way people prefer to share their stories and the likeliness of sharing a personal story.

03— documentation of coffee tea drink experience.

Final Sketch

No matter the importance, food memories are vivid and sometimes even multi-sensorial. My project proposal is a methodology to gather stories that capture a sense of memory, identity, the passage of time, and reflection by using food as an agency to create a place for these internal and external dialogues. By placing food as the main ingredient to stimulate the interaction of memory, the project is a creative prompt exercise that is physically given out to selected participants to work on.

There are a total of 16 pages in the kit that walk through an overview of this project and the following prompts:

  1. What's a culinary dish that brings you a memory of your family, home, or belonging?

  2. Record an audio story relating to your culinary dish.

  3. Ask someone that might know how to cook your culinary dish. Write, draw, or audio record the cooking instruction.

  4. If you can invite anyone to share this culinary dish with, who would they be?

  5. Include any photos that relate to your dish or your shared story.

For this first iteration, I handed out the creative prompt kits to a selective group of individuals in my social circles who represent a passage of time: friends who, like me, moved to New York, colleagues from recent years whom I met through my business and who grew up in New York, to colleagues from the most current chapter of my life as a graduate student.

Once returned, kits will be preserved digitally and compiled into a printed recipe book. The original filled kit will become an artifact of its own. Each participant will receive a hard copy of the recipe book as documentation of their contribution to this project. The exercise ends with project feedback for participants to reflect on the process. This project embodies and celebrates this ongoing archival process of memories and preserves the fragments of identity and home hidden in our lived experiences into meaningful cultural artifacts.