Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2017. xv, 249 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$29.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-520-29374-8.
The title of this book has a double meaning: it “refers … to the flavors and tastes … of cuisines that arrived and were made available by US empire and neocolonialism. Yet it is also meant to highlight the different expressions and manifestations of the American empire—its various flavors—in the postwar world and the multiple actors who participated in it” (8). This book contains much information about Thai food in its production, transformation, and consumption in the US, but it is much more than. The fundamental core of this book is a historicized study of the formation of Thai-American communities in metropolitan Los Angeles from the 1950s to 2000s through a colourful and informative filter of Thai cuisine as a medium of interaction in various “culinary contact zones.” In the author’s own words, his goal in this project is “to present a complex and nuanced history of the role of food in Thai American identity and community: as a history of US empire, race, and the city of Los Angeles and its suburbs” (5). The author is singularly qualified to undertake this project: he grew up in LA, was fully immersed in Thai culture and the Thai community, and is fluent in the Thai language. He was also highly motivated to tell the story of Thai Americans (4). Thai Americans are only the tenth largest Asian population in the US according to the 2010 US census, with a total estimated population of 237,583 (not including the tens of thousands outside of legal status) (183). This explains why Thai Americans have not received the kind of scholarly attention other Asian immigrant groups like the Chinese or Vietnamese have attracted. The expressed objectives of this book are fulfilled with great success on the strength of the author’s excellent writing and analytic skills, the richness of the data collected from oral histories and archival materials, and the author’s demonstrated capacity to deconstruct the entanglements across space and place, national and cultural boundaries, and ethnic and racial identities that are at the same time local and global to produce a well-researched and informational social history of Thai Americans in LA.
Readers who are interested in books on food in its purely gastronomic and nutritional qualities will probably be disappointed with Flavors of Empire. The author explains his approach and research focus as follows: “I explore the complex relationship between food and race because I am more concerned with power relations, political economy, and structural-based inequalities than I am with cultural heritage” (4). His methodological emphasis on the importance of “everyday life of US empire” in Asia and the Pacific and the US guided his data collection from three main sources: oral histories, archival materials, and other documents. Oral histories were collected through one-time, hour- to hour-and-a-half-long interviews of twelve people of diverse occupational and demographic backgrounds recruited through “personal recommendation,” or what is more commonly known as snowball sampling. Using a “multiarchival approach,” the author conducted research in Boston, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC. The main sources of material came from returned Peace Corps papers and oral histories, National Security Administration Files, and presidential papers at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. A large body of diverse documents were reviewed for document analysis: newspapers, cookbooks, menus, travel guides, magazines, a record of temple history offered by Los Angeles Wat Thai, files of Thai Town development made available by The Thai Community Development Center in Hollywood, and other documents (20–21).
The richness of the research data is well organized under five playful chapter headings, in addition to the Introduction and Conclusion. Chapter 1, “One Night in Bangkok,” describes the neocolonial US presence in Thailand after World War II and the initial introduction of Thai food to the US by American culinary tourists, white American housewives, and cookbook writers. Chapter 2, “Chasing the Yum,” is about Thai food in the US with a focus on procurement and the beginning of Thai immigration in the 1950s. Chapter 3, “Too Hot to Handle,” describes Thai restaurants as a culinary contact zone bringing together the American public and Thai immigrants/culture. Chapter 4, “More Than a Place of Worship,” is a narrative about the creation of Wat Thai in 1979 in the suburb of East San Fernando and how the temple’s religious, social/cultural, and food retail functions play out in Thai community formation, and become a source of tension with American neighbours in East San Fernando. Chapter 5, “Thailand’s 77th Province,” showcases the creation of Thai Town in East Hollywood in 1999 and the role of culinary tourism as a tool to ensure immigrants’ “right to the global city” (22).
The greatest strength and contribution of this book is the richness of the empirical data on the dynamics of Thai Americans in the US since 1950s and how they contribute to the urban transformations of Los Angeles. The nuanced narratives are at the same time informative, captivating, and colourful. The theories, conceptual frameworks, methodological approach, and analysis of political economy utilized in this well-designed study produce lots of interesting and critical observations about urban development, immigrant experience, and the changing transnational linkages embedded in immigration, food-ways, geopolitics, and multiculturalism/cosmopolitanism that are entangled in multidirectional configurations. This book is like a Sunday buffet: there are many tasty and colourful items to choose from. There is always something among the new and the familiar that readers will enjoy. I highly recommend this book; it is a feast of great flavours.
Josephine Smart
University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada