Spam Musubi
December 22, 2008
I can officially confirm that Barack Obama will be our first Asian Pacific American president. Not only does he have an Indonesian American half-sister, a Chinese Canadian brother-in-law, several APA staffers, many APA friends and years spent living in Hawai‘i and Indonesia, but he and his family also enjoy eating spam musubi.
A reporter tagging along with the Obamas as they vacationed in Hawai‘i this week reported the following: “As for Mr. Obama and his group, a snack bar clerk later confirmed that he purchased two hot dogs, two spam musubi, two passion orange sodas, one Powerade and one coke, for a tab of $17.75. The spam musubi, a local luncheon specialty, consists of spam and a fried egg on a bed of rice, all held together with a dried seaweed wrap.” (Visualize a very big sushi roll, slightly larger than a Hostess Ho Ho.)
Unfortunately, it will take the mainstream press a little while to catch up to Mr. Obama in his sophistication about Asian Pacific American cuisine. The food item described by the reporter was but one variant of spam musubi and, while it may have been the kind he ordered, a more thorough report would have mentioned that he got a spam musubi (the meat and dried seaweed on rice) with tamagoyaki (Japanese omelette) on top. To bundle all types of spam musubi together is like using the term “kim chi” to subsume the many variations of the Korean delicacy that can be made with cabbage, cucumber, radish and more.
With Obama in the White House, I can see the Asian-ification of American food accelerating. Hawaiian delis and convenience already carry saran-wrapped spam musubi as a take-out treat. Soon we will be able to enter a deli in downtown Omaha or St. Louis and see spam musubi on the shelf, with shoyu (soy sauce) and furikake (dried fish seasoning) on a counter nearby.
If this seems far-fetched, consider that when I was a kid growing up in New York and New Jersey in the 1950s, there were just a few Japanese restaurants in all of New York City. Today it seems like there is one on almost every corner.
My mom’s generation remembered being hazed at school in the 1930s for carrying rice balls with pickled plum in the center in their lunch boxes. Now today’s APA kids will be able to eat rice balls for lunch and point out that even the president likes them.
Commentators are likening the election of Barack Obama to the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932 because of the herculean task of economic rebuilding that awaits him. For minorities and other marginalized peoples, however, his election also has the symbolic importance of the election of John F. Kennedy, an Irish Catholic, in 1960.
So many Catholics and Irish Americans are in the public sector these days that it is hard to remember the savage “anti-papist” feeling that was prevalent in this country. Caricatures of Irish Americans tracked the assaults on intelligence, morals, cleanliness and fitness for employment that were made on Asian Pacific Americans, African Americans and other minorities.
When unschooled Irish American Alfred E. Smith rose from the slums of the Lower East Side in New York City to become the governor of New York in 1918, throngs of crying immigrant men and women hailed his rise as representative of the possibilities open to their own children.
When Smith tried to run for president in 1928 against Herbert Hoover, however, the entrenched ugliness of American nativism reared its head. The Ku Klux Klan burned crosses along the tracks when he visited Oklahoma. Farmers in the Midwest denounced him, his immigrant roots and his perceived control by a pontiff an ocean away. Smith lost even his home state when upstate New Yorkers rebelled against the immigrants that they perceived as trying to take over the nation as a whole.
Thirty-two years later, when Harvard-educated World War II hero and Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kennedy made his case to serve as president in 1960, the anti-papist feelings were still there, but some people had moved on enough to vote for him based on his merits. Likewise, President-elect Obama is the beneficiary of decades of African Americans and other outsiders pressing against the boundaries and finally making it possible for a Harvard-educated lawyer and Illinois senator to achieve the Oval Office, even if his father was of Kenyan background.
Perceptions count when it comes to the occupants of the White House. And that’s why having a president who enjoys spam musubi with tamagoyaki is so important.
Comments
4 Responses to “Spam Musubi”
Got something to say?
Reassuring.
Up to a point.
That point being: how much is Obama and how much “Team Obama”?
Modest holiday homecoming notwithstanding, the facts, or what purport to be facts, remain in re cabinet and second-tier “appointments.”
That said, nota bene:
1: Toda’s LATimes obit on one John W. Powell,who was troed for lesse majesty because he reported Chinese Communist claims that the U.S. had used germ warfare in North Korea. Sedition or no, what today sounds likely? And I don’t mean the teleseries “M.A.S.H.” Amd ot re,omds pf the case of Edgar Snow.
2: The Info Clearing House piece today that notes the fact that it took the ultimate parvenu shamster, Bernard Madoff, to, singlehandedly?, no, there’s his “family” and cohorts, just as with the CheneyDubya, neocon crowd, PULL THE OPLUG
. . .
PULL THE PLUG on the stinking cesspool of overripe capitalist.
These guys have made the three-cipher-comma parameters irreleant.
What’s the diff betwen billions and millions and mere thousands, or even “dollars”?\
To some,, the neaninglessness has become apparent in an irony of ironies.
To the rest of us, if five bucks can still buy a loaf of bread, there may be bare sustenance. No grass soup quite yet. Or cat stew.
But, at the present rate of devolution, quien sabe?
Tomorrow, die ganze welt?
one of us alas!
abc stores worldwide
not just limited to the islands and las vegas…
what’s next? frank lay off the glue!
you guys are upset about spam musubi, and not complaining about pontificating on test score results for American minorities? Sheesh.