David Chang's Memoir on Overcoming Adversity- Eat a Peach

For those of you who do not know who David Chang is, he is an American Restauranteur and entrepreneur who owns Momofuku, Milk Bar, Ko, Seiobo, and produced the Netflix series 'Ugly Delicious' and 'Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner'. He was often doing episodes with Anthony Bourdain.

I enjoyed his memoir on overcoming adversity from the lens of being an Asian American. These passages really stood out to me.

1."The downside to the term tiger parenting entering the mainstream vocabulary is that it gives a cute name to what is actually a painful and demoralizing existence. It also feeds into the perception that all Asian kids are book smart because their parents make it so. Well, guess what. It’s not true. Not all our parents are tiger parents, tiger parenting doesn’t always work, and not all Asian kids are good at school. In fact, not all Asian kids are any one thing. To be young and Asian in America often means fighting a multifront war against sameness." 

2. "When I returned to New York from Tokyo, I started my dead-end job at the financial services company. I would ride my Gary Fisher bike all over Manhattan, weaving in and out of traffic and blowing through stoplights as if I were the only person on the street. I once went skiing with friends who had to tell me to cool it because I was getting too close to the trees. I defied them and completely obliterated myself in the foliage. One day I stepped off the curb in Central Park as a bus was backing up; it hit me and it hurt a great deal. There was a New Year’s Eve party in 2000 that began with Valium, speed, pot, this, that, and the other, washed down with around twenty drinks, and ended with my falling through a giant glass table. Blood everywhere. Shards of glass embedded in my wrists. The ER doctors said I narrowly missed an artery. I wonder if my recklessness was a cry for help disguised as youthful indiscretion, or if maybe I was hoping that at the bottom of a bottle would be the courage to step in front of the train." 

Thought: It's crazy to think of how some of the most successful people in the world have experienced rock bottom.

3. I spent a lot of time resisting Dr. Eliot’s questions about my childhood, but it all came out eventually. There was the fear of abandonment, generated from being left alone so much as a kid. There was the toll of constant exposure to my dad’s intensity and conflict with my mom. The God stuff came up a lot, especially how and why I took it so seriously. And there was the most consistent theme of not fitting in: not in my family, not among other Koreans, not in a WASP-y high school or college, not in the kitchen. I told him that I felt inadequate when I stood next to blue-blooded white Americans or in a French-style brigade. I talked about 9/11 and my classmate who killed himself with his dad’s pistol in third grade, and the three friends I’d lost right after college—one to suicide, one to an overdose, one to a freak accident. I felt surrounded by death. 

Thought: Imposter syndrome is real for many Asian Americans who don't feel like they will ever fit in with white America because of the color of their skin and stick out like a sore thumb amidst Asians because of their American tendencies.

4." For starters, one needs to understand contracts, real estate, management, and publicity—not to mention the craft of cooking good food. This is what people call a “compound art.” 

Thought: There's much more to being a chef and the aspects of running a business that most chefs don't think about before getting into the game.

5. "At Noodle Bar, I also learned that Asian people drank the ramen broth. White people only ate the noodles. If we served the soup lukewarm, Asian customers would complain. If it was too hot, the white people wouldn’t touch it until it cooled down. By then, the noodles would be soggy. As a cook, you’re in a never-ending dance with your diners. - You can't always please everyone but its important to take feedback and adapt according to your customer base."

6. Asian names that could be misinterpreted as swear-words in English. The EPA tried to shut us down because they were getting complaints of pork smells emanating from the restaurant, which is not an uncommon grievance leveled against Asian establishments in gentrifying neighborhoods. PETA picketed the restaurant on the few occasions that we served foie gras. When we started getting complaints about the noisiness of our HVAC unit, I swear it was the vegans trying to bleed us dry. We spent thousands changing the fan belt and proving that the noises coming from the exhaust were inaudible to human ears. 

7. I’m tempted to blame han. Throughout this book, I will argue against the validity of various cultural truths, but I believe in han. There’s no perfect English-language equivalent for this Korean emotion, but it’s some combination of strife or unease, sadness, and resentment, born from the many historical injustices and indignities endured by our people. It’s a term that came into use in the twentieth century after the Japanese occupation of Korea, and it describes this characteristic sorrow and bitterness that Koreans seem to possess wherever they are in the world. It is transmitted from generation to generation and defines much of the art, literature, and cinema that comes out of Korean culture. 

8. I will not deny that there are benefits to being part of what is often described as a “white-adjacent” or “model” minority. I grew up trying my damnedest to integrate into white society. But among the many problems with the myth of the model minority is that it erases the nuances of the Asian American experience. It also sows division, both within our community and with others. Now, if you will forgive a little bit of self-directed racial discrimination, I am what you might call a “twinkie.” Yellow on the outside, white on the inside. There are various factions within the Asian American population, and I definitely reside in the one that looks Asian but lives like a white person. When I visited Korea as part of a program with students from multiple colleges, I found myself excluded from all of the Korean-born, Korean-speaking, and generally more Korean social groups that formed. Then, once we landed in Seoul, the locals knew immediately from my size that I was a gyopo, or foreign-born Korean, so I gravitated to the other twinkies. I didn't yet know how to embrace my Korean heritage, which, ironically, only deepened my experience of han." 

9. By confronting failure, you take fear out of the equation. You stop shying away from ideas just because they seem like they may not work. You start asking whether an idea is “bad” because it’s actually bad or because the common wisdom says so. You begin to thrive when you’re not supposed to. You just have to be comfortable with instability, change, and a great deal of stress. 

10. "All of a sudden I could stay in my underwear and visit some dude’s blog to see pictures of every single dish from the latest menu at Pierre Gagnaire in Paris. Not all of the bloggers knew what they were talking about, but some of them were even more knowledgeable than writers working in the New York bubble. “But the writing is so bad” was a common complaint. So long as there were pictures of the food, it didn’t matter to me. It was a giant leap forward." 

Thought: It's important to gather inspiration from more than just the social bubble you're part of and realize there is much to learn out there.

11. "I’m bad at letting people go, whether by their choice or mine. I scream and shout a lot—too much—but I always have a hard time firing anyone. I like knowing that everybody is around. I yearn for the acceptance and comfort of friends and family. I hate the idea that they’ll leave me. It drags up all manner of old hurts. I feel foolish for trusting that they ever cared about me or Momofuku."- At the end of the day, we all yearn for some sort of acceptance whether it's from our friends, family or colleagues.

12. "These were the same guys who had said things like “I need to take a shower to wash the gook off” after hooking up with Asian girls in school. Now there was a class reunion coming up and they were inviting me to hang out. That sort of interaction really screwed with my head. I didn’t become famous for being handsome or athletic or musically gifted. I was just a cook." 

My takeaways from the book was that David took advantage of the internet and all of these rising bloggers and realized the importance of building a community and treating the bloggers right whereas their peers did not respect them and abused their power against them. He discussed very vulnerably about a lot of the micro-aggressions and straight-out racism he experienced in a Eurocentric industry as fine-dining is considered to be European. More recently he has seen that Asian restaurants are starting to be more respected but have a long way to go in America. Check out the book if you are interested in a deep dive into what it's like to be Korean American.