Food is Love: Marria Nguyen

Welcome to the Meaning of Food, a yearlong exploration of food’s place in our lives and communities. Every meal tells a story – food connects us to our culture, our memories, our sense of identity. These stories shape who we are—and they can shape our understanding of hunger. This month, we are highlighting stories about love. Northwest Harvest Equity and Inclusion Program Manager, Marria Nguyen, shares what “Food is Love” means to her. More stories from our community can be found here.

Sharing a Taste of Home

– by Marria Nguyen

As the child of immigrants, I have spent my life walking that fine line between my Vietnamese identity and my American one. There have been times when those two sides of me are able to sync seamlessly and then there have been moments where they seem entirely at odds. It is a duality that I think many immigrant children juggle, and I certainly have experienced no different in my life.

My parents risked everything coming to this country with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. They fled the aftermath of a devastating war and had to leave everything behind. They came to a country without knowing a single word of English or understanding that they would never be entirely welcomed and would more than likely always be regarded as “other.”

I believe that is why my parents always tried to connect as much as they could to our neighbors and community. One of the ways they did that was through food. Food is the great connector. Especially in many Asian cultures, it is how love and care is shown and how we venerate the gods and our ancestors. And it was certainly how we reached out to those around us, simply by sharing a plate of hot and fresh egg rolls.

Egg rolls, chả giò in Vietnamese (crispy fried spring rolls filled with seasoned meat and vegetables), became our way of immersing our family into the community. For every kind of celebration you can think of, from birthdays to Lunar New Year, my mom would fry up a whole batch of these wonderfully delicious rolls before giving the marching orders for us to deliver a plate to the nearby houses on our street.

I’ll confess that as a kid I was always so embarrassed whenever my parents asked me to deliver the plate of egg rolls. I hardly answer my phone when it rings, so imagine the anxiety around having to knock on someone’s door when I was younger! However, looking back now, I see why we were asked to do this, and I see why it was so important for us to do so. It was a bridge – a way to connect to our neighbors by sharing something about us.

My family continues to do this to this day and has turned so many of our neighbors into longtime friends; it also made us quite popular at every Multicultural Potluck night at our old elementary school! It is often as adults that we are able to see our past with much more clarity and understanding. So even as embarrassed as I was to knock on those doors, I can see how these egg rolls opened the door for us to truly find our place in this country.