This article is part of Mochi’s winter 2023 issue, exploring what “environment” means to us as Asian Americans. From the environmentally friendly to your workplace, favorite neighborhood bar, or ethnic enclave — our environments are all that surrounds us, influences us and makes us who we are. Check out the rest of our issue here!
Food has been and always will be a big part of my Vietnamese identity. I can still remember my mom driving my brother and me home well after midnight after a huge family gathering filled with freshly made food and a lot of bad karaoke. I always took pride in the foods I was taught to love and make, and I still do. My ways of creating them have adapted to my current lifestyle while still honoring my roots. My family, hailing from Vietnam, has mostly kept their folk and Buddhist beliefs even decades after immigrating to the United States.
I took it upon myself to delve deeper into the ideologies and lessons Buddhism could teach me, in a way, making me feel closer to my mother’s culture. I received a lot of backlash from my more traditional family, mocking me for trying something different. They would try to place pieces of chicken or other meat products into my food and serve it to me, hoping I would not realize it while saying I was just doing it to be difficult. It made me feel more isolated at family gatherings where extended family rolled their eyes at me, and the menu wasn’t optimized for someone with a different dietary habit. However, throughout the journey, I came to love what it meant to think about the world and the lives around me, along with living a more grounded and sustainable life.
To explore how different paths can lead to the same place, I reached out to Remy Morimoto Park, aka @veggiekins, to get her experience, journey, and input on what it is like being a plant-based and eco-conscious Asian American woman who shares her way of life online.
Introduction to a Plant-Based Lifestyle
Park first got into the…
Read the full article here
