“Mo-an-a for a party of three?” My eyes widened as I fought to wipe the bubbling grin off my face. At the age of 7, I was already a menace to society.
My parents, testing my independence, let me handle dinner reservations. Big mistake. An hour later, I was doubled over in a giggle-fit as I watched the stone-cold maître d struggle to pronounce the name of my favorite Disney princess.
Sarah Bahr’s piece,“Kids Can’t Stop Watching ‘Moana.’ There’s a Scientific Explanation,” rekindled those fond memories of my early childhood—and the terror I caused.
The piece detailed how Disney has cracked the code on the juvenile brain—gripping storylines and catchy earworms. Bahr calls it the “Chinese Menu Effect”: in the age of the infinite scroll, kids often revert back to the stories they know they’ll love. Hence, “Moana Mania.”
But Pepperdine’s Cristel Russell cracks down on why Moana is so lovable: “[Moana]... isn’t your typical blond Cinderella with blue eyes.” No damsel-in-distress or fairytale prince, just a teenage rebellion, marching to the addictive rhythm of Polynesian drums.
8 years later, I behold my little cousins and their off-key renditions of “Golden,” from K-Pop Demon Hunters (the blockbuster animation featuring a demon-slaying girl group, of course). What I once thought was an exercise in torture is now the same story on repeat: some things never go out of style.
(Unless you're counting my 2018 Moana costume, in which case, yes, it very much went out of style.)
French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi once regarded the U.S as “an adorable woman chewing on tobacco.” Granted, aside from our lack of refinement, we possess an uncanny allure to the globe.
Bartholdi, enraptured by the resolution of America’s civil war, found it apt to gift the United States with their own symbol of triumph over the evils of slavery.—Lady Liberty.
Jason Farago’s “The Most Iconic American Artwork Is the Hardest to See”, showed me how an inanimate object left the most human reminder.
Farago writes that like the statue itself, “the formula for democracy is a thing of multiple parts…on which pieces brought across oceans can be conjoined. From many, one.”
In 1999, my mother was one of many Taiwanese immigrants who sailed her way in the direction of this unity. Daughter to small-town pig farmers, the words “life, liberty, and happiness,” felt funny in her mouth. Today she’s teaching high-schoolers Mandarin, the very language she brought to this country.
But not everyone’s so fortunate.
The gates to this country have been shut on the hands of people like my mother who cherished the now-elusive American Dream. And just like Liberty’s copper has corroded over time—so have our faith in the values that we strive for.
Still, she doesn’t smile, nor is she satisfied with our conquest of those values. She wears a stern frown and heavy eyes, the face of endurance—beckoning us to remember.
We might have forgotten what makes the United States “united,” but she has not.
I take cooking very seriously.
So when somebody say, throws zucchini into traditional Italian pasta, I go a little off-my-rocker. That’s why Eric Kim’s “How to Make Easy Zucchini Pasta,” had me skeptical.
It took Aglio e Olio —a dish renowned for its simplicity and added a completely foreign vegetable to the mix.
This skepticism was rooted in bittersweet memories —early middle school, when I’d spend hours after school hashing together our fridge’s strangest ingredients into pasta, fending off the cries of my mother, “when’s dinner?”
The look of horror in my eyes when a silky smooth sauce proceeded to split, leaving a dismal pool of oil at the bottom of the pasta bowl. Hours of exploring new flavors, dead in a blink of the eye.
“Who’s going to eat that?” my mom chuckled.
‘Another one to the bottom of the freezer’ I thought.
At some point, I came to the conclusion that it was safer to abide by the exact recipes; abandoning my experiments. And though the pastas matched the photos of luxurious garlic-oil spaghettis, they now felt lackluster.
I was cooking for approval, not authenticity. But Kim’s outlook was different. Throughout his travels, he documented the joy of new ingredients from Switzerland, all the way to Japan.
One thing was clear: my pasta-purism had sucked the fun out of cooking.
On finding the perfect Aglio e Olio Kim remarks, “the secret to a great version, I’ve learned, is a little soul.” And I’ve learned that the secret to soul is simply a willingness to play.