First Poem Mention: “After the Dinner Party” by Adrienne Su

Hi everyone! Yesterday was Mid-Autumn Festival, and I hope everyone who celebrates had a good time :)

On another note, this is my first post on a poem, and this one is called “After the Dinner Party” by Adrienne Su (linked).

I actually had to read this poem for school, so I have a lot to share about these 6 verses. (I won’t go too much into more technical poetry things but rather the themes and how they connect to Asian heritage)

The first stanza opens the story up to a casual dinner party, one which Su is hosting. However, after the fun and festivities, her friends throw out her chopsticks mistaking them for disposable ones. To many Asian cultures, ranging from the East to the SouthEast, chopsticks are vital to their eating culture. However, most other people’s relationships with chopsticks are limited to Chinese takeout or delivery sushi, and they don’t actually own any non-disposable of their own. In the case of the speaker, she is like many other asians, proud of her chopstick ownership as she describes them as “my everyday chopsticks”(3). Despite her friends’ probable willingness to understand if they did something wrong and Su’s pride in owning these chopsticks, she chooses to stay silent about this whole situation, suggesting that she doesn’t know what to do in this situation. What could one do if they casually threw away one of their own utensils?

What would you do if someone threw out your chopsticks? Would it leave you stunned? Hurt because your culture was unconsciously labelled disposable? Or would you be more confrontational?

It’s actually kind of strange to me that Su is simultaneously confident but also timid about her culture, but I think that’s a really important thing to note. The description of the food-waste, “pork bones, shrimp shells, bitter melon”, suggest that the guests have just eaten an Asian dinner (5). The speaker is comfortable enough to share her culture with her friends through food, but she is unable to confront them about their faults, demonstrating her slight timidity when exposing something as vulnerable as her heritage. Despite my seeing it as something strange, I totally understand it. There are levels to being confident about a foreign culture, or at least one foreign to America: the first one is a superficial confidence, where you show them the most obvious aspects of your culture. In my Chinese American case, that would mean taking my non-Chinese friends to hot pot or talking about the most exciting holiday, Lunar New Year. But in order to reach enough confidence to tell your friends to not throw out chopsticks, you might also have to be willing to share the less appealing, less attractive sides of your culture, like take your friends to eat the unfamiliar foods they might label as “weird” or show them the culturally important practice of feet-binding that looks too extreme today.

What are your thoughts on this balance of confidence? Do you agree with the “level system” to it?

My final thought on this poem is about complacency, about “making peace” as Su phrases it. I especially find the last verse interesting since she changes the phrase “breaking bread” to “breaking bao” (a Chinese bun), meaning she will continue to show her friends her culture through food, but also decides to “make peace with the loss of utensils.” As if living two lives, Su says when her family is present, however, she’ll “maintain that chopsticks aren’t disposable.”

Through this anecdotal poem, the speaker introduces what it’s like to have to balance different cultures in a mixing-pot community like America. Many immigrant families in the United States have to juggle trying to fit into the typical American lifestyle without completely losing their traditions. Here, the speaker proposes that in order to maintain this balance, without bothering herself and creating conflict with her less-comfortable-with-chopsticks friends, change and flexibility is necessary. After reading this poem, I’m in a slight disagreement with the writer since I think confrontation, standing up for what is your own, is the right answer. Yet, if creating a balance is how she wants to navigate her own Asian American experience, I am not one to judge.

I have two final questions. The first being, I have my own thoughts as to why Su resorted to “making peace,” but what do you think? The second is, how did you navigate juggling, I guess, “two lives” in the same sense Su did?