Dissecting "Cut Fruit Diaspora"

What is it about third culture kids that makes us tick?

“stinky lunchbox, the children stare…” “kumon, no, cumin…” “baba, cuts fruit, I cut him out of my life…” are some of the expressions that come to mind when I think of the poetic imagery associated with ABC’s (an abbreviated form of the term “American-born Chinese.”) On this side of the shore, we are guilty of erroneously homogenising “ABC’s” under one diasporic umbrella – not accounting for the myriad of diverse races, ethnicities, and cultures that compose it. Or at least I am. In my family, the term “ABC” has been utilised as the reigning shorthand for all diasporic Asians. Guilty again. Having said that, discourse surrounding this topic has become increasingly difficult to ignore.

In recent years, diasporic media has beckoned a renewed focus on the world stage. 2018’s Crazy Rich Asians saw gargantuan success the likes of which Hollywood had never seen before. It felt pertinent to me too. Set in my hometown of Singapore, it was handed the goliath task of being a marketable rom-com while also navigating important issues of race, class, and gender on top of discursively raising conversations on the tensions between cosmopolitan individualism and loyalty to family and place. But when I watched it in the theatre, I twiddled my thumbs the entire time.

The fish Dish, Sarah Sedwick: Source: sarahsedwick.com

For the uninitiated, Diasporic media refers to the genre of work created by people who have dispersed out of their country of origin. It traverses genres - from film and television to literature and poetry. The cut fruit in question, is one of its many pervasive metaphors.

In short, the eponymous fruit slices are a gesture of immigrant parents serving their children bowls of sliced, peeled, and prepared fruit. They signify and have become largely understood by members of the Asian diaspora as a symbol of unspoken love.

At once heart-warming and heart-aching, something as innocuous as an apple slice or a cube of watermelon is transformed into a connective tissue between disparate generations, a domestic leveller, a communicative tool, a love language. It imbues a personal experience with a universal resonance that is instantly relatable to a specific community. In this sense, the point of this prevailing metaphor isn’t so much about a unique experience, but to echo a common one. It boils down to a fundamental fact of life - a deep and human desire to be seen and understood.

But is it really that deep?

When I saw this screencap on twitter, it sent me into the throes of a moral quandary. At once funny and denigrating, this slew of words packed a punch. I wondered why it made me stop in my tracks. Well, maybe it’s because it completely resonated.

It captured a feeling of hyper specific cultural cognisance that always lingered in the back of my mind after watching films like Crazy Rich Asians and more recently, Past Lives.

Where Crazy Rich Asians felt grating in its saccharine depictions of the hyper elite in Singapore - think gigantic mansions, luxurious parties, exotic flower blooming soirées, indulgent bachelor parties, foreign locales, and designer clothes - Past Lives is modest and understated. It’s a simple what-if story about two people, childhood friends Nora and Hae Sung, who become separated after Nora’s family emigrates from South Korea and moves to Toronto. Decades later after wistful to and fro’s on Skype and Facebook, they reunite in New York where they are confronted with notions of destiny, love, and the choices they’ve made in their lives. What Crazy Rich Asians does in entrenching the invisibility of the non-elite, Past Lives champions domesticity and normalcy. I implicitly understood how it spoke to the migrant experience and the complicated ways in which being thrust into a life of diaspora can force you to contend with lifelong alternative realities in your head: the self that could have stayed behind in the old country, versus the one that went abroad for a new future.

Crazy Rich Asians brings center-stage themes of culture, values and belonging experienced by diaspora populations in two nodes – New York and Singapore – and invents a global, hyper-connected world, one that feels implausible to me. Past Lives instead explores the tender feelings of relationships at various stages, from budding playground crushes to adulthood’s alleged certainty. It didn’t make me revaluate the human condition or anything, but during it’s hour and forty-five minute run, I was relatively engaged. Because Nora and Hae Sung’s story doesn’t seek to sprout feverish diatribes about identity and belonging.

So what does some fruit have to do with it?

Okay, so we’ve established how in Diasporic communities, specifically in the East Asian realm, Cut fruit functions as a tool. And there are shades of variation that make it meaningful for both parties. For the parents that find it difficult to articulate “I love you” to their third culture kids, it’s a ripe longing for home wafting on the breeze, reincarnated into a metaphorical hug. For the third culture kids, the fruit in question essentially becomes a stand in for their voice.

I’m not here to undermine a motif very much rooted in people’s real lives and experiences, after all, for something to be cliché, there has to be a modicum of truth embedded in it. However, when the writers or poets or essayists of a community default themselves to an apple slice, despite the myriad of other experiences to examine, it doesn’t feel like an intrepid tale in which one searches for their identity anymore, but rather a half-baked approach to one’s heritage through an orientalised lens of themselves. In some instances, the formal constraints of the writing medium have strangled scores of high profile artists, like Rupi Kaur. Take for example this poem:

“leaving her country

was not easy for my mother

i still catch her searching for it

in foreign films

and the international food aisle”

— the sun and her flowers, 2018

What struck me about this poem was how shallow and self-satisfied it is. All the more confusing was how many people find it to be the pinnacle of representation— one review I found said that it gave her “a better sense of what it really means to be an immigrant than an entire chapter in any other book I’ve read”. Because of an international food aisle?! This poem, and the popularisation of so many like it, effectively turns culture into a commodity, insinuating that the likes of KBBQ and bubble tea is a decent substitute for a country. And a name for it exists, it’s called Boba liberalism.

Boba liberalism is recognised as Asian Americans whose activism is inoffensive and never challenges the inherent inequality of capitalism – thus largely being wrapped upon consumerism and largely concentrated on Hollywood representation. This brand of activism ends at shallow issues of media representation and interpersonal stories of hardship. Many connote that there is always a lack of analysis of western imperialism and racial capitalism. Because Boba liberals want to be accepted by the system, not dismantle it.

So what am I doing here?

I’m just a girl from Singapore. I’m not trying to use my personal essay to revolutionise, nor bridge the gap between these two communities. One of them I’ve touched upon at length in this essay, the other being the one that I’m from.

I’ve lived in Singapore all 26 years of my life. The only aspect of my blood that makes me ostensibly different is my Mother’s Malaysian and Sinhalese heritage, but my nationality remains squarely Singaporean. In this country, there looms an ironclad focus on global competitiveness. This permeates the most resoundingly in the heads of local educators - who evoke the implication that when speaking English, Singaporeans must be intelligible to a white audience. “Why do you sound speak with an accent?” “I grew up watching Disney channel and Nickelodeon…” is a response I’ve sharpened to a knee jerk reaction.

And that much is true. Shows like That’s So Raven and All That were formative pieces of media for me and hold a special place in my heart (to name a few). Watching hours of shows the likes of Hey Arnold and Kim Possible as a kid meant that I picked up and reproduced quasi-American inflections in my own speech patterns, setting me apart from my peers at school in a way that sometimes felt both confusing and isolating. However, it wasn’t lost on me that on their side of the shore, Asian appearances were used to denote a fundamental difference. Not only deeply felt in the physical, but from a cultural standpoint too.

But in Singapore, where everyone is so unapologetically themselves - to the point where it seems like an inscrutable fact of life, I didn’t have anything to worry about. We speak in a vernacular so unique that we can hear each other from a mile away. My pseudo Americanised way of speaking is a conversation starter at best, and sounds halting at worse. But I can code switch like no problem. I pull out the Singlish UNO reverse card - a multifarious creole that draws from our four official languages of English, Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil, as well as Chinese dialects like Hokkien, Teochew and Cantonese - like a backhanded trick. So if I want immerse myself fully as a Singaporean and be accepted in spaces that demand for it, I can just retreat back into the deliciously brusque intimacies of Singlish. If that sounds confusing, well, it can be. Singlish’s plurality is perhaps the source of the average Singaporean’s mercurial ability to slip into, out of, and between languages and registers. To me, code switching is a crucial element of my life here and it solidifies my identity as a Singaporean. The code-switching that defines a Singaporean’s communicative life is usually not thought of as a conscious undertaking, and this certainly held true for myself.

I’m also a cisgender Chinese girl. I’m one person in a cultural demographic that amounts to 74.3% on this little red dot. If I was a diasporic asian, I might be up in arms if i was asked “So where are you really from?” but, the question continues to unfaze me. And it did throughout my 4 years of University in Australia.

I don’t have a complicated relationship with my identity, but maybe I do with my identity as a Singaporean. My passport is one of the most powerful in the world. My tiny island is anchored in political stability, low corruption rates, and transparent public institutions. The origin story we propel to world chronicles how we went from a dirt poor swamp to a gleaming metropolis that is agile and adaptable. By all accounts, I should resonate with the underdog. But for all the bravado Singapore boasts about being an economic powerhouse, I concede with the myth of meritocracy. As someone who wants to make a living from writing, I’m spent at the idea that I’ll never make a liveable wage in my country. Sound monetary and fiscal policies, together with a robust judicial system, underpin Singapore’s low-risk economy, but amidst global economic headwinds, editorial and writing jobs can only reckon with a door that continues to slam in their face. The recent mass layoffs of Yahoo’s Singapore-based editorial and social media staff (amongst many other corporations) and the public’s aversion to paying for written news content interplay to generate a future that looks bleak to me. But I take the occupational hazard in stride because I can’t imagine doing anything else.

How do I remain strong in one of the world’s strongest economies? Is it really the strongest if it doesn’t even have an infrastructure for its budding writers? An infrastructure where we can only reckon with adversity?

I got middling grades throughout school, and this reflects pointedly in my certificates. I feel a strong emotional connection to my alma mater, but I can’t shake the anxiety that employers look at my university emblem with a dubious reproach, choosing to go with the local school graduate instead. Some days it doesn’t even feel like a disillusionment at my credentials or lack thereof, it’s a growing weariness at the worsening gap between the have and the have-nots.

Remember how I posited that “Boba liberals want to be accepted by the system, not dismantle it”?

Maybe I share the same plight.

In the face of global economic trade winds, it can be hard to reimagine the Singaporean Dream. I’m constantly trying to reimagine that dream for myself; some days i’m desperate and some days i’m apathetic - but we all do what we can to carve a space for ourselves alongside existing mappings, sometimes without engraved routes for us to follow. We all crave the catharsis of community; a sense of belonging.

The deeper I looked, the more abundantly clear it becomes that the twin forces of capitalism and imperialism are deeply embedded not only in our political systems and ideologies, but in the very substance of our lives, in everything unremarkable and beautiful, as seen in some cut fruit.

While I, and many Singaporeans, probably treat cut fruit as a trivial part of our day, maybe for some others it reflects the changing temporal and social contexts of their life, and is closely intertwined with their identity not just as third culture kids, but as a third culture kids learning how to be away from a home that people project onto them. Life can sometimes feel like a synthesis of incompatibilities - from our cultural politics to the physical aspects of ourselves that we can’t change. And in recent years, there’s been a pointed shift from shuddering at ones stinky lunchbox to living life through a renewed and invigorated lens, and maybe I can find it within myself to do the same.

So i’ll continue to be critical and wary of narratives that claim all manifestations of difference, only because they only further the sense of commodification that all Asians actively work to dismantle. Having said that, there is also definitely still room for the exploration of exotic foods in the body of diasporic literature, so long as it does more than reduce these people’s lives into tiny, digestible pieces— much like cut fruit.

But i’m hopeful that we can all write new stories for ourselves - ones that feature motifs that don’t feel platitudinal, but instead honour our cultural significances and complicated histories. My pithy thesis on my substack is far from the first brick thrown at the stonewall that is diasporic media discourse, but I can happily resign myself to the fact for now, we’re all just striving to find our own modes of belonging. And that’s more than enough.