My Stinky Lunch Box Story That I Never Lived
A conversation with mom made me question a painful moment in my life
Dig if you will the picture of a seven-year-old me. A recent immigrant to the United States. Not being able to speak English. On the school bus in the morning. I can’t understand what the students are saying. But their scrunched-up faces combined with the universal hand waving gesture in front of their noses signals to me that they find something to be stinky.
Then suddenly the kid sitting next to me shouts out “Ewwwww!”, points to my lunch box, and pretends to throw up. All the kids point at me while pinching their nostrils. Ewwwwwwwww. I turn to face the window and lean my forehead against it, pushing as hard as I can, hoping that the window will give in so that I can fall out of the moving bus.
When I get to school, I toss my lunch box into the trash. At lunchtime, a fellow immigrant student shares half their peanut butter and jelly sandwich and chips with me.
When I get home, I yell at mom. I cry and tell her that she ruined my life, forever, by putting disgusting kimchi in my lunchbox, that all the kids laughed at me, and that we are not in Korea anymore so I only want pb&j sandwiches from now on like all the normal kids. I storm off to my room and slam the door. The next day, I find out I’d made her cry.
The first time I heard it referred to as the “stinky lunch box story” was from Jay Caspian Kang’s podcast, Time to Say Goodbye. But it wasn’t the first time I’d heard those stories.
It’s part of a long list of collective traumatic moments that Asian immigrants and children of Asian immigrants share and love to share when telling tales of our early struggles in a foreign land. Usually, there’s some mention of shame, confusion of identity, rejecting of our cultures, and how the same white kids who mocked us for eating such stinky foods now claim to love them. And maybe even a “teaching moment” for a parent and their child.
Sprinkle in some perseverance, overcoming, redemption, and a moving bonding moment eating stinky foods with our parents as adults where every little detail of the cooking process is broken down in longing prose (because almost nothing will be said to each other during the meal), and bam you have a viral ready tale on your hands. These shared struggles make us feel connected and less alone.
So that story about the school bus in the beginning? It never happened to me. I brought it up to my mom a few months ago and she just stared at me confused and said, “I never packed kimchi for you to take to school. Why would I do that?”
But for the longest time, I really did think it happened to me. I mean, I told that story to others for years. Did I think it happened because I wanted to be able to relate? Was the narrative so easy to connect to that I just internalized it? Was it my mom who had it wrong? Maybe it was a painful memory that she just tucked away?
Except, when I thought about it after my talk with mom all I could remember was being fascinated at all the wild and exotic dishes they served during school lunches. I remembered especially liking sloppy joes and spaghetti and meatballs. I remembered us eating in a gym and found it super cool that the lunch tables folded into the walls. I remember having to give my name to the lunch lady so she could check it off on the free or reduced lunch list. I don’t remember any stinky lunch boxes filled with kimchi.
Since my sister and I have entered our 40s, we’ve had a lot of chats about our childhoods. We often have different memories of them. Our perspectives are different. I realize what’s important is less about who is right and who is wrong but why we remember certain things the way we do and how that shapes the way we think about the people in our lives. And ourselves. For me, I’ve been wondering if the painful memories that I’d held onto for a long time in fact were not as bad.
All this isn’t to minimize anyone’s experiences, especially if they did have a stinky lunch box moment. As I mentioned before, I understand that AAPIs are currently experiencing a flood of stories. And that’s great. We’ve been backed up. It’s all got to come out.
But any time certain types of stories are being told over and over again to the point that it starts feeling like a trope, you have to ask why. What purpose do they serve and to whom? Who keeps soliciting and publishing them?
In Jaya Saxena’s essay “The Limits of the Lunchbox Moment” for Eater she wrote, “The lunchbox moment has become such a touchstone both because it’s recognizable for many and because it’s an editor’s dream.”
I know memories are not facts. And as we get older, we tend to embellish much of our pasts. We turn some of our good memories into great ones and turn some of our bad memories into terrible ones. Our memories fail us, all the time.
It could be that for a long time, like so many other AAPIs, I too felt like I wasn’t seen or that my stories didn’t matter. So much so that I badly yearned to be a part of a shared collective trauma of the “stinky lunch box.”
So much so that I lied to others and to myself about what I had experienced while curating a neatly packaged narrative of victimhood that never even happened.
And who knows, maybe that’s a whole different level of coping right there that’s beyond my degree.
*Mom, sorry I told that false story for so many years!