Spice (In)Tolerance: The Pinnacle of Asian Self-Centeredness

Gentlemen, ladies, aspiring actors, directors and producers at Hollywood, let me put you onto the next billion-dollar idea, unveil the curtain over a simmering untapped market of potential—the Asian horror movie. Forget zombies, forget fake blood and CGI, jumpscares and severed limbs—all you need is a Singapore math book, a terrified child actor who has gotten a rabbit-and-chicken-leg problem wrong for the eighth time, pan to the mother smiling crazily and frothing at the mouth, fingers twitching, while the sounds of her sister’s soccer game roar in the background.

 

But the climax, and stay with me here, the last bone-chilling scream comes at the family reunion scene. Cut to a montage of well-meaning relatives you’ve never seen before, smiling uncannily as they grip deathly onto your wrist and tell you how tall and too skinny you are now. First-person POV, squeezed between two great-aunt or second-cousins that keep piling food onto your plate and asking how your grades have been doing. Then the slip-up, the blunder. You haven’t touched the best dish of all—that glossy silver-scaled fish in the golden soup platter in the middle of the table, long as your forearm and bobbing in the pan with tofu and scallions and radish. The aunt on your left demands, voice shrill, why you still haven’t touched the holy grail of Hard-Earned Family Reunion. The small talk gradually fades away as she stares into your soul with black dead-end eyes. Awaiting your verdict.

 

Your mouth opens, then closes. Throat clears. Eyes duck but can’t look away.

 

I can’t eat spice.

 

The table falls silent. Great-aunt Wu on your father’s side across the table explodes into feathers with one ear-splitting, deafening shriek.

 

No, this is not made up, yes it is based on a true story, and yes it is scientifically classified it as Nightmare Fuel for the average, spice-intolerant Asian. In reality, at an actual family reunion my mother might just have side-eyed me and the world would have moved on. But it is equally likely that conversation might have hovered around how my sister learned to eat spice because of the allegedly cancer-inducing shady “spice stick” street snacks in middle school, and the cousin who as a baby refused to eat anything but chili peppers even while crying, and then it might have shifted to how Americans can’t tolerate spice at all and as I grew up in America, the whitewashing must be why. Such a seemingly insignificant thing is not, in fact, insignificant. In China it is a conversation-starter, an ice-breaker, and to some extent a social status symbol. If you told me you were from Hunan or Sichuan Province, I might remark jokingly that it must mean you have insane spice tolerance. Xiyuan or Yiqing might be referred to as “the girl who can really eat spice.” In China, Chinese circles and Chinese culture, a country home to spice-eating contests in the Guiness World Records, it is safe to say that far beyond a simple food preference, it simply is that deep.

 

And this is something I have become aware of more than ever as the only person in my four-member family whose spice tolerance growth seems to be stunted at age two. A common occurrence at the dinner table: Gaslight the Spice-Prude Daughter. Is this spicy? I ask my mother upon seeing the very obvious chili peppers posing on the plate, who says no. I point to said chilis. She relents, I added a chili, but it isn’t spicy at all, I just tried it. Said gullible daughter tries it and incinerates the roof of her mouth. Mother, le gasp, hands over mouth, over face, over chest: This was spicy to you? or, When are you ever going to learn to tolerate spice?

 

It isn't exclusive to parents and elders; there seems to be a mysterious threshold spice-aspirers cross at some point that makes them forget where they came from. Once upon a  time, when my sister was still barred from that world, she too would scoff indignantly at my parents’ “fake news” reports for spicy dishes and their scorn for their bland-tasted daughters. But as she traveled up the spice-prestige ladder she has morphed into a perpretrator, in true sibling fashion, insisting that some food that makes even her sweat and run for water isn’t spicy at all, Ivy, so try it please, or joining in with my mother’s incredulity when to me, something that is spicy is, in fact, spicy.

 

The truth is that somewhere in this harmless cultural quirk there lies embedded, complicated problems of empathy and liability. It is perhaps the best example of being “deeply and literally self-centered,” as articulated by David Foster Wallace in the speech “This Is Water,” in the Asian experience. To a spice guru, someone whose taste buds and nerve endings have literally lost the ability to feel certain levels of spice, it is physically incomprehensible to them that someone might not be so desensitized. And it is the same for those hypersensitive to capsaicin. On the carnal and sensual level, our experiences are wholly isolated from each other.

 

The problem is when this kind of “quarantine” in individual experiences becomes routine, trivial, and unacknowledged in our everyday interactions with one another. Sometimes my mother will make spicy malatang, or default to using the spicy hotpot sauce after the two-compartment pot was thrown away, without a non-spicy alternative—and as I depend on my mother to feed me, I will often go to bed hungry. At dinners, I have to make sure that we order non-spicy dishes just so I have something to eat. When I go out to eat with my friends, the fact that I cannot eat that much spice is followed by the statement “I’m not a true Asian, haha” out of habit now, as if eating spice was a qualifier for my ethnicity and not, simply, personal preference. I have argued to my parents multiple times that spice isn’t a true flavor, just the activation of pain and heat receptors in the nerves, and that capsaicin is actually plant poison that was never meant to be domesticated and eaten. But none of it will change the fact that I might be excluded from the table tonight, however inadvertently and however lovingly.

 

But I am not blameless either. My mother remarks frequently that a dish made spice-less specifically for me would have tasted pepper with some pizzazz. With only one anomaly to the family’s flavor-diet, it’s often difficult to make meals accommodating for the whole family, expensive to order extra spice-less dishes at family dinners, and exhausting to justify adding a single chili pepper for culinary science reasons to accusatory fingers pointed from thankless, non-chef hands. My mother’s take that I should just learn how to eat spice once and for all is not without merit, either. But the truth is that it is still impossible for us to become truly connected. If I were to conform and finally level up to my family’s spice tolerance, we would simply be vibrating at the same frequency, not playing from the same instrument—it would just be that at this specific moment in time for this very niche issue, our agendas are aligned. Even if we as a family could eat the same dishes, there might still be disagreements on what ingredients we each prefer, or scuffles on how many days of the week we’ve had rice; and countless other granular tizzies unrelated to food, such as getting to school in the morning or turning in permission slips or clashes with parents’ work events and friend hangouts. The point is that conformity is never the solution, because it would only work at the impossible extreme, and neither is trying to avoid the inevitable friction that comes from inherently self-centered community experiences.

 

If the solution, then, is not to all play the same note or play from the same instrument, we must learn to harmonize—compromise and adapt to better perform our roles not as soloists but as entire orchestras. David Foster Wallace speaks negatively about our self-centeredness, but as with the duality of all human things it is also special, and miraculous in that it allows for an extraordinary wealth of diversity, and makes it even more wondrous when we do connect and unite. Individualism is not the enemy, our default settings are not the enemy, no more than the laws of physics or the fact that 1+1=2 is. The beauty of creation and human resilience is that we can work with what we have and become a little more full in the process.

 

And that is what I have come to understand is the true meaning of the Asian dining experience—when I am so sure something is not my cup of tea or within my spice tolerance, but upon being urged or threatened find myself pleasantly surprised. The fact that while some dishes are more popular than others, spicy and non-spicy, sweet and sour and savory and bitter all have their place on the menu. The very existence of the family gathering—where people living in all different places, working all different jobs and of all different ages agree on one simple common truth enough to engineer the aligning of the stars, the convening at one place at one time. The primordial ocean we were all born from; this is water, the common, consummate water flowing through all of our veins.