Poor Girl, Stinky Girl

Stinky, funky and spicy - my favourite condiment.

Bangkok, Thailand | PC Ravenous Ratha

There is a dark side to delicious food. Sometimes it stinks!

My mom is a great cook, and I grew up eating a lot of delicious, home-cooked meals: savoury noodle soups with chewy rice noodles, tender slices of beef, and fragrant with scallions and cilantro; steaming and translucent, there was another favourite: a vibrant chicken soup with lime leaf, lemongrass, and garlic, with the last-minute addition of fresh-squeezed lime juice, bright red, bird-eye chilies and cilantro, stems included. There was another dish of crispy, deep-fried smelt, their insides sometimes creamy with white roe, served with a Khmer pickle/relish consisting of carrots, green papaya, and cucumber. And always, always, the ever omnipresent: steamed jasmine rice. My mom even made broccoli taste good - my sisters and I scarfed down veggie-loaded stir-fries with squid tentacles, poked at snails (I loved the nifty fork you used to extract the snail from its shell) and considered braised chicken feet a real treat (they were difficult to find in non Asian markets).  

My entire world was my mom and two sisters. We were very poor. I did not know this for a long time. My mom was very skilled at budgeting and we never went hungry. Also, a lot of the food she bought was not popular, nor expensive, such as chicken feet and oxtail; it was dirt cheap to buy at the time. Bones for soup were also super cheap, or sometimes even free. Soup could last for days in our home. I didn’t realize our family was so poor, until I was 8 or 9, the truth hitting me blunt and hard, like a clear, glass wall the poor birds do not see. My very best friend told me blandly that my family was poor: my mom was a single mom and we were on welfare. Then he laughed with his brother. I didn’t quite understand what this all meant at the time, to be honest. The reality was that we were all poor. We were all refugees. In fact, he told me this in a blueberry field where both our mothers were toiling under the hot sun, picking blueberries to make extra money to feed us. So I punched him, and then we went back to playing. I could never take anything he said seriously. 

The three amigos circa 1988.

The damage had been done, however, and my third eye had awoken. This third eye gave me insight into my harsh reality: We were poor. This is why we lived in basement suites. We had always lived in basement suites or apartments (which I preferred - they were so usually so much cleaner) but my mom said there were too many rules.

I started to have terrible anxiety about appearing poor and people finding out that I was poor. I started to believe that being poor allowed people to treat you badly, and you couldn’t get that Super Soaker Skipper you’d had your eye on the entire summer.  I think the toy was $35 or something like that, a stupid skipping rope that sprayed water. You could not buy nice things, nor have a nice house, with stairs, and your own room, with beautiful things on your walls, nor beautiful clothes in your closet. I started to become obsessed with how I looked. We could not afford to buy trendy or expensive clothes of course, so I tried to be creative with what I had. I was and am in no way a trendy dresser, so I often looked awkward and weird, like I tried too hard. I refused to wear clothes that my mom bought at cheap department stores but sometimes I had no choice, like this huge purple monstrosity of a jacket that I still have nightmares about.

My worst fear when I was 10 years old, was that people would find out that my clothes, so carefully selected by my mom, were bought at Kmart and Zellers or even worse, at thrift stores (which were often the nicest things!). My own vanity was often my own downfall, like these super horrible, knock-off Doc Martens that I bought once from Kmart. They were so hideous and my pride for them was quickly stamped down and rightly so. My pride was false and hollow and those shoes were cheap and ugly af.

My anxiety also started to manifest in the fear that I was stinky. I started to fear that I was a stinky person.

The worst part is that I would not even know if I stunk or not! I had been oblivious to the fact that we were poor so of course I stank and didn’t know. I ate all of the stinky food with such enthusiasm for a little kid - all the chicken heart stir-fries and balut and lemongrass rich dishes my mom cooked. I probably stank to high heaven. 

My Mama Nann cooked with the oddest, most pungent ingredients like prahok and intestines, meaning the invading smells of fermented fish and offal often clouded through the house - lies, we never lived in houses - basement suite, like a thick and unavoidable fog. Offal needed to be boiled for hours. They were destined for certain Khmer dishes my mom craved, a last link to her home country, and the boiling process purges them their bitterness and stink. I had no idea these foods stank until our landlords started to complain and then tried to prohibit us from cooking certain foods. But then my mom would have a craving and fry something like a dried, smoked mackerel, and give us all away. So worth it though, that fried fish, flaked and pounded together with julienned green mango, lime juice, fish sauce, chilies and garlic. A truly stinky dish that makes my mouth water just thinking about it! But then we would get in trouble and my mother had to devise ever more ways to hide the stink when cooking prahok or intestines.

Fishy fish, oh so stinky.
PC Denis Agatic | Unsplash

I started to realize that being stinky was bad. And smelling like fish was really, really bad. Oh dear lord, I probably smell bad, my poor, young mind panicked. Smelling like curry was also bad. I knew this because some of the kids at school would make fun of Indian and South Asian kids for smelling like curry. I couldn’t make fun of them because my mom’s creamy coconut chicken curry was one of my most favourite foods. It still is. It is aromatic with turmeric, coconut, lemongrass, and garlic, the curry paste having been hand pounded in her mortar and pestle. All the Khmer kids I knew ate their mum’s curry as I did: with gusto, and crusty french bread, eating till our bellies rounded out, tight like a drum.I couldn’t be Judas and put my fellow friend to slaughter. I loved curry too.

I remember a particularly painful experience in gym class. I was about nine or ten years old and we were practicing lay up drills. We were in groups of four or five when out of nowhere, one girl yelled out that she smelled something stinky and claimed that it was me and that Asians eat weird food. 

We do! I loved it! Weird food is interesting food; give it to me over normal food any day. However, my nine-year-old self was neither strong nor brave enough yet to declare this love. I had eaten an egg swirl and matsutake mushroom soup that morning for breakfast, with a light sprinkling of fish sauce. Did I get some on my skin or shirt? I said as such and was rewarded with screeches of “fish sauce, gross”. Later, in the bathroom, I smelled myself all over very carefully and noticed a slightly fishy smell on my wrist. I must have missed a spot because it was higher on my wrist - I did stink! I felt so humiliated. However, it did not stop me from going home and eating more more soup. Do you know how much matsutake can cost? I didn’t at that time, but I did know it was delicious! My mom makes an egg swirl soup with Dungeness crab and matsutake (pine) mushrooms. Sometimes it is made with mushrooms foraged by my dad and crabs caught by my mom or a friend. It smacks of Pacific Northwest and tastes so wonderfully fresh. It does not necessarily stink but I added a bit of fish sauce to the soup and fish sauce stinks like ass. 

I watched the movie Parasite recently and the theme about being poor and stinky really hit me hard. We too lived in a cold, damp, basement suite. We were so poor that I also believed the stench of poverty had sunk deep into my skin and hair, with me leaving behind a waft of fish sauce and despair in my wake. 

No shame in my gnawing game: chicken feet with rice noodles and nuoc cham.
We sat on stools in an alleyway - which is my favourite way to eat.

Hanoi, Vietnam | PC Ravenous Ratha

I understand now that these actions by those young girls may have been a form of discrimination from young, white children who are unfamiliar with certain foods and their stink. And these kids were all white. No way any Asian kids were going to make fun of Indian kids or vice versa, We all ate weird stinky foods and loved them too much! We stuck together! Unfamiliar things, as we have all observed, can lead to a pattern in a lot of people: We group it as bad, or negative. And strong-smelling food - fish sauce, curry, - is hard to ignore and can be considered aggressive or vulgar, low class. Different. Strange. Smelly! There’s also research that suggests that evolution could come into play; we are grossed out by smells that we should traditionally fear if we want to survive IE Rotten in caveman days probably gave you a stomach ache or badly preserved food would make you sick. It took some time for us to come up with kimchi and thousand-year-old eggs. I bet the first batches were terrible and not in a good way. Then through patience, and I bet a lot of trial and error, we had thousand-year-old eggs, wine, kimchi, fish sauce, and cheese. 

I became obsessed with smelling clean and perfumed. My stepbrother stole a bottle of CKone for me when I was 12, and though I was expressly forbidden to wear the perfume as I was deemed too young, I splashed it liberally on myself any chance I could get. I also started wearing a strongly perfumed antiperspirant. 

And then of all ironies, I became allergic to ALL forms of deodorant, save cornstarch and coconut oil formulas. My armpits grow a fungus. It is disgusting and if I sweated while wearing antiperspirant, it somehow gets even disgustingly worse. So I am now a soldier with no armour. I have to be strong in my confidence that I don’t stink, but I have smelled my armpit enough times and have had many friends, and boyfriends, and now husband to smell me at random times. So far, I always smell good. Whew.

When I was 21 years old, a coworker told me I smelled like dumplings and that it was a good thing. He now wanted dumplings! I was more than OK with that. I think this was the beginning of my confidence for my Khmer background and the confidence that comes with being young, beautiful, bright and Asian. I started to understand that stinky food is delicious food: Cheeses, pickles, kimchi, sauces, fish, these are stinky and delicious things. Stinky food is often preserved food to make food last. Stinky food is often economical and sensible, given they came about when were no fridges nor freezers. 

Travelling to other countries really opened my nose up to different aromas, smells, scents and stinks. I also learned that so many Asians considered white foreigners really stinky! A Thai person never stinks as they may bathe 3 times a day. The person stinking up the bus is usually the young, heavily perspiring white North American backpacker who forgot to pack his deodorant and cannot handle the 35° plus heat and humidity. 

I was even brave enough to visit a fish sauce factory in Battambong, Cambodia. It was so interesting! The smell was incredible, so strong it felt physical. As we explored the countryside, I did not worry if the stink lingered on my skin at any point. I tried stinky tofu in Taiwan and that was intense, even for me, I love how this dish is so wonderfully, apologetically strong, and so loved and defended by those who love it. The stinky tofu stand is always one of the busiest stands at night markets.

Standing proud in the motherland.
Angkor Wat | PC @timjaspy

I feel this way about Khmer food too. It is such a force in my life and I am no longer ashamed of its smells and flavours; I welcome and embrace them: Mackerel, kimchi, durian, fish sauce, nuoc cham, prahok. I love it all and I am no longer ashamed. Do you know what dried squid smells like when it’s being charred over the bbq? I do: It’s pungent and robust and forceful; if the wind is strong, the smell of it will carry for miles. But this chewy, salty snack is so good with a cold beer, you only smell the salt and brininess of it because of the beer bubbles bursting under your nose. It reminds me of carefree times in warm places, and great conversations over cold beers. There is nothing like long afternoons of laughter, salt, and beer. 

Yes, it took some time for me to embrace and love my stinky heritage and now there is no return for me. Gimme dat funk baby. Gimme dat stink.