What is national identity

Last night, watching the Top Chef finale a week after it aired (managed not to know the result either!) something the judges said to Hung set me thinking. Hung was technically the best chef on the show, and because of his training in haute cuisine, his creations sometimes lacked personality, in the judges' opinions.

One of the judges said, in this conversation: 'you're Vietnamese, aren't you?' (as if he didn't know). 'Why don't we see more of that in your cooking?'

Now, I don't know Hung's personal circumstances, or how connected he feels to Vietnamese heritage. Perhaps he was raised in a culturally Vietnamese setting, where he learned to cook the food his family did. Perhaps he did not. The specifics of this situation are neither here nor there.

What does bug me about that question is the judge's insistence that because Hung is visibly Vietnamese, that he should cook that way.

In other words, you are ethnic, therefore you must cook ethnic.

Whether Hung chooses to reflect his family's heritage in his cooking should be up to him, not up to commentators who expect Asianness because of his appearance.

Of course, cooking is an intimate enterprise, reflecting home and heritage in more ways perhaps than other creative arenas. I imagine that most people who love cooking do so because of an elder family member, or other formative experiences.

However, I am reluctant to impose expectations, because of visible ethnic characteristics. Naive views of heritage imply that skin or language is unifying, such as the odd characterization of 'Hispanic' people in America. People who speak Spanish represent so many cultures, that are effaced under a bland terminological convenience.

The political purpose of such alliances are clear. However, there has always been a deep and wide variety within these cultural and ethnic groupings. Political boundaries do seem to differ from creative and cultural modes of self expression.

Is it damaging to others in the group that mainstream culture identifies you with, when you choose to approach your skin, background etc. tangentially?

What are the limits of identification with a national or ethnic heritage? How much is optional?

Is the person who prefers not to be ethnically pigeonholed identifying with whiteness? Surely this is not a zero sum game, where failing to choose one automatically means the other.

I presume that Hung's technical expertise comes from European training. As he experiments with that, to come up with his own style, is it unfair to expect that it will be somehow Asian, because he is?