Thailand’s “77th Province”

Chapter 5 explores "Thai Town" in East Hollywood (established in 1999) to highlight the role of culinary tourism in Thai American struggles for a right to the global city. It charts the history of Thai Town's development as a product of Thai community leaders, specifically the Thai Community Development Center, and Los Angeles city officials’ attempt to parlay Thai cuisine's popularity into political visibility, civic engagement, social justice activism, and urban redevelopment. While playing on cuisine-driven multiculturalism allowed Thais to use food, specifically culinary tourism, to root identity and community in a physical place, the chapter argues that heritage commodification in Thai Town also constricted a right to the global city, because it was geared toward a neoliberal vision of multiculturalism that sought to highlight the position of Los Angeles in the global capitalist economy. The chapter also includes a discussion of the 1995 El Monte slave-labor case.

“One Night in Bangkok”

This chapter explores the blossoming of America's fascination with Thai cuisine during the Cold War. The informal postwar U.S. empire in Thailand vacillated between "hard" and "soft" power, consisting of state-sponsored dictatorships, militarization, modernization projects, and cultural diplomacy. The chapter traces how this neocolonial relationship established circuits of exchange between the two countries, making it possible for thousands of ordinary Americans (non-state actors) to go to Thailand and participate in U.S. global expansion through culinary tourism. Many, especially white women, treated Thai foodways as a window into Thai history and culture and into the psyche of the Thai people. The chapter argues that these culinary tourists constructed an idealized image of Thailand and a neocolonial Thai subject by writing "Siamese" cookbooks and teaching cooking classes to suburban homemakers back in Los Angeles, whetting Americans' appetite for an exotic Other’s cuisine.

Too Hot to Handle?

This chapter explores the Thai restaurant boom in Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s to show how Thais grappled with U.S. racial, gender, and class structures through the food-service industry. The boom, coupled with new patterns of discretionary spending, turned Thai restaurants into culinary contact zones where sensory experiences reestablished racial boundaries and sustained racial thinking and practices. To distinguish Thai food from other Asian cuisines, Thai restaurateurs—along with white food critics—used race, ethnicity, and nation to produce novelty and product differentiation in the marketing of Thai cuisine. In explaining to the American public how Thais were unique from other Asians based on what they cooked and ate, they relied on taste and smell to construct Thais as an exotic non-white Other. The chapter also discusses how Thai restaurants reinforced, created, and masked gender and class divisions within the community through labor practices behind the kitchen door.

“More Than a Place of Worship”

This chapter examines food festivals at the Wat Thai of Los Angeles, the first and largest Thai Buddhist temple in the nation, which was established in 1979, as a window on the relationship between food, race, and place in the suburbs during the 1980s. It charts Thai American suburbanization in the East San Fernando Valley near Wat Thai and traces the history of the temple, including how it evolved into a community space that became popular for its weekend food festivals. The festivals, which attracted thousands of visitors, fostered a public-oriented Thai American suburban culture that was a claim for a "right to the global city." The festivals, however, sparked complaints from a group of nearby residents, who used zoning laws to try to shut them down. The chapter contends that the residents who opposed the festivals articulated a liberal multiculturalism to maintain the white spatial imaginary of the neighborhood.

Conclusion

The conclusion explains the author's reasons for writing the book, including autobiographical material, and how the author came to the topic. It details the book's scholarly contributions and interventions into dominant narratives of postwar U.S. empire, race in America, post-1965 immigration, and metropolitan history. It ends with a discussion of the larger goals of the book and the insights it can provide into issues related to food, identity, and community in the United States today, including cultural appropriation, cultural food colonialism, and cuisine-driven multiculturalism.

“Chasing the Yum”

This chapter examines the origins of Thai foodways inside the United States, focusing on food procurement as a community-building practice among Thai Americans in Los Angeles before free trade. Before the 1970s, Thai and Southeast Asian ingredients were not widely available, which led to a crisis of identity among Thai immigrants. The chapter follows Thai food entrepreneurs who resolved the crisis by developing a local supply of Thai ingredients, opening grocery stores like Bangkok Market, and starting import/export companies. Chapter 2 also discusses the first wave of Thai immigration. U.S. cultural diplomacy in Thailand encouraged thousands of Thais to obtain student visas to study in the United States. These college students were among the first to open Thai restaurants and food-related businesses in the city. Many, however, ultimately overstayed their visas and became "ex-documented."

Introduction

The introduction lays out the main arguments, central claims, agenda, and goals of the book. It makes a case for studying food, identity, and community in relation to race rather than simply as an expression of culture. It identifies key historical forces and significant turning points to structure the narrative arc of the story of food in the making of Thai American identity and community in Los Angeles from the end of World War II to the present. This narrative is woven into a discussion of the relevant scholarship on Asian American foodways, the U.S. empire in Asia and the Pacific, and the rise of Los Angeles as a global city to establish a basis for the book and how it extends and challenges existing studies on racial formation in the late twentieth-century United States. The introduction ends with a detailed description of archives and methodology and brief chapter summaries.