Fruity Pebbles and Congee Make Perfect Sense Together – Trust Me
Written By Maggie Wong
When I set out to write my take on a specifically Asian American short film, I dreamed up – or spawned? – a fictional dish that has, since sharing the script, sparked disgust and questions. Lots and lots of questions. Such as: Just, why? And do I actually (or did I ever) enjoy the artificial flavor of Fruity Pebbles sprinkled over an otherwise wholesome bowl of congee? Does something as humble, pure, and centuries-old, as plain rice porridge really deserve to be defiled by a flashy modern invention?
No, to all of the above. But I can confirm that when I tried the sacrilegious combination for my film’s crowdfunding video, I vowed to never try it again. For those who are curious, it doesn’t taste terrible. But it doesn’t taste good. It tastes exactly how you would expect it to – largely like fruity sugar. Congee is a blank canvas after all. But really, the most off-putting thing about it is the melding of textures, the way crisp, airy rainbow-colored puffs sink and bleed into porridge if you let it sit for more than a few minutes. It just feels wrong, I’ll admit it.
As I wrote Golden Garden Takeout – which tells the story of a nosy Chinese American mother, Judy, who investigates whether her teenage daughter, Steph, has a secret boyfriend, and accidentally witnesses her devastating breakup – I needed to create a symbol that represented what can happen at the intersection of two cultures. That is, friction, tension, strange harmony – and the spark of a Third Culture that naturally creates things that haven’t existed before. Things that, because they don’t have long standing precedent, are fuzzier, still being defined, still being reacted to, still being navigated. This whole being Asian and American thing is something that only makes deep, perfect sense to Asian Americans. It’s still a piece of my identity that I’m coming to terms with.
It's one reason I wrote this film, something I could have only written as an adult, with a few years of distance from growing up in my Cantonese immigrant parents’ household. The story is a first-generation kid-immigrant parent story, told largely through the perspective of a Chinese immigrant mother. It’s about the imperfect love I started to see in the rough edges of the way my parents raised me, despite there being whole parts of me they couldn’t understand, or agree with – simply because I grew up in a different culture than they did.
It’s about how they loved me anyway. And how even if Fruity Pebbles and jook (as we say in Cantonese) truly make no sense, it’s worth putting together because someone you love likes it.
Maggie Wong is an independent writer/director based in New York. Golden Garden Takeout is currently in pre-production. Learn more about the project and join AIA in bringing it to life by checking out the film’s crowdfunding campaign.
