So my family and I immigrated to Los Angeles
when I was 12, in 1984.
So we ended up in LA.
And it was during the Olympics.
So this poem is actually set during that time,
and it's called "Hamburger."
And that's actually an epigraph by the chef
Dan Barber, who owns the Blue Hill Farm upstate in New York.
He's a big farm to table guy.
So the epigraph goes, "The great curse of American food culture
is that we have no food culture."
[LAUGHTER]
"Hamburger."
In 1984, when I arrived in these United States,
pastel neon in the dream pastiche desert
of Olympics-fisted Los Angeles, I wanted my first meal to be
a hamburger drenched in tomato, not banana, ketchup,
squeezed between white sesame seed buns, not pandesal--
Filipino morning roll eaten sweetly any time of day.
That had to wait.
On arrival in a town called Bell,
I was served rice under pork chicken adobo,
and the rest of my first week, a feast as if I've never loved--
pancit garnish with shredded veggies for longevity,
oxtails, pork hocks, calves feet bisque in peanut butter sauce,
pig stewed in shrimp paste, bitter melon, chayote, achiote.
The women live practically in the kitchen.
How things had not yet changed, my grandmother chopping,
stir frying, frying, boiling, steaming, mashing,
melodious sounds that carry the bewildering loneliness
of a foreign home momentarily out of doors.
Since the table was not big enough,
we ate together, scattered throughout
the two-bedroom, one-bath house shared by three families.
On mats on the floor, we children
love sleeping side-by-side, hot dogs
rotating on a carnival seller's grill.
But I was growing impatient.
The fast food that would transform me into an American,
I hadn't ingested, a kind of superhero pill,
until my first day of school in my 7th grade cafeteria
where I was served a round patty of compressed meat--
boiled, charred, yawning, open face, next to curly potatoes
glowing a cartoon meteorite orange.
I could not contain my joy.
I tore and poured on packets of ketchup,
discarded the wilted iceberg like fabric softener,
clamped the hamburger between my shaky hands,
and chomped momentously into my first taste of America--
salty, starchy, chewy, beginning to a lifetime consumption
powdered with sugar, melted as margarine,
deep fried, blue dyed, iced, over
jell-oed, marshmallowed, popcorned, bite size,
on the run.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]