Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America by Mark Padoongpatt (review)

Flavors of Empire explores Thai American identity and community formation through analyzing the rise of Thai food in Los Angeles. Padoongpatt directly addresses a critical issue within Asian/Pacific Islander studies: the constant erasure of Thai Americans from historical narratives. Although a handful of scholars including Jiemin Bao and Kanjana Thepboriruk have interrogated contemporary experiences of Thai Americans, Padoongpatt’s book proves to be the first extensive work on the history of Thais in Los Angeles and U.S. Cold War interventions in Thailand. This text interrogates the deeply racialized power structures in Thailand and America that enabled Thai food to boom in Los Angeles. Thai foodways—the production, consumption, and movement of Thai food—became central to Thai American identity and community formation. While it was used to colonize Thai people and Thai Americans in the mid-twentieth century, it also served as a way for Thai communities to challenge white power structures through reclaiming a place in the global city of Los Angeles. The evidence Padoongpatt utilizes, including oral histories, U.S. Peace Corps volunteer papers, archives, cookbooks, Thai restaurant menus, and Department of State foreign relations papers, is astounding and thorough, pointing to the ways in which Thais carved out space in Los Angeles while dealing with socioeconomic issues.

Food is not just a connection to cultural heritage. It is also deeply rooted in political economy through foreign policy, trade, and labor. In chapter 1, Padoongpatt traces the popularity of Thai food to informal U.S. colonialism in Thailand. Cold War relations in Thailand gave way for white American culinary tourists to become authorities over Thai food. Tourists constructed the “Thai subject” via exotification and objectification. White suburban housewives, through cookbooks and recipes, defined what it meant to cook “authentic” Thai food. Padoongpatt states that while the popularity of Thai food spun a positive image of Thais in America, it became a replacement for Thai people: a way Americans could deal with the palatable parts of Thai identity.

Chapter 2 highlights early Thai communities in Los Angeles, focusing on Thai grocers in East Hollywood, an area where most Thai immigrants resided in the 1970s. As Padoongpatt’s research shows, because of deindustrialization and lack of resources, areas like East Hollywood became key places for Thai immigrants to reside due to cheaper rent. The search for “yum,” the salty, sour, sweet, and spicy flavor profile of Thai food, turned into a demand for authentic products, which led to the opening of Thai markets. However, Thai grocers went through a burdensome process: securing imports, purchasing foodstuffs overseas, paying tariffs, planning the entry of goods, hiring transportation, and distributing the goods. Mr. Tilakamonkul, the owner of Bangkok Market, negotiated tariff barriers, challenged enforcement agencies, and established foreign trade zones in Mexico to produce Thai ingredients for American import. Padoongpatt directly challenges popular conceptions of the area being in “decline” by telling the history of Thai markets and Thai people not only by asserting a claim to the global city, but also by revitalizing and transforming the spaces they were forced into.

Chapter 3 focuses on the food industry, the impact of Thai restaurants, and how the senses of taste and smell reestablished racial boundaries. While Thai food became a means for forming identity and community among Thais, Padoongpatt notes that Thai restaurants reinforced gender and class categorizations, where Thai men had agency through an array of roles while Thai women were subjected to the back of the kitchen or sexualized as waitresses. He conceptualizes Thai restaurants as culinary contact zones, spaces where food producers and consumers interact across race, gender, and class differences. Thai restaurants also become culinary contact zones that constructed Thai American identity, racializing Thais as an exotic nonwhite other, and thus “rendered Thai food as a stand-in for the complexities and contradictions of Thai people” (87).

Chapter 4 focuses on Wat Thai and the...