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Heads up: Food52 earns an affiliate commission on qualifying purchases of the products we link to.<\/em><\/p>\n We had the pleasure of chatting with Frankie Gaw, the Seattle-based food writer and photographer known for his blog, Little Fat Boy<\/em><\/a>. His first book, First Generation: Recipes From My Taiwanese-American Home<\/em><\/a>, came out in October 2022 and delighted readers with its nostalgic recipes, playful visuals, and unexpected flavor and ingredient pairings (lap cheong corn dogs, anyone?).<\/p>\n How did the process of creating the book compare to the writing and work you do for your blog, Little Fat Boy<\/em>?<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019m very much an introvert, and it takes a while for me to open up about my personal life. Even though I was writing a blog about Asian American food, I felt like I could kind of get away with talking about it at a surface level. I could be like, \u201cOh yeah, this stew is from my grandma,\u201d or, \u201cThis is something I ate as a kid,\u201d but I never had to dive into any of the details of what it was like to be<\/em> that kid.<\/p>\n In the beginning, I thought I could just extend my blog voice and bring it into a book. Reading some of the early drafts, my friends were like, \u201cThis doesn\u2019t sound like you at all. Your personality isn\u2019t there. Your story isn\u2019t there.\u201d It was a really good wake up call\u2014I had to ask myself, why am<\/em> I writing this book? I wanted to see what I hadn\u2019t seen as a kid, which was a book that was around the Asian American immigrant experience. It always felt like you could only have an Asian cookbook if you were a historical expert or had a deep, deep knowledge of the culture. I thought it would just be so cool to come at it from the very personal, unique perspective of an individual or a family.<\/p>\n I had to dive deep into my own personal experiences and identity and understand what it means for me to be Asian American\u2014the things I\u2019m proud of, but also the shame I was struggling with.<\/p>\n How does it feel to have done such a personal project that required so much vulnerability?<\/strong><\/p>\n I feel somewhat scared [laughs]. Some of this stuff I\u2019ve never even expressed to my family or friends, especially because the cookbook was such an isolated project. I worked on it a lot during the pandemic, and I wrote and shot the whole thing in my house. It felt like my own personal project that wasn\u2019t going to be seen by the world. So, I think I was a little bit hesitant when I finished\u2014I put a lot of myself in this book. But I also feel very proud, because I accomplished the goal that I set for myself at the beginning, which was to represent a group of people that I felt hadn\u2019t really been represented in cookbooks or in food media in the past. It was this idea of celebrating third culture kids, people who always kind of felt between two cultures and are still trying to figure it out. I felt like the book really captured a moment in time for me, of validating and making worthy this feeling of not belonging, or this feeling of trying to understand your identity through food.<\/p>\n
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