Amanda Lin invites you to consume both Asian food and content at Between a Wok & a Hot Pot
If you haven’t already heard, it’s cool to be Asian. Crazy Rich Asians, featuring an exclusively Asian cast, is a blockbuster film that opens on August 15, and has already received a whopping 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, and Macklemore is making pho the trend for all of Seattle’s hip-hop scene and beyond. This second piece of information I got from creator Amanda Lin’s hilarious experimental dinner theatre piece titled Between a Wok & a Hot Pot.
In this piece, playing for only one more night (tonight!), Lin tells the audience of an internal conflict between 2 of her primary identities – being Asian, and being Canadian. She suggests that it is significantly more difficult to celebrate the 2 identities individually, especially when being Asian means being a visible minority in Canadian society. Annoyingly, she is always subject to the question, “where are you from?”, to which she sometimes replies “Pickering” for the shock value on the white person’s face who asks her. Yet, the answer to the question they really mean is also hazy, since Taiwan – the place from which the Lin family originates – has historically been a blend of Chinese and Japanese cultures, practices and traditions. One thing, however, that Lin is sure of is her family’s fondness of the hot pot, which she shares with us!
Seated at a table with a hot pot in the middle and all the various necessary apparatus we need to successfully make hot pot, Lin guides the audience in which ingredients to put into the put, and what foods, dressings and spices we need to mix in order to create the perfect hot pot dip. Lin states that although she grew up fairly disconnected from her Asian culture, “theatre and food were always the two things that helped [her] learn more and appreciate where [she] came from”. While the food was indeed delicious (and vegetarian), it was a bit distracting to have to split our focus between preparing and eating the food, and the comprehensive slideshow off of which Lin based her engaging performance.
Fashioned in a brightly-coloured kimono with chopsticks in her hair, Lin uses this slideshow to explain to audiences the nuanced difficulties of being an Asian-Canadian artist in the 21st century. From explaining exactly what attributional empathy is and how it directly affects her own self-perception as an artist, to identifying the problems with the commodification of diversity in culture, audiences can be sure they will leave with a newfound understanding of being a minority in Canadian culture. Or at least, audiences will leave with their bellies full of some authentic Asian hot pot, something about which Lin cares – “in Asian culture especially, cooking food for someone is a big way people show their love”.
Well, I love her right back and am confident that you will too once you get a taste of her witty and eccentric humour, and the food of course.
Between a Wok and a Hot Pot plays in the Rehearsal Room at the Tett Centre for only 2 more shows tonight! Click here for show times and tickets!
