Rahim Ullah’s halal food truck is a lunchtime staple for Penn students along Spruce Street, where they line up every day for the meat, rice, and vegetables he prepares from the bright red cart. Shawarma and crispy falafel are all served with energy and enthusiasm.
Ullah’s journey from Pakistan to Penn was an arduous one, taking him through 10 countries, a harrowing experience in the Panamanian jungle, and years of cooking and saving to buy his own cart.
While it began with a dream to become a cricket superstar—he still plays, on his lone day off—he loves his life and the business he has built, he said, speaking recently to students in Penn’s Asian American Food class. He is one of many guest speakers who have shared their experience with the students there.
Fariha Khan, a folklorist who is co-director of the Asian American Studies (ASAM) program, says she chose food as a path to study the broader immigrant community because food is a universal attribute. “It’s perhaps one of the best expressions of identity, when we share food, when we cook food, when we talk about our food habits,” she says. “It’s really about who we are.”
Understanding immigrant connections
Khan says she wanted to tap into the deeper immigrant experience in Philadelphia and reveal some communities that students may not have known about. “I know students are here for only four years, maybe more, but it’s very hard to really understand the city,” Khan says. “The many dynamics, and all of the richness that immigrant communities have, contribute to this city.”
Students also bring their own personal and family perspectives to the course. David Deng, a fourth-year history major and Asian American studies minor from Austin, Texas, says that growing up in a first-generation American household was a little complicated. Traditional American foods were more socially accepted when he was younger, but now “Asian food has really exploded in America while I’ve been in school trying to understand that phenomenon,” he says.
Deng, whose parents came from China, says producing and preparing food became a profession for many immigrants—either growing ingredients or cooking food in restaurants or food trucks—simply because they had to survive.
“Asian American food is really important to the story of Asian Americans,” Deng says. “It is a connection to their homelands. How food becomes one of the things that they adapt and sort of assimilate and alter is very interesting.”
Long days, expensive business
Even something as seemingly simple as running a food truck can be incredibly expensive. Ullah, for example, spent $35,000 to purchase and decorate his truck and spends $12,000 a year to rent a storage space to keep it safe overnight. That doesn’t even count his costs for ingredients, licensing, and other expenses.
The 30-year-old wakes at 6 a.m. to start his day with prayers, is at his truck by 7:30 a.m. to begin cooking, and is in place on Spruce by 9:30 a.m. or earlier. The lunch rush runs from noon to 2 p.m., and he closes around 7:30 p.m. That’s a 12-hour day, six days a week. He also does catering, including for Penn.
The bulk of his customers are students, meaning that during Winter Break and summers his business slows down considerably. “When students are gone, 70% of the business is gone,” he says. For marketing, he has turned to Instagram, where he maintains a locally popular account, @rahimredtruck, posting photos of his customers and food.
As a member of a large family, with three sisters and five brothers, Ullah knows that the quality of education for girls can be limited, and he regularly sends money home to Pakistan so his village can start a school for girls.
Khan says that Ullah’s story and those of other speakers help students understand the challenges of Asian immigrants as well as their history and culture. “A lot of times when we go to a food truck, it’s incredibly transactional,” she says.
‘Really cool lens’
Zaina Maqbool, a fourth-year health and societies major from Wallingford, Pennsylvania, says the course has become her favorite class at Penn. “It’s been a really interesting way to learn about the immigration stories of different Asian ethnic groups coming into the United States,” she says. “Food is this really cool lens to study history through.”
The class focus on the broader Philadelphia community is quite special, Maqbool says. Speakers have shared the impact of food on their lives, from professional chefs to recent immigrants, “situating themselves in Philadelphia, anchoring them in Philadelphia, and in helping them find a community,” she says. “They all have such unique perspectives on the way that food has shaped them.”
Presenters have included restaurateurs, food truck owners, and workers in community centers or cultural associations, many due to Khan’s connections as a former member of the Pennsylvania Commission on Asian Pacific American Affairs and other ties to the Philadelphia community.
Speakers have included Kenneth Yang, CEO of Penn Asian Senior Services; Naw Doh, co-executive director of the Karen Community Association of Philadelphia; Haoyi Shang, commercial corridor manager of the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation; Anuj Gupta, president and CEO of The Welcoming Center; and Sarun Chan, executive director, and Kayla Sok, market manager, of the Cambodian Association of Greater Philadelphia.
A few of these presentations have also been open to the public, including the last in the Asian Food series, and cross listed with the ASAM Asian America Across the Disciplines events, featuring James Beard Foundation Award-winner Chutatip “Nok” Suntaranon, chef and owner of Kalaya. In addition to Ullah and Suntaranon, other chefs who spoke to the class have included Raquel Dang, a self-taught chef and owner of Baby’s Kusina and Market; Curtis Chin, author of the memoir “Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant”; and Shahzad Khan, director of culinary and campus executive chef with Penn Dining.
One member of the Karen community, from Burma, brought samosas with a unique sauce like what some serve with spring rolls, Deng says. “That’s just a little example of how food reflects sort of those fusions of culture,” he says. “Having those speakers, having that representation in the classroom—I probably wouldn’t encounter them if I were just walking around in Philly.”
From challenging topics to elevating foods
And the course doesn’t shy away from difficult historical topics, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 or the forcible internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. “When Japanese Americans were incarcerated, they lost access to being able to eat together as a family in camps or cook their traditional foods,” Khan says.
There are levels to the Asian immigrant food experience, Deng says. For example, Chinese food is seen as cheaper and less expensive, while Japanese eateries can charge more and can find better locations. “Because people really like Japanese food, they really like that aspect of the culture and sort of elevates it with this hierarchical idea of what’s a good culture, what’s a good food,” he says.
Students also completed a fieldwork assignment, interviewing a member of a local immigrant community about how they use food beyond as a means of sustenance. Maqbool spoke with a woman from her hometown who immigrated from Pakistan and created a small business preparing traditional meals from her apartment.
“We talked about how she immigrated to the U.S. and the financial struggles that came as part of that, when she decided to turn her life skill for cooking into a career that sustains her family,” Maqbool says. “That was a really eye-opening process for me.”
Khan says many students think that it’s going to be a course about eating and tasting and recipes, but it’s much deeper than that. “It’s about food and race, it’s about food and labor, it’s about food and gender roles,” she says. “Food isn’t just about preparing and consuming, it’s about identity, it’s about colonization, it’s about changing food habits, it’s about the refugee experience, it’s about the economy.”
But above all “food is intimate. It really is an intimate expression of self.”
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