“The original selfie was a very, very serious object,” Negar Mottahedeh, a cultural critic at Duke University who has written at length on selfies, told me. She considers pilgrim-mirrors among the earliest instances of self-portraiture.
Seven hundred years later, in Indonesia, where I live, a popular new tempat wisata selfie, Indonesian for “selfie tourism destination,” has come under fire for blatantly plagiarizing immersive art works by the likes of Yayoi Kusama, Chris Burden, and even the “Museum of Ice Cream,” the immersive, traveling, smash-hit American exhibition whose tickets cost $38 a piece. Rabbit Town, in the city of Bandung, is a shrine to the ubiquitous life activity of taking photos of yourself.
Some purists believe that even switching up the order of how ingredients are added can throw off a Cuban’s delicate balance. So when someone finds a recipe that works, it becomes religion. That’s especially true of Tampa’s legendary Columbia Restaurant, the country’s oldest Hispanic restaurant. There, chefs dole out over 600 Cubans daily using the same family recipe that’s been a mainstay since 1915.
But for Hyunmin Cho and Geunmin Kang, the owners of the South Korean sandwich shop Tampa Sandwich Bar, in Seoul, the invitation to compete in Tampa against dozens of other local, statewide, and international vendors at the 2017 International Cuban Sandwich Festival “was a dream come true”. Some of their competitors had been churning out Cubans for decades. Kang and Cho had started making them less than two years before the festival.
I do not remember a time in my life when I was not aware of being marginalized as an immigrant. I may not have known those words exactly, but their meaning has always been felt. So it’s a strange thing to be told at 33 — when I’ve written a book about what it means to migrate and try to settle into a new life and lose parts of yourself in between — that my book is so relevant right now. That it sounds topical or timely, as if I must’ve jumped at this opportunity, this moment when my community is being vilified and targeted and sent away in droves by an administration that got elected on the racist notion that Mexicans are rapists and bad hombres. There’s also the well-intentioned but equally upsetting reaction from white people who say my book is sure to do well because immigration is so important right now.