Burning Food is Toxic
Ice Queen Interviews Jenny Chu
Ice Queen: So, to start us off, what made you submit these poems to Ice Queen?
Jenny Chu: I submitted them because I just love your guys' aesthetic. I saw you on Chill Subs and I was like, Oh my gosh, yay, it's so cute!
I loved the pixel character concept, and I thought... I looked at your Instagram and I was like, The aesthetic is super cute, I'm gonna submit it.
I also like that you can self-nominate and you have to submit some of your own work, so I submitted Shareable Photographers, which is a poem I wrote a while ago.
Ice Queen: Perfect. Okay. So tell us about "I, Agnostic".
Jenny Chu: Well, when I was writing it, I was thinking about how love and religion can be intertwined, and I was thinking about how intimate both of these things are and how I could explore that.
And honestly, this is about kind of just being in love with someone– the little moments of being in love with someone, but also kind of dealing with your experience with higher powers as well and feeling small.
Ice Queen: And how would you say that the mentions of food in this poem plays into those feelings?
Jenny Chu: I think the food helps it a lot by grounding it in authentic human experience, because I think food is a very... obviously all of us need food, right? I was thinking the food helps establish this motif of love and just living together as normal people, and then also giving texture to the piece.
Ice Queen: Right. Did the poem surprise you in any way?
Jenny Chu: Yeah, it did surprise me, 'cause originally it was gonna be about romance, but then it kind of switched into more of a texture piece, like I said, that explores more themes like family, love, and food.
Ice Queen: Beautiful. Let's talk about "Chinese Supermarket". I love that you have this dedication here for yourself. Tell me a little bit about the piece and then what made it so special for you to dedicate it to yourself?
Jenny Chu: I'm Chinese American, and I grew up in these supermarkets. I was walking into a market and I was like, I wanna write a poem that feels authentic to the experience, but also kind of fits into the larger Chinese folklore, Chinese American diasporic folklore. In 2023, the dedication is because, at that time in my life, I just moved to high school, and I was stressed and I was like, Oh my gosh, like, how am I gonna, like, reckon with my Chinese American identity in high school, you know? How am I going to keep myself, like, culturally balanced and aware of my heritage? This poem is an ode to belonging and to how food is a central part of this and how food, and the places that hold food, can be such important places for the diaspora to me.
Ice Queen: Very well said; okay, so the recipe that you chose, which by this point all of the Ice Queen readers should see how it's really sort of a recipe you need to know what you're doing, right? What made you wanna showcase that?
Jenny Chu: The recipe that I chose was actually my mom's recipe. So my mother, for me and my family, all the food that we eat is mostly Chinese. And even if it's not, like, explicitly Chinese, we still put a lot of touches on it– soy sauce on pasta, et cetera.
And I think it was important to me to showcase my family 'cause that recipe is actually my favorite food. My mom's dumplings are my favorite food, so I was just thinking about how to showcase that; an homage to my parents who have worked so hard for me to have opportunities in my life and to showcase their culture too.
Ice Queen: Beautiful. Would that be your favorite family recipe then? Do you have a favorite personal recipe?
Jenny Chu: I actually don't, because I like making omelets. It's not a recipe– it's not fancy, but I like making potato and broccoli omelets for my family. And like the little... I figured out a long time ago, that if you cut out a pepper, a bell pepper, and you cut out the center, you can put an egg in it and it'll be an egg pepper, it's pretty.
Ice Queen: Like a toad in the hole, but with pepper [yeah you meant an Egg in the Basket, Ice].
Jenny Chu: Yeah!
Ice Queen: Yeah.
Jenny Chu: I also sometimes make pasta for my family.
Ice Queen: Like homemade pasta?
Jenny Chu: Uh, no [Laughs]. I use like store-bought pasta.
Ice Queen: I was about to say! 'Cause that's next level stuff right there, getting into the fresh made pasta.
So then this question is, and you've kind of touched on this a little bit already when you were speaking about your pieces, but what would you say your relationship to food is in your writing?
Jenny Chu: Food is a really important thing to me, in my writing, 'cause I think it's a very good accent and a good backdrop for like bigger things to happen. And also, food is just love. Yeah. The act of making food, the act of serving food is just inherently so loving, and I think it's so... but also, if you burn food, like it's inherently a little hateful or a little toxic.
So I think just whatever is done to food and how it's prepared just makes a relationship so much more wholesome or, you know, more complex and nuanced, so I use food as that.
I just love food, I'm a foodie. I love trying new foods. Me and my friends went out to this Palestinian restaurant called Ayat recently, and it was really good.
What I love about food and writing is... look obviously, food explains or undercuts how someone grew up–their personality, their dreams, and just what they were raised around, even without realizing it.
Sometimes I'll read a Hispanic author and they'll talk about Hispanic foods, or I'll read an African American author and they'll talk about African American foods, and I think it's a very important prism of culture.
It's a way to see culture that humanizes people beyond their art or their persona.
I would say one of my favorite food mentions is from Danez Smith's poem, "summer, somewhere", because they mention food, not centrally, but they talk about sweets and salts and pulp and there's just a lot of small things in there that I feel come together to make the piece more vibrant.
My other favorite food poem, one of my favorite poems of all time actually, it's called "Summer" by Chen Chen. It's so good. It talks about things that are like really relevant to the Chinese-American diaspora, 'cause it talks about red ice cream, Singapore, sandwiches. That specific scene is just so... the things that he talks about are so mundane, but you can just tell so much about them, and it's very relatable to me.
Because it immediately sets you in a different area of the world, but still it's like this American tradition of ice cream. But like there's different commonalities of flavors, but at the end you can still tell that like there is a specific type of flavor you're supposed to be, which is, it's a metaphor for being straight, and I think it just transcends those like barriers.
Yeah. That's my favorite food scene in writing.
Ice Queen: Love that. I love asking people this– no one has ever had the same or even like similar answers to these questions. So even though it's the same questions that I'm asking over and over again, I love to hear how people approach these thoughts.
'Cause, you know, sometimes people have come on and they sort of prefaced everything by saying, "Oh, I'm not very passionate actually about food."
Jenny Chu: Oh, I love food.
Ice Queen: But then they start talking about it and it's like, you might not be passionate about it, but you feel strongly about it.
Jenny Chu: Mm-hmm!
Ice Queen: People have much more thoughts about it than I think maybe they realize that they do. So I love to hear how much you live for food. It's amazing. So what would you say are your favorite food scenes in TV, movies, or video games?
Jenny Chu: Oh gosh. Hmm... [Pauses to think] Okay. My favorite food scene of all time is in Joy Luck Club. It's a movie based off the book by Amy Tan. And I think the scene where they're all eating food together in the house.
And I just think it's so powerful. 'Cause the food is obviously, it looks great. Like, I look at it and I think, Wow, it looks so good. But also, I just think the about way that the food eaten by each of them, and the boyfriend can't use chopsticks. And, like, it's a very small thing, but I think it is a really good way to demonstrate the small ways that you can either fit in or be an outsider.
I've also always had a special fondness for the Minecraft cake or pumpkin pie. I just really like them. Whenever I play Minecraft with my friends, we'll make cake or pumpkin pies and we'll take them out and just eat them.
They're just really cute designs, and I think they're very whimsical parts of Minecraft.
Ice Queen:What is your favorite show that is about food? Hmm.
Jenny Chu: I actually don't... This is a confession; I don't really watch TV shows. I used to watch Canadian MasterChef, 'cause they're really nice on that show. I don't do mean food shows.
Ice Queen: Yeah. That's a, that's a good answer. I would watch Canadian MasterChef clips, and like, Australian MasterChef clips sometimes on YouTube, so those are always good.
Jenny Chu: Yeah, I also like... my guilty pleasure is looking at reels of instant ramen, 'cause it's really good.
Ice Queen: I love watching those when people are like, Okay, so this is how I do it. And they're like, You're gonna take like a tablespoon of Kewpie mayo. Specifically, it has to be Kewpie. You're gonna take an egg yolk. You're gonna like... And just like zhuzhing up, like what we all grew up and loved eating.
Oh, let's see. Do you bake or cook a lot?
Jenny Chu: I do! Whenever I have free time.
Ice Queen: How did you get into it?
Jenny Chu: I've been around food my whole life. Me and my mom... I would always grow up watching her cook. Also my dad too, 'cause my dad cooks.
[Deadpan] Feminism, equal.
I've always been someone who views food and cooking as a way to connect with my family. My family is literally, after this interview, going out to dinner together. So my family and I, we make time for each other through food. Dinners are like a really big thing for us. I like cooking for them, like pastas. I like making puff pastry whenever I have free time, and just kinda trying out our favorite dishes. Yeah, I'm definitely a big foodie. Baking, I use... okay, I'm ashamed...I use pre-made mixes, like Trader Joe's. I am kinda basic. I just use pre-made mixes for baking, or I use puff pastry to make little apple tarts for my family, or fruit tarts.
Ice Queen: You know, I don't think there's anything wrong with a pre-made mix.
Jenny Chu: One time I did make brownies from scratch.
Ice Queen: I think a lot of times you're either a cook or you're a baker, right? Like, you can like to do both of them, but your passion's usually going to lie in one direction over the other. I feel like you lean more towards the cook side of it.
Jenny Chu: Yeah, I feel like cooking... I've always said I like cooking more because cooking is a very active thing. You're right there, you can see what's going on every second. You lift it off, you're like, Yes, I did that. But for baking, it's like you gotta mix a bunch of stuff, put it in, and then just... wait. I get bored, I wanna be in the action!
Ice Queen: See, and I'm more of a baker. When I was younger, I didn't enjoy the really scientific side of baking, I guess. I didn't understand why ingredients reacted the way that they do or how to make something my own. 'Cause a lot of times people always say, Oh, baking is a very exact science and it's like, it is, but also someone still had to create the recipe, right? So, it is still incredibly experimental at the same time. It's just after you have found that recipe, if that is what you want, then that is what you have to do. I think sometimes cooking is a little bit more forgiving.
This is a three-part question. So the first is, what is your favorite food (which you already answered), if you could only eat one food for the rest of your life, what would it be and why, and then the final questions is what food have you tried really hard to like and you just don't?
Jenny Chu: Um, if I had to eat one food for the rest of my life, it would have to be my mom's dumplings because they're my favorite. Yeah, they're very home for me; they're very filling, they're really delicious, and they're pretty healthy, too.
A food I've tried to like, let's see... I think salads. That sounds so embarrassing, but I hate salads.
I've tried to like them, but I need some kind of protein. I can do chicken and greens, if there's a salad next to chicken, I'm like, Okay, that's fine, but I could not just eat pure plants. I need something else. Plants with sauce over them, like, that's just not appealing to me!
Ice Queen: You might be interested just to check out– there's a Instagram account... I cannot remember the name right now. If I can think of it later, I'll put it in the interview, but it's basically an account for non-boring salads and other ways to eat vegetables– obviously some of the things are more "salad-like" than others, but it's got some great recipes in there for other things too.
Jenny Chu: Yeah. I'm totally down for vegan food. I just couldn't ever just eat plain vegetables. I could eat cooked vegetables. My mom makes really good cooked green beans. I could eat those. I mean, like, just raw, ugh!
Ice Queen: It's definitely tough when you get all raw veggies.And just, like, a bunch of them back to back to back. It's not a pleasure to eat, which, not saying that food always has to be pleasurable, but if we live in a time where we're privileged enough to live in a space where it can be, why wouldn't you?
Jenny Chu: Yeah.
Ice Queen: This is the last question: what are some of your favorite current literary magazines to read and to submit to?
Jenny Chu: Oh, for me, Wildness. I love wildness. They're, like, one of my favorites. Um, I also like The Shore– I was in their magazine, but I love their poems, and then I would say Chestnut Review. I like them, too. Those three. And then there's obviously more, but those are just the three I thought of off the top of my head!
Ice Queen: What are some of your aspirational magazines?
Jenny Chu: Oh, I think I would love to be in wildness one day. They're one of my favorite magazines, and also Adroit.
And I would say another aspirational magazine, I'd love to be in... Oh, Shō Poetry!
Ice Queen: What do you love about these places?
Jenny Chu: They're just very inventive; I feel like everything that they publish has a sort of whimsy to it but is also surprisingly devastating. Understated and just really thoughtful and touching. I think the people they publish are very diverse, there's lots of representation, and they really do make an effort to incorporate different perspectives and make it a publication that tells stories of people all over the world, you know?
Jenny Chu is a high school student from Dallas, Texas. Her work has been recognized by YoungArts, the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, the Guernsey Literary Festival, the Texas Cultural Trust, the Texas Commission on the Arts, the Poetry Society of New York, NSPA, and NCTE, among others. She has studied at the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship, and the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference. Her work appears in journals such as Pithead Chapel, The Shore, and Gone Lawn, among others.
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Erin Armstrong has an MFA from CU-Boulder and is the editor-in-chief of Ice Queen Magazine. Her works are published in The Citron Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Banango Street, New World Writing and elsewhere.
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