Kitchuri is a porridge of rice and mung beans, like a spiced congee, and similarly elicits a feeling of comfort, like a warm hug. This one is made simply with onion, garlic, ginger, Chinese celery stems, and rehydrated shiitake mushrooms. It’s spiced with turmeric, coriander, cumin, bay leaf, white pepper, and cinnamon, and seasoned with a little bit of fish sauce, mushroom powder, and hondashi. On top, there’s a salad of Chinese celery leaves, garlic achar, and fried shallots.

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With this dish we wanted to remind everyone here of the warmth that food can provide. The connection to a memory, the comfort and warmth that radiates from within. This is what we imagine provided comfort to many of the immigrants from the Bengali and Fujianese communities - a warm bowl of porridge, when they probably couldn’t afford much else.

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The means by which both these communities came into the States wasn’t always the cleanest or the prettiest. Many were survivors of human trafficking or came here with massive debts to pay to shady organizations. One such story is of the Golden Venture, a cargo ship that smuggled in almost 300 Fujianese into NY on June 6, 1993. These “passengers” were loaded into cramped cargo holds on the freighter ship, surviving the 4 month journey on peanuts and rice. Many suffered through illness, beatings by gang leaders running the smuggling ring, or even raped. When they got to NY, the boat was stranded after a mutiny happened on board and the rendezvous group was arrested by the police, so the asylum seekers tried to swim to the shores of Rockaway beach, 10 drowning as a result. When they touched ground, they were immediately taken into custody, with only 10% of them granted asylum and only half of the remainder left in immigrant prisons, fighting their cases with largely pro-bono lawyers.

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The first Bangladeshi immigrants were ship jumpers, eventually this evolved into lottery visas and those seeking asylum. But undocumented immigration to the U.S remains steadfast, even now, with Bangladeshis making one of the largest undocumented Asian groups in NYC. In this day and age the largest populations of Bangladeshi trafficking is not in the U.S but to countries like Italy, the U.A.E and Malaysia. Bangladeshis lured with promises of good wages and a safer way of life are sent to these countries only to have their traffickers hold their passports and forced to work in inhumane and unsafe conditions, sleeping ten to a room, barely making anything to send back to their homes. This trafficking is a huge part of our story and is happening right now.

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These hardships are a part of our history as well. They shade in the generational trauma we feel as children of these immigrants. We want to honor these memories as well as the others, and understand the power that food can have in providing comfort when all else fails.