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- [00:01]
Camille de Jean
Welcome to the new books network.
- [00:13]
Melissa James
Welcome back to Gastronomica, a podcast now available on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Alyssa James, a member of Gastronomica's editorial collective. Today I'm joined by writer and historian Kemi Bejan, whose evocative essay Chiang Mai 2015 appears in the Spring 2025 issue of Gastronomica. It's a memoir of failed culinary tourism, a story set against the smoky skies of northern Thailand, where the search for authentic food becomes tangled with questions of illness, climate, and care. Through vivid moments of taste and disorientation, Kimi asks what it means to travel, to look for meaning, and to eat ethically in the Anthropocene. We talk about how the haze, both literal and metaphorical, shapes her story, seductions and politics of culinary tourism, and how food can become a small anchor in times of crisis. So let's jump in. Cami, welcome back to the Gastronomica podcast. To get started, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and your Essay Chiang Mai 2015?
- [01:14]
Camille de Jean
Yes. Thank you for having me. So this essay is really representative of the evolution in my writing. I started as a food historian writing academic articles and one book, and I've moved to creative writing. And this was in part or in large part, this was triggered by personal events that have happened in the past 10 years, starting with the events that I recount in this article. So it all started in 2015, and that's when I had graduated with my PhD in food history and I decided I was invited to a food conference in Singapore, and I decided to travel to Thailand before and meet my parents there. And my then boyfriend, now husband, also joined us. So I met. We met my. We met up with my parents in northern Thailand in chiang Mai in March 2015. It was also the opportunity to spend my 31st birthday with my parents, which I hadn't done in a while because I had moved from France to Toronto 10 years before. And when we arrived there, there was smoke everywhere. Everything was engulfed in smoke. We just couldn't believe it. It was just so odd. Now we're somewhat used to it because of all the forest fires that. And we can feel the haze and smell the haze even in North American cities. But this was. This was new to us. Unfortunately, it wasn't new to people living there. But this, all this haze meant that less oxygen was getting to my father's brain. And he started acting very oddly, really not being himself, to the point that we decided that something was going on and we brought him to the hospital. And in the hospital he was quickly diagnosed with a brain tumor. And so we were repatriated to France and he was sick for, for five years. And in 2020, he. You know, this is a spoiler. But in 2020, he entered palliative care. And so I traveled back to Paris and at that point I had a four month old son. So I traveled with my son. This was in January 2020. I'm. You know, dates are important to me because that allows me to actually retell the story. And as everybody knows, by March, Covid was there and the lockdowns started happening. The lockdowns in Paris started on March 17, 2020. I remember that because it was my birthday and a few days before. So there's a lot of dates like this that come back. And a few days into the lockdowns, I went grocery shopping and I myself had an epilepsy attack. And very quickly a diagnosis of a brain tumor. Yes. And that was the. The same. So in a few months, I became a mother, I lost my dad, I received a life threatening diagnosis and I was repatriated to, to Toronto to where I end up with surgery and treatment. And so after that, you know, life is not the same is one way to put it. My life was turned upside down. And before all this, I used to, you know, I, I can say that now because I've had time to reflect. I used to hide in the archive, I would tell other people's stories. But now I'm writing about the world outside of the archives and how I sense it. And that's the main connector between all my work, from academic to creative writing, is really my interest in how the senses worked in the past and the present. But now I tell that story through a personal lens. And so this article in particular, I published another one in Gastronomica in 2022, where I was still kind of hiding behind archives, although this time it was family archives, but still. So this article is really the story of the three days that we spent in Thailand and us trying to make sense of what the smoke was about and what was happening to my father.
- [06:29]
Melissa James
Yeah. Thank you for sharing that with us and I'm very sorry for your loss. As you, as you were talking, I was thinking about the song. I can't remember who sings it, but I always think about the line, you know, every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end. So I want to kind of take us to the beginning of your essay and how it starts. It starts, you know, it's actually A photo. So it starts with this hazy photo of farmers in Chiang Rai. They're barely visible through the thick, smoky air, this haze. And it immediately sets this mood of uncertainty and exhaustion, but also care, like something tender and political is already unfolding. So I want us to begin there. Can you tell us about that image, how it came to frame the essay, and what it captures for you about the atmosphere of the story?
- [07:20]
Camille de Jean
Yeah, so that that photograph really engages all the senses. Fights, smell, touch. You can already almost feel the thickness of the air getting into the farmer's lungs also. All lungs. So it really captures a sense of, you know, we were a tourist, so. Of being lost in a foreign landscape that we could not decipher. We had never been there, and because of the smoke, we could not know what was there. It was very disorientating. But people were going on with their days. No, they were still harvesting their potatoes because they have no choice. And this picture was taken by my father. And so I think he, like me, and we were all traveling together. He was amazed at what we were witnessing. People being used to this, to the smoke, and just going on with life. So I think this is where the care come comes from. You know, when I submitted the article, I. I had a. I received feedback saying, like, you know, is this the anthropological gaze? Is this like, you know, a white tourist gaze? But I really think that for my dad, it came from, like, a care for these people, the need to document what we were witnessing. And what I find really interesting is that 10 years later, when I decided to write this article, I went back to look at the. At the photograph, and then I looked into the metadata and I. And the caption is quite important because it also provide the exact latitude and longitude where we were. And so we were lost. But the metadata 10 years later allows that allowed me to find us and to say, like, this is exactly where my father stood when he took that picture. And so that's. That's why this photo is. Is quite important to me.
- [09:30]
Melissa James
Wow. The. The things that we. That we take for granted when it comes for technology, when it comes to technology is. It's always interesting. But I. I really liked, you know, that people are asking you about what kind of gaze it is. It makes me think about the things we see and don't see, particularly in this visual culture that. That we have. And so one of the things that really stayed with me is the way that the smoke keeps you from seeing, you know, these lush green landscapes that. That you'd expect. And yet, you know, they're there. So I couldn't help but think about that as a metaphor, that maybe the beauty or the good is obscured, but it's not gone, you know, which feels so apt for how many of us are moving through climate crisis right now. You know, there's this faint possibility of good amidst the difficulty, the obfuscation. So was that connection between visibility, obscurity and hope something you were thinking about as you wrote?
- [10:27]
Camille de Jean
To be frank? Not really. I have a very complicated relationship with the idea of hope because of where I'm at in my life. And I, I, what I was telling you about earlier, I'm not, I'm not a pessimist, but I don't want to cuddle myself with hope either. And I try to face things as they are, both on a personal level, but also on like a, you know, citizen of the world environmental crisis crisis level. We are, I, I, you know, we're going into the wall. And it's not that, you know, we shouldn't do nothing about it, but it's, it's the reality. So I think that what I was more thinking about was the relationship between visibility, obscurity and disbelief. And I think it's, it's, you know, in terms of climate crisis, personally, I have this feeling of disbelief. Like, how have we gotten there? I can't even believe this is happening and that we are not doing anything about it. So for me, this obscurement of the landscape is really about disbelief, like, I can't believe this is happening both on a personal level and on a worldwide climate crisis level.
- [11:58]
Melissa James
Well, I'm going to sidetrack, but, you know. No, well, I want to ask you, I don't want to sidetrack too much, but, you know, you did go through these moments of difficulty and you also see these people who are, have adapted and are used to, you know, living in these moments of environmental crisis or, you know, kind of ongoing receding and returning kind of disaster. You know, how do you get through moments of difficulty if not with hope? What, what's your, what's the thing that you hold on to?
- [12:35]
Camille de Jean
What do I hold on to? That's a good question. I think I hold on to,
- [12:41]
Melissa James
to
- [12:42]
Camille de Jean
the ones close to me. And, and then, and I think that's what a lot of people do. You know, this, this also reminds me of, you know, what did we do during the COVID lockdowns? Well, I underwent like chemo radiotherapy. But, you know, people held on to their bubble, to the people close to us. And ultimately it's those Personal relationships that might get us to hope. I think hope just has too much of a religious tone to me. But I, I don't know that we can find a better word. I'm still trying to find a better word.
- [13:33]
Melissa James
It sounds like you root yourself or plant yourself in the present with the people who are around you rather than some hoped for future.
- [13:43]
Camille de Jean
Yes. Because ultimately you need to be there for the people around you and, and care for them.
- [13:52]
Melissa James
So, you know, thinking about relationships and, and food and connection and culinary tourism. Of course, you write that quote, the search for authentic food is laden with power relationships, exoticization, and neocolonial desires to eat the other. A reference to bell hooks. And I think that's a sharp line, you know, one that gets to something so pervasive in the ways that laypeople and even academics who study this for a living talk about food and travel. So why do you think culinary tourism and this ongoing search for authenticity remain so seductive even when we know it's bound up in these hierarchies and desires?
- [14:34]
Camille de Jean
Well, I, I also write I should have known better because, you know, I, I had read and ultimately to me, it comes back to, to taste. It's good. I'm in Thailand, you know, I may know that pad Thai, there's a really good article in Gastronomica, but the history of Pad Thai, how it was invented in the 40s and 50s. And I will let our listener go back to this 2009 article that's in the references of, of my essay. So it's not so traditional, but it's definitely popular and it's certainly tasty. So why would I not try to find the best pad Thai, even though I know this, you know, all it's wrapped up in, in a lot of things. Why would I deny myself a good pad Thai? You know, that's, that's just where we animals, we, we are looking for, where humans we want. I want to eat the best food I can.
- [15:39]
Melissa James
Yes. Our constant search for. For the best and the next is something that certainly motivates us. But then on the other hand, so you have that, you know, you have this moment of searching for authenticity, and then you realize, you know, you say in our goals as culinary tourists, we had become. We had become disaster tourists of the Anthropocene age. And I really love that sentence in the essay. Your father's illness kind of mirrors the Hays crisis and is exacerbated by it, which in turn echoes this broader climate crisis. So I'm curious how those scales came together for you the personal, the environmental, the political. Did writing about one of them help you make sense of the others?
- [16:23]
Camille de Jean
I think it helped. So looking at the big picture of why was there so much smoke really helped me put my own story in perspective and it distanced me from the pain. So there was smoke because, you know, we were in the mountainous area of Thailand where the hill tribes such as the Hmong or the Karen live. And there's been a long history of the Thai states from modern lowland area where ethnic ties reside, trying to stop the nomadic slash and burn agriculture of the indigenous hill tribes by pushing them towards cash crop and such as coffee or corn and trying to have them settle in villages. And so that means that the regular slash and burn cycle cannot happen anymore. And people need to deforest this wide deforestation because people need more spaces for cash crop fields. There's also a lot of demographic pressure in that region coming from neighboring countries. So we're in the golden triangle with China and Burma, Myanmar. And so there's a lot of, of movement of people that need lands to settle. And so that's where we have this exacerbated smoke crisis. And, and this is an important story to tell and it's been, you know, lots of writer will tell you that and readers that having a personal, getting into this big picture story through a personal entry point can have quite a bit of impact. I realize that the people who read my essay, they don't know my father, they don't care as much as much as I do. But by taking them with me on this emotional journey, the story of the hill tribes and the smoke and the haze crisis might stay with them longer or might make more of an impact. So I think it's, it's this, this what it brought to me on a personal angle and what I'm hoping it brings to the reader. It's a, you know, this, this two things here.
- [19:02]
Melissa James
Yes, there's, it's, you know, you're writing memoir, but it also makes me think about the, the project of anthropology which is, you know, which we talk about coming out of Michelle Rolph Trio's work and others building on that. But thinking about using a small place or a small story or a single person to tell a larger global story. It's always very interesting and exciting for me as an anthropologist.
- [19:33]
Camille de Jean
Yeah. And there's also the idea of micro history that's, that's about that. And also the idea of, comes out of more the French academia, the ego history which is not, you know, having a crazy ego but just telling the story of. It's a bit of a misnomer when you, when you talk about it in English, but it's about telling the story, of telling your story in relationship to historical events. And that's, that's, that's a powerful way of also telling larger histories because you, you take your reader with you.
- [20:22]
Melissa James
Yeah. Well, taking us to some of the, the small moments, I found that food in the story kind of operates as punctuation. So the essay is punctuated by these vivid food moments, these small meals and sensory details that you like to kind of linger on as is your project and interest. And even though there is this exhaustion and disorientation and difficulty, those moments anchor the story. So how, how did food function for you in the narrative? Were they moments of grounding, of tracing connection, or were they something else entirely?
- [21:06]
Camille de Jean
Yeah, I think it gives, you know, this is a story that unfolds over three days. So it does give it the story, its, its space. And it's moment when, because we were all seated around the table so we couldn't really ignore my, my father's states. He was. Obviously something was wrong with him. So it's this commensality of the table when, you know, we think about commensality as something joyful. But sometimes it, it, it is not because sitting around the table was really the moments where we had talks about, like, what's happening to you? What do we need to do about this? And I also noticed that I'm writing a larger, a longer manuscript about this, that breakfast really features very often in my writing breakfast scene. So I think there's something there, that breakfast is important to me. But food also allows a shift in the narrative where we, and that is my mom, my then boyfriend and I switch from culinary tourists seeking out authentic food. And then when everything unravels, we start craving for familiar food and in fact, for comfort food. And in fact, the last line of the essay is baguette sandwiches replace the street food stalls when we are back in Paris. And I think it goes back to our previous conversation about authenticity because a North American family may have craved Mac and cheese, but we were craving Jean Bourbon. And you know, literally our minds and our guts could not take the spicy food anymore. My dad was the first one because he was in the hospital. And in the hospital they were. They only had Thai food, which is normal. It's a Thai hospital. And he just couldn't do it. So we would just buy, you know, mango sticky rice at the food stall and bring it to him because that was the sort of softest, you know, like, least spicy that we could find. But I'm, you know, I also got interested as part of this project into the. I'm interested in. In hospital foods. And at the same time, in Toronto, there's a lot of work being done about providing culturally appropriate food for people in hospital or for people for seniors living at home. So I think it was. The food was also a way of also thinking a bit further about this authenticity question and ultimately playing with it. Because if I'm being honest, and again, this is me thinking about this 20 years on. How I got into food history and food studies was because when I was 20, I moved from. From France to Toronto. And then people started asking me, oh, what's your favorite French food? Do you cook French food? And, you know, I posed because I. French food was what was all around me. I mean, I. I was aware that they were Thai food, Italian food, but the norm was French food. So I never had to really think about it. And so when people started asking me questions like this, I. I started thinking, but what makes it French? Is it the recipe? Is it because it fits what they think of as French food? Or is it just because I'm French and I'm cooking it, therefore it's French? And so. So I think, you know, this is not a. That's not really in the essay, but that's what I'm thinking of behind the essay when I'm raising this question of food authenticity and using food to punctuate and to pace the story.
- [25:36]
Melissa James
Yeah, there are so many points I want to pick up on there. I think when you were talking about being around the table and it not being this. This moment of. Of comfort, but more so realization and concern, it made me think about Anita Manour's book, Intimate Eating. And she talks about in the beginning, in the introduction that the. The dinner table in her home growing up was. Was not this safe, comforting, you know, place it. It was a place of fear. And so she threw the book kind of reclaims the dining table by eating with friends and eating alone and all of those practices. And then on the latter end, thinking about French food and how much work has gone into codifying what French food is, it's probably one of the places that has done the most of that kind of work in terms of heritage preservation, thinking about the. I think just the French meal is. Is its own heritage, is its own intangible heritage.
- [26:47]
Camille de Jean
Yeah, the gastronomic meal of the French, meaning not like a specific food. But just like the. The fact that you'll. I looked into this quite a bit. It's. It's about, like, cooking together. It's also about what they call lizard de la table, or what we call lazare de la table. So, like, sitting the table with the nice silverware, with the nice glasses, choosing the wine that goes with it. And it's also about spending 2, 3 hours at the table. And it's. It's true. I can see, you know, now that I'm living in between France and North America, the holiday meals are very different. And also the idea of, well, what's actually the Russian way historically of serving the. The dishes one after the. Yeah, the dishes one after each other. And, and. And, you know, you don't do cheese at the beginning, you do cheese in the middle, and then you do desserts. And so it's this. I'm very interested in this idea of heritage, especially as it relates to French food. And I'm interested in it to criticize it a little bit, to push them to think a bit further about what they're doing. But they certainly started a trend.
- [28:18]
Melissa James
Yes. So as you were seeking out those. Those comforts of home while you were in the hospital, were any of those rituals something that you also found yourself practicing if you were to. To think back on it? Of course, not setting the table and all those kinds of things, but maybe, you know, eating slowly or the conversations you were having. I'm. I'm being very anthropological with the use of ritual, but were any of those practices kind of something that you also used to ground yourselves while you were in the hospital?
- [28:51]
Camille de Jean
Yeah, I think still the idea, like, the fact of eating together, my mom and I, and, you know, we. We found ourselves, like, in Chiang Mai, but also later in Paris at several points, visiting my father in hospital. And there's very little instances where we would just say, like, well, I'm hungry. I'm going to eat now. You can eat later. Like, we would still, even if it was just the two of us, try to eat together and not necessarily talk that much because it was tough time and we don't have, like, tons of things to talk about, but we would eat together. So in. In the larger manuscript that I'm writing, that also includes the time where my dad was in palliative care and I was in Paris with my son. I write about how I would leave the palliative care unit a bit earlier than my mom because my son was screaming and he needed to be fed. But then I would still go home to my mother's house and wait for her to have dinner. Because it's that sense of, okay, we've both spent the day at the hospital, let's get together. And I. To me, it's. It's normal. I don't know, you know, this is where I don't have enough distance. Is it a. I don't know that it's a specifically French thing. It's just a. A thing that seems normal to do. And I. And, you know, with other family members, there's. There's a lot of that going on, and that's. That's all a way of supporting each other, is we're going to still cook and eat together.
- [30:38]
Melissa James
Well, I want to bring us over to questions of kind of motivation and process, because as a fellow writer and thinker, I like to know what other people are up to and what's going through their minds as they're writing. And so one question that I ask myself often when I'm writing or when I'm planning my research and that I ask a lot of students who are working on their research projects is, is what are you really trying to understand? So what was that for you with this piece? What question or feeling was, you know, really pushed you to. To put these words and ideas on the page?
- [31:16]
Camille de Jean
I think I was trying to understand how I could be a creative writer without losing my academic roots. And. And this is where the matter of the. The big picture and the personal comes back into play. I knew that as I, as I mentioned several times, I'm developing a full memoir manuscript. And so I knew that I. That, you know, this is kind of a. An event, a moment that I can't avoid, but I, I avoided it for a long time. And, and, and it's also. When I first wrote it, I had the urge to fictionalize it, to write it in the. I didn't write. I. I wrote like, she, you know, it's like, no, this did not happen to me. Things that actually happened to me, I were not. Were relatively easy to write, but I cannot recover my father's point of view. So I had to get comfortable in inhabiting this I for something that I. I was not like, fully the center of it. And so I. This piece was a challenge because I had to put myself in it and including my emotions. And I've gotten a fair amount of feedback about my writing where, you know, as you were telling. I was telling you that I don't like to cuddle myself with hope. There's no. I don't Think there's any pathos or lyricism in my writing? Because it is not easy when you come from an academic background to write yourself in your pieces, including your emotions, if only to just name your emotions and recognize what you were feeling. It's not something I was used to do, but so I gave myself a challenge and I was like, okay, I'm going to have to write a dialogue, descriptions, put in my feelings and my thoughts. And so really the more academic talk explanation. It's one paragraph that I actually introduced as, you know, here are the call notes about the smoke. Like I can still do research. Like, and you know, probably I'm not a specialist. It's also because it's the. It's. It was slightly uncomfortable because I don't know much about Thailand and its history and so how do I. I could not write a research paper about the smoke or it would be like a literature review. And so I had to. It was uncomfortable to write. I'm very happy with it at the end, but it was an uncomfortable piece to write.
- [34:13]
Melissa James
Yes. Yeah. I think putting yourself in the story is nerve wracking for all writers. Actually. I think about Zadie Smith and her book Swing Time came out a few years ago now. And that was the first book that she wrote in the first person. And she said that it was extremely. It really pushed her out of her comfort zone to do that because even though she's a fiction writer, you know, she still is typically writing in, you know, third person omniscient or something like that. So. So having to be the center is, is discomforting but also pushes you to do something new.
- [34:54]
Camille de Jean
Yeah, because at the same time it's writing creative nonfiction and first person essays and hopefully a book at some point is also very liberate and common. Like, I don't have any problem writing words like they just come. I mean, I didn't have like the blank page issues if as an, as an academic. But I could never go back. I mean I could. I would be able to go back to a more academic style of writing. I just don't want to. I have this urge now to just be creative and put myself out there in part because look, everything bad that could happen has happened. Why. Why not? Why not do it? Yes. Yeah. So it's uncomfortable, but it's highly rewarding.
- [35:49]
Melissa James
The time is now, everybody. So now that you've. You're moving into this, this creative writing or I mean you're, you're already doing it, but you're working on your memoir. I love to Hear about other writers habits and processes. So tell us, tell us about your writing process and do you have any rituals, a playlist or a snack or anything like that that keeps you company while you're working on your memoir?
- [36:14]
Camille de Jean
So there is no playlist. There has never been a playlist. I can, I have to write in silence. I am the person who wears earplugs at the library. I could never write in. I have started to write in cafes, but I need to choose them very carefully and still wear my earplugs. So I'm sorry to let you down on that one. And I'm afraid that there's not much snacks either because it distracts me from my focus. If there is a. What I tend to do is I do need to know that I have a few hours ahead of me usually. So I just push myself until the point where I'm like, no, I need a meal. And, and you know, this goes back to what we're talking about, about, you know, the, this notion of heritage and Frenchness that I didn't realize. It's only after 20 years that I realized how French I am to the core is that I need my three meals a day. So I will stop for lunch and then pick up from there. And I have the luxury now of being able to carve out time fairly easily because my kid is in school now. So the ritual would be sit down, have a few hours ahead of you, be full caffeinated and an empty house with silence. That's. Yeah, I know it's boring and it's not really exciting, but that's what I need.
- [38:02]
Melissa James
All right, well, thank you so much. Thank you for joining me and our listeners and sharing the layers behind, you know, this beautiful and haunting work. Can you tell everyone the the name or the working title of this memoir and where they can find more about you and your work?
- [38:19]
Camille de Jean
Yes. So the working title is A Trail of Taste and Illness. And I have a website which is camillebejan.org yeah, and there's a little bit more about this. I also have a few pieces out. So there was one in gastronomica in 2022 that's called don't Wait for Me for Lunch Gastronomica. And then I also have an essay. I was very happy with this one in a scientific journal called Brain. It's one of the top high impact neurology journal. And I won their best essay prize last year for an essay called Souvenirs of an Awake Craniotomy. And it's literally my souvenirs of I had an awake craniotomy and I remember a lot of it.
- [39:25]
Melissa James
That's incredible.
- [39:27]
Camille de Jean
Yeah, so that's, that's also about bilingualism because I, I, I wanted to remain bilingual. I, I do, I am bilingual still, because you can lose one of your languages with, you know, brain things and surgeries. So, yeah, that's, that's what I, that's where people can read more from me.
- [39:53]
Melissa James
Very cool. That sounds fascinating and I'm definitely going to check that out. Listeners, you can find links to this work and more in the show. Notes thank you so much, Camille.
- [40:03]
Camille de Jean
Thank you, Elisa.
- [40:04]
Melissa James
That was writer and historian Camille de Jean discussing her essay Chiang Mai 2015 in the Spring 2025 issue of Gastronomica. You can read the piece and explore more essays, research and creative reflections on food and culture at online ucpress.edu gastronomica. Thank you to our listeners for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe and leave us a review. It helps more people find the show. I'm Melissa James and this has been Gastronomica on the New Books Network. Until next time,