When my elementary school friends teased me about my slanted eyes, I laughed along.
"Can you see?" they'd ask, half joking and half wanting to know the answer. And to my older sister, who has a particularly flat nasal bridge: "Can you breathe?"
As one of the few Asian children growing up in our neighbourhood in Kamloops, B.C., during the 1980s, I knew better than to take these questions to heart. As my mother explained, there was no denying that my family was different from everyone else. It was only natural that our neighbours found us curious - and their attention was kind of comedic, if you thought about it. (The "can you see" and "can you breathe" comments were a hit when retold around our dinner table.)
But there was one glaring difference between my non-minority friends and me that caused me no end of grief. And at no point did it stand out more than at lunch.
While little Jake's mom bundled him off to school with tuna fish sandwiches and Becky's mom made her peanut butter and jelly, my own mother, to my horror, insisted on making us fresh wontons packed in thermoses of hot broth, hand-rolled sushi and sandwiches made of thinly sliced, tender, beef tongue. In short, everyone else ate normal things. I did not.
My lunches were tasty. But the embarrassment of being the-kid-who-eats-weird-and-nasty-stuff outweighed my enjoyment. I would have gladly traded my homemade barbecue pork buns for processed cheese on Wonder Bread any day - if only I had any takers.
Each noon hour when the lunch bell rang throughout my elementary and junior high school years, I'd peek inside my locker to see what kind of agony my mom had unwittingly unleashed upon me.
If it was a beef tongue sandwich, I could slyly explain to my inquisitive pals that I was eating beef, "just beef," conveniently dropping the tongue part. But if she'd made me zhong zi, an unattractive but aromatic wad of sticky rice, fatty pork belly and salt-preserved egg wrapped in bamboo leaves, I had no such luck.
"Eww." "Gross!" "What's that?" "You're going to eat that?" "That looks like brains. Are you sure that's not brains?"
If only they knew. Lunch wasn't even the half of it.
After school, safe within the walls of my parents' white-stucco house, I savoured the delights that came out of my mother's kitchen.
Brains? You bet we ate them, sucking them from the heads of steamed prawns like milkshake through a straw. Pigs' ears we snacked on like popcorn, crunching away at cartilaginous, marinated slices. Ditto for duck tongues, which could only be bought during our monthly visits to Vancouver's Chinatown.
Until I was old enough to understand other people's disgust, one of my favourite things to eat was fish eyeballs, which my dad would poke out and offer with his chopsticks, declaring, with dubious authority, that they were full of nutrients. I'd pop them into my mouth whole and let the salty, jelly substance ooze across my tongue before spitting out the inedible outer layer.
My other great pleasure was to gnaw on chicken hearts and gizzards, cooked in soy sauce and five spice powder.
My ghastly appetite wasn't limited to Asian dishes. I adored garlicky escargots, which my parents turned me on to at a French bistro. And I dug in without flinching when they ordered pig trotters at a German restaurant. Sauerkraut, tangy fermented sausages and pickled herring were also a treat.
For the most part, I was able to hide my culinary deviancy. But when my playmates hung around our home long enough, the shameful truth inevitably would come out.
When my dad decided to cure a leg of pork, he chose to hang it from our backyard apple tree, thus freaking out all my friends whose fathers bought ham at the grocery store, like normal people. For weeks, the meaty limb gently swayed in the wind like a Halloween prop in the middle of a cool, dry spring.
"What is that?" my friends would shriek.
"Never mind," I'd mumble in reply, as I desperately tried to divert their attention.
Then there was the time when the girl next door had the misfortune of visiting while my mom prepared a Chinese New Year feast. As the strong smell of braising bamboo shoots filled the air, my neighbour abruptly abandoned the board game we were playing.
"This house is getting stinky," she said. "I think I'm going to go home now."
Upon hearing this, my mother laughed until tears rolled down her cheeks. My tears were of a different sort.
These days, closeted freakish eaters like me have been liberated. As diners grow increasingly adventurous, exotic cuisines and offal have become not only acceptable, but dare I say, even cool.
Crispy pigs' ears, calf brains and chicken innards, previously limited to ethnic eateries and immigrants' kitchens, are finding their way onto the menus of some of the hottest restaurants in North America. And home cooks are once again taking up the forgotten craft of fermenting their own sauerkraut, foraging for their own fungi and hanging their own hams.
When I called my mother to tell her about a Toronto restaurant serving cow tongue, she couldn't believe her ears.
"You mean people are paying to eat it?" she asked, incredulously. "And it's popular?"
Yes, they are. And indeed, it is.
At last, as more people catch on to the fact that freakish foods can taste fantastic, I, for one, can now say I knew it all along.
Wency Leung is a Globe and Mail reporter and lives in Toronto.
Wency Leung