I last saw my grandmother late last year, in an Atlanta suburb where she and my grandfather now live with my paternal uncle and his family. I understood my grandmother’s embrace of Vienna Fingers as I understood her affinity for Planters Cheez Balls, Gorton’s Fish Sticks and other American processed foods. I would grab two and devour them, leaving behind a mess of vanilla-flavored crumbs on the kitchen tiles. Thomas or Britain - Vienna Fingers were always on the table, at the center, arranged in a flower-shaped pattern. When far-flung family members came to the house - from India or St. Daily, after preschool, she met me at the door with a stack of cookies, and I would eat them, pre-dinner, nestled under her threadbare brown shawl, while we watched “General Hospital” and “Sesame Street” back-to-back. She doled out Vienna Fingers with abandon - in school lunches, on road trips, at birthday parties. The cookies became a sort of currency, both physical and emotional, over the course of my life. To my grandmother, Vienna Fingers were an affordable luxury that represented her social and economic aspirations. My family free-cycled, couch-surfed and community gardened long before those terms had entered our lexicon as new immigrants, they bartered, made, shared.
We weren’t particularly wealthy - I certainly remember some leaner years - but I was never at want for the trappings of a comfortable and contented life, a life largely built with social and cultural capital accrued from ties to an ethnic community, and also reinforced by individual ingenuity, originality and frugality. Soon after I was born, in 1979, they relocated to central New Jersey, where they followed a well-worn, upwardly mobile trajectory into the middle class, shared by many professional, English-fluent, Asian immigrants.