According to Lisa Ling, her new travel and food documentary “Taking with Lisa Ling” feels “rushed”.
“We sold the show before COVID … but at a time when this pandemic and attacks on the Asian American community are on the rise, especially our elders – I think it’s more important for people to get to know this culture, this food and history.” Post edition.
The six-episode show, which premieres on HBO Max on Thursday (January 27th), is about journalist / television presenter Ling’s journey to different parts of the United States, exploring the history of various Asian American communities there, as well as restaurants and local cuisine. At the opening, Ling eats a shrimp dome of Louisiana bayou and learns how Filipino American society influences the popular cuisine in that area. Other episodes focus on Bangladeshi cuisine in New York City (Eastern Village) and the Korean American community in Virginia.
“These days, even in the smallest cities, you can find sushi or Vietnamese food or Thai food or even Bangladeshi food,” he said. “But the events behind these restaurants, the stories about these immigrants are not known in America – and there is an opportunity to pull the curtain and enter the kitchens of these restaurants and learn their stories through the lens of this dish we all visit. Love is really about the show.
Ling, an American Asian and well-traveled, said he learned a lot of new information during the filming of “Taking With Lisa Ling” – thanks to other shows on Acesparks’s “It’s Life with Lisa Ling”. .
“I didn’t know that the first Asian Americans to come to this country landed in the Gulf of Louisiana,” he said. And they came here before the United States even came to the United States, “he said. “It was a great educational experience for me as a history student who learned nothing about Asian American history in my education.”
The series will also be personal; in one episode, Ling travels to the Sacramento Delta, California, and interviews her aunt about her grandparents ’Chinese restaurant.
“It was emotional,” he said of diving into his family history. I think for many immigrants, especially Asian immigrants, the road to the American Dream begins with a restaurant. It was the same for my family. Although my grandfather studied here in the U.S. – he earned a bachelor’s degree from New York University and an MBA from the University of Colorado, and my grandmother graduated from England – when they moved to this country in the late ’40s, my grandfather was Chinese. The doors were closed on his face for financial matters. So they did some weird things and eventually raised enough money to open a Chinese restaurant. At the time, neither my grandmother nor my grandfather knew how to cook. They really had to work at that restaurant.
“So it was a very exciting opportunity to tell such stories of people who have sacrificed so much to open these restaurants and who have put their hopes and dreams into these places that are so ubiquitous in America.”
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