Five Flavors centers Asian American sex workers’ voices, addressing legacies of racial, gender, and sexual violence through the metaphor of “consumption” and the healing medium of food. Sex workers’ oral narratives recount memories of sex, labor, homeland, or diaspora, paired with a favorite dish representing one of the five flavors in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). By inviting sex workers to the proverbial table, this community-based intervention addresses long-standing issues of exclusion in the feminist movement while offering a history of cultural assimilation, appropriation, and representation through the metaphor of Chinese American cuisine.
While some stories directly address sex work, others explore chosen or biological family. In a culture where sex work remains heavily stigmatized, these narratives provide necessary counterparts to model minority myths. Drawing from TCM, which uses food to heal emotional imbalances, Five Flavors connects each dish and flavor to a corresponding organ and emotion: salty foods, for instance, treat kidney-related ailments tied to fear. The project proposes that Asian communities might begin to heal fears, anxieties, anger, and resentments—what Cathy Park Hong calls “minor feelings”—through culinary practices and collective gathering.
Five Flavors emerges during resonant anniversaries: the fifth year since the Atlanta spa shootings, when a white evangelical gunman murdered Asian massage workers he blamed for his sex addiction, and the 150th year since the Page Act, the first U.S. federal immigration law, which cast all Chinese women as potential sex workers. Today, ICE deportation campaigns and racially motivated assaults against massage workers show how Asian American people—especially undocumented, queer, women, and low-wage workers—continue to suffer under patriarchal white supremacy.
A pilot performance and installation premiered at AHL Foundation in New York on March 15, 2025. Thank you to the storytellers Charlotte, Cleo, Ellie, Wu, and Yin. The dishes served (from Atlas Kitchen) included:
Sauteed Cumin Flavor Sliced Lamb in Drywok 孜然黑山羊 (spicy)
Minced Pork with Sour String Bean 酸豆角肉末 (sour)
Beef with Broccoli 芥兰牛 (bitter)
Sauteed Eggplant with Salted Egg Yolk 金沙茄子 (salty)
Sliced Oranges (sweet)
The project included a limited-edition print, which was inspired by placemats in Hong Kong diners from the San Gabriel Valley and designed in collaboration with Angel Tolentino.
