What does it mean when someone says a dessert is “not too sweet”? For older generations of the Asian diaspora, it might be a comment of the highest praise. For younger Asians and Asian Americans, perhaps it’s a mark of maturity (and a sign that they’re becoming their parents). For Eater, Jaya Saxena unpacks this common phrase, which is a lot more complicated than it seems.
Like any in-joke among a marginalized group, “not too sweet” is a defiant shorthand, and one that in its construction necessitates a binary: “too sweet” compared to what? Often, in the Asian American usage, it’s a contrast to Western desserts filled with milk chocolate, sticky caramel, and corn syrup. To say “not too sweet” is to say actually, I don’t want your frosted red velvet cupcakes or your sticky toffee pudding; I long for the subtlety of red bean, the freshness of mango over sticky rice. It’s to say that Asian dessert traditions and flavors — matcha, black sesame, jellies laced with lychee — are superior to flavors associated with whiteness. It’s to proclaim that my culture has given me different tastes, better ones, and no amount of soft power can take that away.
This is what got my hackles up every time I saw a blanket “Asian” or “Asian American’’ descriptor around this supposed preference. Estimates put Asia as encompassing about 50 countries, and 4.7 billion people. Do you hear how silly it sounds to describe a cuisine, a behavior, literally anything as “Asian”? How dare you speak for everyone! I called my Bengali grandmother and asked her about desserts, just for extra proof, and she waxed about the roshogulla in her hometown outside Kolkata, the kalakand she ate at college in Lucknow, her mother’s kheer. “I love sweets,” she told me, even though at 93 she now limits her intake. Still, this was proof that the preference for “not too sweet” is not universal among Asians, and that “Asian” and “Asian American” cease to be useful frameworks when we start talking about the nuances of culture.
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