Asian Intuition: Learning to Trust Your Gut
After attending a Rumpus Room workshop on intuition in South Asian culture, two of our Young Voices team, Jiaqi Zheng and Zainab Ashraf, were inspired to consider the part that intuition played in their respective cultural upbringings.
By Zainab Ashraf and Jiaqi Zheng
The room is full of blank faces at the mention of nigella seeds. Then someone gives the Urdu translation – kalonji. Faces light up as we each take turns to mentally revisit our kitchens and share snippets of wisdom: it’s good to eat half a teaspoon of these little black seeds daily with water, in Islamic belief they hold shifa (healing properties) for all ailments, and, of course, they’re great in curries. This moment of connection was also shared between us and our respective backgrounds – all the way from East and South Asia to a small studio in Govanhill.
This spring, Rumpus Room members Ragini Chawla and Camilla Crosta delivered a series of workshops titled ‘You Drop, You Sow, You Gather’. “We spoke a lot about intangible heritage”, says Ragini, sitting in front of a purple tablecloth decorated with paintings of our food memories. “And we realised that intuition is a way of learning and grasping that we all share”. This can be as simple as ‘knowing’ to risk the addition of an extra teaspoon of chilli powder, but it is also an accumulation of learned rituals which are passed down through generations. In other words, it is the process of trusting our gut feeling to guide our decisions – whether growing herbs, composing music, or preparing food.
Within the theme of South Asian heritage, we also found ourselves discussing various cultures which may seem different, but hold the same firm belief in using intuition as a guide. Often, we learn to trust our gut feeling by listening to and observing our mothers, so women tend to have a very special role in maintaining our culture and familial traditions.
Cross-generational stew
It may sound contradictory that something we define as innate is taught, but that is exactly how intuition has come to have its key role in Asian kitchens – handed down through generations. It’s a skill honed through collaborative teaching and learning, often passed from mother to child. It’s how we navigate the kitchen, by learning and understanding food and flavours, meaning we have little need for measurements and recipes. Instead we are taught to rely on an estimate based on our gut feelings – in other words, our intuition.
Cultural and often spiritual beliefs fuel this almost subconscious practice of cooking. For example, in China, it is believed that there are benefits to eating foods that have physical resemblances to our organs – walnuts for the brain, beans for kidneys, and blueberries for our eyes. These beliefs not only add to our recipes, but build on what we come to know as our culture and heritage. The passage of such knowledge is never a one-way street, it is vital to listen to the past, but also actively incorporate the present. Explaining this succinctly over a video call, as she poured oyster sauce into a steaming wok, Jiaqi’s mother once said:“It is all about experimenting in the kitchen. Be bold with how you’re feeling”.
Being brought up in a big traditional family of forty people, Jiaqi spent her childhood shuttling between the houses of various aunts. Her favourite lotus root and ribs soup tastes subtly different at all the different tables. In one version, there’s always a froth of oil and refreshing water chestnuts at the bottom of the pot – the perfect winter supplement. While another makes a more creamy textured soup with a hint of coriander in each sip. The soup varies according to the makers’ personalities, as they turn their experiences into delicacies.
Our intuitive bond
We recognise that in every new generation, our preferences change and we are able to add new layers to the knowledge we have received. We also think it is so important to learn from the source. When we can learn from each other and communally, it makes for great food and a really special cooking experience.
lIlustration by Ragini Chawla
Speaking about this idea, as she describes to us a fruitful Italian summer, when wild tomatoes were flourishing and people were gathering to make the year’s passata together, workshop leader Camilla says: “Everything can merge together. There are no boundaries between one thing and another, everything is open and flexible and we can embrace that.”
We each have wisdom to share, and being able to collaboratively celebrate our individual traditions has empowered us – not just in passing wisdom down to the next generations, but also with each other. Inheriting recipes is a process many (if not all) cultures share, but it is not so often that we share across cultures. Rumpus Room provided us a space in which we could do just that. Through bonding over the role intuition has had in our kitchens, we, as a diverse group, found similarities between our cultures and enjoyed learning from our differences too.
“Intuition has a lot more authority for me now as a way of knowledge, and I want to really step into it now and have confidence in it”, says Ragini. The very specific celebration of intuition, something which has as vital a place in all of our recipes as salt or sugar, not only empowered us, but added new enjoyment to our cooking and eating rituals.
The poster below was designed by Jiaqi Zheng and inspired by the first workshop session in the Rumpus Room when everyone gathered around the table to write their thoughts and stories about herbs. The white blocks are for people to write on, share their stories and recipes. Why not print it out (or tear it out of our latest paper issue) and share your filled-in poster with us.
Poster by Jiaqi Zheng