Food in Constructing Transcultural Finnish-American Identities in The Migrant Short Stories by Lauri Anderson

Abstract

In this article, I analyze the position of food in constructing the transcultural identities of Finnish migrants in three collections of short stories, Heikki Heikkinen (1995), Misery Bay (2002), and Back to Misery Bay (2007), by the Finnish American writer Lauri Anderson. The American-born settlers look back at their Finnish heritage with nostalgia and use foodways to establish their versions of Finnishness. First, food serves to express the migrants’ ethnic difference and sameness by separating them from Americans and uniting as Finns. Second, food is a part of the settlers’ inter-generational relations when Anderson’s younger-generation characters invent new culinary symbols of Finnishness and rebel against their Finnish heritage or return to it with the help of foodways. Third, the migrants express their Finnishness through their relation with nature in the form of living off the land. At the same time, the characters incorporate the traits of Finnish and American cultures within their identities, which can be addressed as transcultural.