by Sophia N. Lee

I liked myself better when I discovered that I liked cilantro. I was at one of those trendy midnight food markets in Manila, the kind we had to drive two hours to get to, back and forth. Cilantro is one of ingredients that are polarizing at the outset - you either really liked it, or really hated it - there was no going in between. Then, everyone I knew despised it with a passion.

So when I listened to the lovely Vietnamese woman explain everything that went into the banh mi, I didn’t hear her say anything about putting cilantro in it. Maybe if I had, I would have hesitated to try it, and moved on to another stall. I watched her carefully assembling the banh mi (something that took well over 10 minutes because of how meticulously she did each step), toasting the bun, and then layering mayonnaise, pate, sweet barbecued pork, and spicy pickled vegetables on top of one another - it escaped my mind that cilantro leaves were the “greens” she was adding on top of all of that. In a place where they served burgers with glazed donuts in place of buns, and ice cream with bacon bits long before that became fashionable, this was a combination that to my mind was so wild I knew I immediately had to have it.

Ordering that sandwich to me felt like venturing into uncharted waters.

Discovering new food, along with the manic driving to any place that promised the same - I already knew that that was me. I knew that it was a part of myself that I shared with my father, who started taking me to good restaurants when I turned thirteen, because he was afraid that some boy would take me someplace mediocre and then I’d fall in love with them.

“I want you to know what good tastes like,” he had always said then. And I had always associated good with him. But he wasn’t with me on that day.

He hated cilantro. It tasted like bed bugs, he always said.

But there I was, eating a banh mi for the first time, and cilantro was definitely in it. It tasted fresh. Like a revelation. Like for the first time, I was discovering something that was just entirely me.