I was on a train, trying to erase eight words from my mind—eight words from Slouching Towards Bethlehem, the city of San Francisco, 1968: ‘We are eating a little tempura in Japantown.’

I grew up in a household with not much of a food culture. Being from different parts of the country my parents never agreed on certain things. I think my mother never picked up cooking as a certain feminist rebellion. She was much relieved when we moved to Europe, where cooking is simpler and much less of a duty. Her diet, as I last remember, resembles that of Didion: black coffee, couscous salad, fruits, whatever is left. The same meal she would’ve had if she had cats instead of children.

What I am meant to say is that because of all of this I ate out a lot as a child. And growing up as a child in a big city like Beijing, which neither of my parents really call home, means you develop a taste that some might call cosmopolitan. What I am saying is that I do not have sentimental stories to tell. Food is what I find cold in the fridge. Food is fuel, not family. Let alone culture.

One time, both of my parents were out of town, and had the curator of my father’s gallery—for they distrusted paid professionals and only bothered a roster of relatives and employees—to babysit me. She was a waifish, 20-something woman who had studied in France, and came with a bag of foreign snacks: instant pastas, dried sausages, cheese sticks. But it wasn’t enough, so we took a cab to eat at the Japanese place with the tatami seats.

That wasn’t the time I fell in love with tempura, but certainly I ordered it. The first time I saw tempura might have been in Spirited Away, when the multi-limbed boiler geezer crunches into a fried prawn. The next was in Phineas & Ferb, the finale of season 2, where they travel around the world on the longest day of the summer. They stop at Stacy’s home in Tokyo to refuel. Vegetable oil. Her grandmother runs a tempura restaurant. In reality the oil used for tempura is usually canola or safflower, but also can be sesame or tea seed. The key is to choose an oil with a high smoke point to ensure the batter doesn’t burn, so to have that pale, flurry, yet crunchy finish.

For one reason or another, Japanese food has become the emblem of cosmopolitanism. It doesn’t require much cooking. It doesn’t smell strong, often served cold, acceptable for offices and the subway rides to and back.

But there is also something that makes tempura particularly rootless. The dish originates in the 16th century, when Portuguese missionaries brought about the Western style of coating foods with flour and eggs and frying. Peixinhos da horta is a Portuguese vegetable dish eaten during Lent. The name means ‘Little Fish from the Garden’, as the fried vegetables resemble small pieces of colorful fish. The word ‘tempura’ comes from the Latin ‘tempora’, referring to these fasting times.

So tempura in its Portuguese origin was a substitute for fish, which was itself a substitute for meat during Lent. It is also, perhaps, a metonym for a certain lifestyle, one that is less concerned with finding where one belongs, or is going, but more with the instant gratification of biting into a crunchy prawn.