It is now an accepted statistic that a remarkably high proportion of Asians and Asian-Americans are, in someway, either allergic to or intolerant to dairy products. However, until I was a teenager, I was blissfully unaware of this, or that I was included in this statistic, due to the fact that my diet, like that of many Japanese, was remarkably free from anything dairy.

It Begins

My journey of discovery began shortly after I arrived in America and started to suffer from an uncomfortable bloated feeling and a build up of mucus, as if I had a cold. This quickly progressed to stomach pains vomiting at various times, but mostly first thing in the morning when a night worth of mucus had drained into my stomach while I slept.

I put this down to eating strange American food that did not agree with me, and my mother blamed hay fever, and took to shouting loudly at anybody who dared to sneeze near me, but it was our new doctor who quickly narrowed down the possibilities until he found the source. An ice cream Sunday.

Since the day that I arrived in the local dinner and the well-proportioned waitress had remarked that I was too thin and needed to put on some weight, I had been drinking a jumbo sized Sunday almost every other day, and they weren’t just any Sundays. The local dinner made its Sundays with half a cup of cream and two scoops of an award winning local ice cream that was renowned for being so rich and filled with cream that the taste stayed in your mouth an hour after eating it.

It turned out that I had consuming enough lactose and dairy fats to fell an army.

Disagreement

While it turned out that lactose disagreed with me, it also turned out that my Mother disagreed with the doctor. My Mother didn’t like the idea that I suffered from a food allergy in the slightest, and when he said that it was common in Asians, she liked it even less.

To be fair though, during the early nineties, food intolerances was a still a patchy science and food intolerances within minority groups was largely taboo because it went against the US principle that all races were the same except for the color of their skin, so my Mother was not only upset at the idea that I was allergic to something pretty non-threatenings, but also at the idea that somebody was using a new statistic from a science that wasn’t being promoted by the whole of the medical community to tell her why her son wasn't at his best.

Eventually, after being proffered a great many pamphlets, and being told that allergy care was covered under out health plan, my Mother relented to the idea of putting me on a low dairy diet and, sure enough, within a few days of stopping the Sundays, not putting milk in my coffee and avoiding Pizza, the vomiting stopped and the stomach pains subsided, and within a month or so I was my old self. Much to my mother’s irritation because it meant that I was far more Asian than she cared to admit. Both on the outside and on the inside.