It always started with the chocolate. My mother would order it in bulk from a couple of Swiss importers in early November; it would arrive in thick, five-pound bars a little after Thanksgiving. Next came the cinnamon, then the cloves, and finally a million almonds, and with the reckless happiness of someone in search of something to celebrate, my mother would begin to bake. The result was brunsli: a delicate Swiss-German Christmas cookie made from sugar, spices, chocolate, egg white, and nuts. Or, as my Jamaican-Canadian father calls them, in a nod to their deep brown-black color, “negro–sli.”
“They’ve got no added fat!” My mother used to joke. “You can eat them forever.”
Brunsli’s Swiss-ness, like my own and my mother’s before me, is a complicated thing. Despite what Helvetic chocolate companies like Lindt or Läderach would have you think, chocolate—one of Switzerland’s proudest exports—is not Swiss at all. Brunsli is Swiss in the way that tea is British, or tomatoes are Italian. These things are the fruits of empire, plucked from the fruit trees of a foreign land. The term “Swiss chocolate” is an impossible contradiction, and yet nearly 200,000 tonnes are produced each year.
There is something ironic, therefore, about my parents, my sister and me showing up to my grandparents’ house at 30-38 71st Street in Queens with a box full of brunsli every Christmas Eve. After all, we were not exactly the spitting image of the Swiss Family Robinson. While my mother’s mother is from Baden, near Zürich, my grandfather was staunchly Chinese. Both migrated to New York amidst the Warholesque-excess of the postwar era. After meeting at a social event for unmarried foreign nationals sponsored by the Rockefeller family, the couple spent most of the rest of their life together in Jackson Heights—the most diverse neighborhood in the city. Sure, Christmas Eve dinner ended with brunsli and kirschwasser (a clear cherry brandy), but the main course regularly included lion’s head, glass noodles and tsung-yu-bing, or scallion pancakes. Running in circles around the living room between dinner and dessert, my sister, my cousins and I felt like cultural pirates: we had lifted culinary treasures from Switzerland and China, and returned to Jackson Heights unscathed to enjoy our rightful bounty, among the wayward Italians and Bangladeshis and Greeks.
Even to my child’s eyes, though, it was always clear that there were also elements of profound unhappiness scattered throughout my grandparents’ house in Queens: the too-loud Chinese Central News on TV, and my bed-ridden grandfather’s pursed-lip silence; my grandmother’s singular practicality, and my aunt’s perpetual frown. When I was twelve, for reasons I could not yet understand, my family started celebrating Christmas Eve alone, at home. The one continuity was the brunsli. My mother’s reckless excitement about the cookies multiplied into a borderline fervor after we stopped spending the holiday with her parents, and by early December there would be hundreds of cocoa-colored cookies spread out across sheets of parchment paper on the kitchen table and living room floor (brunsli must air-dry before it is baked). My sister and I would look on in awe; my father would look on in amused admiration, and the whole house would smell like nutmeg.
It was nine years later—with my grandfather long dead and my grandmother descending into dementia—that I got the full story. As with the cookies themselves, there was blackness at the core of it; or rather, anti-Blackness. We had stopped visiting my grandparents because my grandfather did not approve of my mother marrying a Black man. My parents had been briefly welcomed back into the Wang household after my birth because my grandfather was desperate for a grandson, even a funny-colored one. But by the time I was born, my parents had not spoken to my mother’s family for nearly a decade. With the exception of one of my uncles, everyone had sided with my grandfather to varying degrees during that time. My sister and I were given Chinese names and taken to a few Christmas Eve dinners in the first twelve years of my life in a failed attempt at reconciliation, but the whole time, unbeknownst to us, we had been bastard children. In 2013, my mother had stolen the family brunsli recipe (along with my great-grandmother’s apron) as an act of final goodbye. Negro-sli indeed: the black cookie for the black sheep, with the redbone husband and the light-brown kids.
Like American hotdogs in Filipino cuisine, or budae jjigae (so-called “American army stew”) in Korea—both of which occupy a liminal space somewhere between imperialism and resistance—my mother’s brunsli are at once an expression of pride and an object of shame. For my mother, making brunsli is an act of defiance through reclamation: the cookies make her Swiss, without needing to interact with anyone. But at the same time, making brunsli is a reminder that, despite her parents’ transgressions, she still wants to be Swiss. In my mother’s mind, the only path towards personhood is the one that cuts directly through the ugliness of her ancestral past. My mind’s not so made up. But I know this: when my mother gives me that recipe I will treasure it, and I will bake those cookies every December until my hands cannot roll the dough.
