4 ms·

The Struggles of Writing About Chinese Food as a Chinese Person

23 points by DiabloD3 10y ago

Safety1stClyde 10y ago
It doesn't really make a lot of sense. If anything, Chinese people have more credibility than white people when writing about Chinese food, not less. That is not a new phenomenon either, since people like Ken Hom and Martin Yan have been doing it since the 1980s. Is she really claiming she was "bullied" for eating pig intestines? One minute she claims that everyone thinks Chinese food is cool, then the next minute she is complaining about how she gets funny looks for chewing on jellyfish heads.
- jwong_ 10y ago
  I definitely get this feeling. She means Chinese food is cool, but not when she's eating it. It's trendy when someone white picks it up (mostly because they're eating things that white people are accustomed to). It's because she's eating something that's more "authentic", which likely is less palatable. I know I make an effort to only share certain foods with people who aren't accustomed to actual Chinese food, because I get a lot of dirty looks when offering some dishes.
  - Safety1stClyde 10y ago
    > I know I make an effort to only share certain foods with people who aren't accustomed to actual Chinese food, because I get a lot of dirty looks when offering some dishes. I have given Marmite to foreign students to eat, and they responded with a funny look or horror. Sorry but I can't work that up into some kind of anti-Britishism. Similar with the turducken issue, can she really be serious about working that into some kind of anti-Chinese prejudice?
newsbinator 10y ago
Of all the problems of disenfranchisement and discrimination that genuinely hurt people, this politicization of identity is the least interesting. > "Only certain dishes like noodles, dumplings, kebabs, and rice bowls have been normalized. The majority is still largely stigmatized because, bluntly put, white people have not decided they like it yet." You know what: if you like whatever dish and you wish others would too, then write and vlog about it and try to popularize it. Use a pseudonym if you think your name connotes the wrong ethnicity for your audience's sensibilities. I do. > I myself had many of my pitches labeled by as "too niche," only to find those same topics surface in articles by white people years later. Or perhaps you were pitching the right thing at the wrong time. We'll never know. > Please, think about who you give the microphone to. If you want the microphone, take it, it's yours. But please fight battles with more obvious foes and more serious stakes. There are lots to choose from.
- andybak 10y ago
  The greatest weakness of the left is its inability to choose its battles wisely. And discern friend from foe.
  - prestonh 10y ago
    And driving away would-be-allies by constantly referring to 'white people', which is not only a fallacy (we're not a homogeneous group) but incredibly hypocritical.
    - rayiner 10y ago
      I'm beyond frustrated by the mainstreaming of derisive comments about "white people." Hey, my daughter is half white you assholes!
FloatingGhost 10y ago
>"This was something that had been on my mind already. I wanted to find the data to show that structural oppression exists," she says. Conclusion preceded the study, you can dismiss this now.
DarkKomunalec 10y ago
"Though the country [China] only has 10 percent of arable land worldwide, they produce food for 20 percent of the world's population." Nice way of saying they produce enough food for their own population, and make it look like an act of charity.
coldcode 10y ago
Every country has this issue. In this global universe we live in all "native" foods merge with local culture to produce something new. For example "Mexican" food in various parts of the US is nothing like the food I ate when I worked in Mexico, yet even there regional differences are almost as different. Even "Chinese" food is wildly different dependent on where you are from in China. I grew up eating "German" food that is only barely like any restaurant I've seen in the US, and nothin like what you find in Germany today because it came from my parent's remembering what they ate as kids and my grandmother's what she learned from her mother. Food is not a static item and never has been. Trying to say the food you remember or eat is "yours" to talk about is sort of ignoring that it is a very personal concept as well as rooted in time and place.
rayiner 10y ago
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to get out of this article. As a counter-example. My family is Bangladeshi but we live in the U.S. Bangladeshi food is mainstream in the U.S. in many ways (many Indian restaurants are owned by Bangladeshis) but there will always be stuff Americans find unpalatable. I think it's awesome to see Americans (of any color) enjoying Bangladeshi food; do I care that they'll probably never develop a taste for shutki (extremely pungent dried fish)? Is that a mark of "structural oppression?" And moreover, its sad to see the author engage in racial and ethnic stereotyping of her own. "White people," of course, have many different culinary traditions. My father in law is from the Oregon coast; he loves salmon, smoking things, pickling things, etc. Can he complain about "structural oppression" now that the East Coast cultural elite have embraced salmon, but continue to find sucking on fish and lobster heads disgusting? Can he claim "cultural appropriation" now that pickled foods are super trendy?
- dec0dedab0de 10y ago
  I am half Lebanese, and had friends grossed out by me eating hummus a decade before you could buy it pre-made in super markets. I kind of understand her point, but after a while I just wanted to hear about some new food I should try.
- rhino369 10y ago
  I don't understand the growing demonization of cultural diffusion by labeling it "cultural appropriation." The author is just upset that Americans are incorporating her culturing into our own under our own terms. But that doesn't harm Chinese culture at all.
  - slantyyz 10y ago
    >> I don't understand the growing demonization of cultural diffusion by labeling it "cultural appropriation." Either do I. The one thing I notice today is how everything is "sacred", whether it be certain a person's feelings, words, culture, activities, etc. It makes it very hard to have a reasonable discussion about a topic that a person feels is sacred to them.
  - 10y ago
tyingq 10y ago
" Only certain dishes like noodles, dumplings, kebabs, and rice bowls have been normalized. The majority is still largely stigmatized because, bluntly put, white people have not decided they like it yet." Is it really "white people" though, or just Americans in general?
- prestonh 10y ago
  Most Americans for sure. It's totally reasonable that people are slow in expanding out of their comfort zones. 20 years ago eating raw fish was considered weird, now high school kids are doing it to impress their classmates.
iamacynic 10y ago
i'm asian american. the overwhelming cringe factor in reading this kind of drivel is it's so obvious the author desperately wants acceptance from the in-group, while at the same time demonizing it, while at the same time humblebragging their newfound coolness. what person of any race or culture would respect someone with such an obvious inferiority complex?
malandrew 10y ago
Lots of great points in this article, many of which I agree with. What's absent is the acknowledgement of the importance of the audience. The gatekeepers generally represent the audience/market the content is being published for. Take the movie industry for example. The highest paid actors of color don't make movies that appeal to audiences of their own ethnicity. They make movies for audiences that are more greatly represented in the United States, mostly white people. At the end of the day, that's where the money is. With this all in mind and the fact that the audience completely missed the importance of the audience in this rant, I can't help that this is the reason she's still feeling this frustration as it's the gatekeepers that she complains about that understands that audience better than she does. If she understood that audience, she would have at least acknowledged the importance of appealing to them in her post.
ouid 10y ago
My grandmother had what I would call food racism. She would regularly dismiss rice as being ethnic food. It was profoundly annoying to deal with, but I always felt that I really had no right to confront her about it. I wish I could articulate why I felt that way. It's almost exactly the same pattern of thought that people racism is (but without victims). She didn't really have a good system for describing what made food (or by extension, people) good, and instead of just living with some uncertainty, her brain created a bunch of rules that correlated with her enjoyment. Then she lazily conflated that with an honest to god definition of good food (people), and used that to exclude just about everything else as uncivilized. I don't think that the author of this article would consider this the underlying cause of the problem, and I agree that he comes off as a bit whiny, but I think he's noticing a real problem. Maybe the most intractible problem that we have.
- ajmurmann 10y ago
  I think what you are describing is actual racism what the author is describing to me sounds like someone being unhappy with the culture the live in being different and being badly educated about the culture their ancestors came from. Food is core to every culture. We all need to figure out what is edible and what isn't. Raw foods and fermented foods are right in the riskier category of what's edible and therefore frequently considered problematic by other cultures. That's a good thing. It means we have different cultures and diversity on our planet.
rendall 10y ago
Here is a critique of the essay's assertions about the Wade-Giles romanization system. The TL;DR is that it is inaccurate and misinformed. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=32434 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=32434

23 points by DiabloD3 10y ago

It doesn't really make a lot of sense. If anything, Chinese people have more credibility than white people when writing about Chinese food, not less. That is not a new phenomenon either, since people like Ken Hom and Martin Yan have been doing it since the 1980s. Is she really claiming she was "bullied" for eating pig intestines? One minute she claims that everyone thinks Chinese food is cool, then the next minute she is complaining about how she gets funny looks for chewing on jellyfish heads.

jwong_ 10y ago
I definitely get this feeling. She means Chinese food is cool, but not when she's eating it. It's trendy when someone white picks it up (mostly because they're eating things that white people are accustomed to). It's because she's eating something that's more "authentic", which likely is less palatable. I know I make an effort to only share certain foods with people who aren't accustomed to actual Chinese food, because I get a lot of dirty looks when offering some dishes.
- Safety1stClyde 10y ago
  > I know I make an effort to only share certain foods with people who aren't accustomed to actual Chinese food, because I get a lot of dirty looks when offering some dishes. I have given Marmite to foreign students to eat, and they responded with a funny look or horror. Sorry but I can't work that up into some kind of anti-Britishism. Similar with the turducken issue, can she really be serious about working that into some kind of anti-Chinese prejudice?

newsbinator 10y ago

Of all the problems of disenfranchisement and discrimination that genuinely hurt people, this politicization of identity is the least interesting. > "Only certain dishes like noodles, dumplings, kebabs, and rice bowls have been normalized. The majority is still largely stigmatized because, bluntly put, white people have not decided they like it yet." You know what: if you like whatever dish and you wish others would too, then write and vlog about it and try to popularize it. Use a pseudonym if you think your name connotes the wrong ethnicity for your audience's sensibilities. I do. > I myself had many of my pitches labeled by as "too niche," only to find those same topics surface in articles by white people years later. Or perhaps you were pitching the right thing at the wrong time. We'll never know. > Please, think about who you give the microphone to. If you want the microphone, take it, it's yours. But please fight battles with more obvious foes and more serious stakes. There are lots to choose from.

andybak 10y ago
The greatest weakness of the left is its inability to choose its battles wisely. And discern friend from foe.
- prestonh 10y ago
  And driving away would-be-allies by constantly referring to 'white people', which is not only a fallacy (we're not a homogeneous group) but incredibly hypocritical.
  - rayiner 10y ago
    I'm beyond frustrated by the mainstreaming of derisive comments about "white people." Hey, my daughter is half white you assholes!

FloatingGhost 10y ago

>"This was something that had been on my mind already. I wanted to find the data to show that structural oppression exists," she says. Conclusion preceded the study, you can dismiss this now.

DarkKomunalec 10y ago

"Though the country [China] only has 10 percent of arable land worldwide, they produce food for 20 percent of the world's population." Nice way of saying they produce enough food for their own population, and make it look like an act of charity.

coldcode 10y ago

Every country has this issue. In this global universe we live in all "native" foods merge with local culture to produce something new. For example "Mexican" food in various parts of the US is nothing like the food I ate when I worked in Mexico, yet even there regional differences are almost as different. Even "Chinese" food is wildly different dependent on where you are from in China. I grew up eating "German" food that is only barely like any restaurant I've seen in the US, and nothin like what you find in Germany today because it came from my parent's remembering what they ate as kids and my grandmother's what she learned from her mother. Food is not a static item and never has been. Trying to say the food you remember or eat is "yours" to talk about is sort of ignoring that it is a very personal concept as well as rooted in time and place.

rayiner 10y ago

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to get out of this article. As a counter-example. My family is Bangladeshi but we live in the U.S. Bangladeshi food is mainstream in the U.S. in many ways (many Indian restaurants are owned by Bangladeshis) but there will always be stuff Americans find unpalatable. I think it's awesome to see Americans (of any color) enjoying Bangladeshi food; do I care that they'll probably never develop a taste for shutki (extremely pungent dried fish)? Is that a mark of "structural oppression?" And moreover, its sad to see the author engage in racial and ethnic stereotyping of her own. "White people," of course, have many different culinary traditions. My father in law is from the Oregon coast; he loves salmon, smoking things, pickling things, etc. Can he complain about "structural oppression" now that the East Coast cultural elite have embraced salmon, but continue to find sucking on fish and lobster heads disgusting? Can he claim "cultural appropriation" now that pickled foods are super trendy?

dec0dedab0de 10y ago
I am half Lebanese, and had friends grossed out by me eating hummus a decade before you could buy it pre-made in super markets. I kind of understand her point, but after a while I just wanted to hear about some new food I should try.
rhino369 10y ago
I don't understand the growing demonization of cultural diffusion by labeling it "cultural appropriation." The author is just upset that Americans are incorporating her culturing into our own under our own terms. But that doesn't harm Chinese culture at all.
- slantyyz 10y ago
  >> I don't understand the growing demonization of cultural diffusion by labeling it "cultural appropriation." Either do I. The one thing I notice today is how everything is "sacred", whether it be certain a person's feelings, words, culture, activities, etc. It makes it very hard to have a reasonable discussion about a topic that a person feels is sacred to them.
- 10y ago

tyingq 10y ago

" Only certain dishes like noodles, dumplings, kebabs, and rice bowls have been normalized. The majority is still largely stigmatized because, bluntly put, white people have not decided they like it yet." Is it really "white people" though, or just Americans in general?

prestonh 10y ago
Most Americans for sure. It's totally reasonable that people are slow in expanding out of their comfort zones. 20 years ago eating raw fish was considered weird, now high school kids are doing it to impress their classmates.

iamacynic 10y ago

i'm asian american. the overwhelming cringe factor in reading this kind of drivel is it's so obvious the author desperately wants acceptance from the in-group, while at the same time demonizing it, while at the same time humblebragging their newfound coolness. what person of any race or culture would respect someone with such an obvious inferiority complex?

malandrew 10y ago

Lots of great points in this article, many of which I agree with. What's absent is the acknowledgement of the importance of the audience. The gatekeepers generally represent the audience/market the content is being published for. Take the movie industry for example. The highest paid actors of color don't make movies that appeal to audiences of their own ethnicity. They make movies for audiences that are more greatly represented in the United States, mostly white people. At the end of the day, that's where the money is. With this all in mind and the fact that the audience completely missed the importance of the audience in this rant, I can't help that this is the reason she's still feeling this frustration as it's the gatekeepers that she complains about that understands that audience better than she does. If she understood that audience, she would have at least acknowledged the importance of appealing to them in her post.

ouid 10y ago

My grandmother had what I would call food racism. She would regularly dismiss rice as being ethnic food. It was profoundly annoying to deal with, but I always felt that I really had no right to confront her about it. I wish I could articulate why I felt that way. It's almost exactly the same pattern of thought that people racism is (but without victims). She didn't really have a good system for describing what made food (or by extension, people) good, and instead of just living with some uncertainty, her brain created a bunch of rules that correlated with her enjoyment. Then she lazily conflated that with an honest to god definition of good food (people), and used that to exclude just about everything else as uncivilized. I don't think that the author of this article would consider this the underlying cause of the problem, and I agree that he comes off as a bit whiny, but I think he's noticing a real problem. Maybe the most intractible problem that we have.

ajmurmann 10y ago
I think what you are describing is actual racism what the author is describing to me sounds like someone being unhappy with the culture the live in being different and being badly educated about the culture their ancestors came from. Food is core to every culture. We all need to figure out what is edible and what isn't. Raw foods and fermented foods are right in the riskier category of what's edible and therefore frequently considered problematic by other cultures. That's a good thing. It means we have different cultures and diversity on our planet.

rendall 10y ago

Here is a critique of the essay's assertions about the Wade-Giles romanization system. The TL;DR is that it is inaccurate and misinformed. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=32434 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=32434