The Struggles of Writing About Chinese Food as a Chinese Person | Hacker News Reader

The Struggles of Writing About Chinese Food as a Chinese Person

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23 pointsDiabloD323 comments

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?

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.

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.

>> 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.

It seems to me that cultural appropriation, like other recent attempts at critical thinking about culture, is reasonable when applied to a very narrow range of activity, and unreasonable when applied broadly. Moreover, we've moved toward the broader interpretation at such blinding speed that the idea is understood only in the broad fashion.

It seems reasonable that the majority culture should hold some sensitivity to minority elements. Christians would be upset to see a tabernacle used out of context. We should show the same respect to the morally equivalent symbols on other cultures. That idea seems compatible American values - no prohibition of speech, but mutual freedom and respect.

This idea has been rapidly and rabidly misinterpreted as absolute ownership of all unique elements of a culture by its members, and an imperative to shame anyone that uses any symbol they don't 'own'.

I don't know that I had a broader point besides that those crying cultural appropriation should take a deep breath, and those of us shaking our heads should recognize that the idea does have some value

>> I'm not sure what I'm supposed to get out of this article.

I don't either. The tone is incredibly whiny and maybe more than a smidge elitist, in my opinion.

My parents came to Canada (from China) in the early 60s, and first rented living spaces in basements of... well, white people. They told me stories of how they wouldn't cook any "aromatic" foods like shrimp paste or salted fish, because the smells were deemed offensive. But that was then.

Fast forward to 2017, and the acceptance of the "weirder" Chinese foods among North Americans seems to be pretty good, and we can probably thank the Food Network and other TV shows for that. The author's complaints about the lack of interest in the finer points of some Chinese cuisines to me isn't a big deal. You can just as easily make the argument that people have the same apathy towards Italian food. I'm sure there are large swaths of people who think good Italian food is what you get at the Olive Garden.

I live in a predominantly Chinese suburb in Ontario known to have a lot of good Chinese restaurants (catering primarily to Chinese people). I'm sure there is a lot of nuance to the food, but a lot of it is lost on me. Most of the popular restaurants are basically cookie cutter clones of the other restaurants.

Unlike the writer, I don't have a problem with white writers introducing the non-Chinese masses to Chinese cuisine. People want someone like them to introduce them to something exotic to them. My parents for the longest time would only eat Chinese food and "common" western food like McD's, steaks and roast beef. My siblings and I would have to do a lot of convincing to get them to eat anything else. Of course, if their Chinese friends suggested something because they tried it and liked it, it would all of a sudden be "Oh I hear XYZ is delicious! We should try it", even though we may have suggested it a dozen times.

Your comment reminds me of a personal experience which seems appropriate to this thread.

I had heard for years about kimchi. All sorts of things along the lines of how it was cabbage buried in the ground and isn't that weird / disgusting? I finally found myself at a Korean restaurant, and they brought out the banchan, and there's some kimchi. I try some. And holy shit, it's just spicy sauerkraut. I have Polish heritage; I grew up eating sauerkraut. This was literally nothing special to me.

I think the lack of reaction was disappointing to my friends. I took them to a Polish restaurant later and introduced them to good sauerkraut.

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.

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.

The greatest weakness of the left is its inability to choose its battles wisely. And discern friend from foe.

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.

I'm beyond frustrated by the mainstreaming of derisive comments about "white people." Hey, my daughter is half white you assholes!

"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.

" 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

> 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?

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

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