I want to take a moment to write about something really stupid that happened on Twitter last week. Business reporter Ellen Chang woke up one morning and decided what the world needed was a tweet about how to eat asian foodwhich in itself is a red flag that should tell you it’s time to log off.
It was praised and criticized by readers, and I’m firmly in the latter camp. What really got to me was that so much of that thread, which went viral, was wrong — and reflected a strange and often objective view of how 4 billion people eat.
You know how babies have no sense of object permanence and assume that because something is wrong in front of them, it has essentially ceased to exist? This thread, an exercise in cultural erasure and unwarranted self-confidence, is just that. It could also be an intentional troll, and I’m sorry – in which case, great job, Ellen, and thanks for all the laughs.
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Here are just a few of the many points from the guide that didn’t make sense.
She opened with total amazement, with her first point being that “all”—that is, all Asian food—”is family-style (except Japanese bento boxes). It shouldn’t take the average person more than 5 seconds to think of any food on the Asian continent that is not served family style Name literally any noodle soup Taiwanese fan tuan Vietnamese banh mi Uzbek Shivit Oshi
“Thai food is not eaten with chopsticks,” she continued, ignoring the many regional dishes in the Thai canon that require chopsticks. And “we” don’t care if “you” don’t know how to use them. Who is included in “we”? Certainly not people from the Philippines, who tend to use spoons and forks or just their hands to eat their traditional dishes.
Another tweet says you’ll know a restaurant is “authentic” if it’s full of Asians or non-Asians unaccompanied by an Asian person. So by that logic, wouldn’t every restaurant in the world be authentically Asian? Congratulations to The Cheesecake Factory and its cheeseburger patisserie for their excellent work in promoting and preserving traditional Asian cultures and cuisines.
And then the last ridiculous cherry on top that ignited my fight or flight instinct is point 25 (and it’s not even the last): “All Asian food is different. I don’t know anything about Japanese, Korean, Thai, Malaysian or Vietnamese food except the food I’ve tried.” Imagine if I ranked NBA teams and then said that my only basis for that ranking came from watching Space Jam.
OK, so this is just one really stupid tweet in a sea of bad questions. Who cares right?
And I can empathize with why someone like Chang would do that, somehow. As a food writer, I’m often tasked with learning as much as I can about the food of a new (to me) culture in order to write about it. And it’s not easy to condense everything I’ve learned into one paragraph’s worth of context in a restaurant review. But as a human, I’ve also conducted that research with extreme anxiety about getting it wrong, because I’ve experienced it the other way around: it’s really humiliating to speak from a place of authority about someone else’s culture and not give a damn if you’re or not correct. When you’re not an expert on everything, it’s okay to admit it, I promise.
This thread stirred up a lot of people because it also revealed, in full frontal exposure, how there are still many people out there who should know better than to generalize the customs of entire continents, but do it anyway. So many people casually confuse the whole of Asia, with its diversity of cultures, with a little piece of East Asia, and this mindset can be applied to much more than food. This happens whenever people in the United States talk about Asian American policy, perpetuate the model minority myth, or make some other attempt to take shortcuts when talking about the continent and its diasporas.
No, not all Asians are raised in a Confucian, education-first environment. No, not all Asians vote the same way. No, not all Asians eat shumai.
If you’re looking for a one-stop guide to Asian food, you’re already asking the wrong question. But here’s my advice: The specification will give you the best answers. Be honest about who and what you are talking about: Central Asia? The Philippines? Indian subcontinent? And don’t believe it everyone who claims to be an “Asian food” expert, unless he’s an absolute brain genius. And let’s be real – no one who’s that smart tweets.
