twincitiesrunoff: Steph explored how Asian...

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Steph explored how Asian restaurants in the Twin Cities market Asianness this week at TCR, and you should look at this essay, because it’s good. Since I got here, the weirdly pretty racist marketing (which often descends into objectification of women because you know how in lawless Asia women are pretty much having sex and being demure and looking hot all the time) of a lot of popular Asian-inspired restaurants has bothered me: billboards like the one above don’t seem to inspire much outrage in people. And, when people do complain about them, the restaurant responds by saying they were being “edgy.”

If you use the word “edgy” to describe something that could possibly be racist and sexist, it is probably still racist and sexist. “Edgy” generally never means “creative” or “engaging”; it usually means “stupid” and “poorly conceived.”

My biggest complaints about the marketing of restaurants, however, involve how complicit local media is in celebrating restaurants that use cheap Alexandra Wallace-esque stereotypes— and in exoticizing even those that don’t. Even though the TC is home to a variety of immigrant and minority cultures, all of which work together to make our city a place of interest, we still

make definitions of what is “American” and what is “Ethnic” by separating the two in our local magazines (btw, are there any Irish pubs in the Ethnic list?).
feel the need to separate an Asian restaurant as “quirky,” in the same category of one that has a zombie theme.
actually write a pretty decent review of two local Thai restaurants but still feel the need to include a throwaway line about what the “Caucasians” might be doing (a sentence that, by the way, doesn’t make any sense, but just talk about what the white people are doing and you may get a laugh).

Those are just this month; it happens all the time. (And don’t even get me started on how the media doesn’t treat “ethnic” restaurants in the same way as, say, 112 Eatery, even though 112 is largely Italian influenced.)

Yes, there is a certain amount of escapism in eating unfamiliar food and going to a tropically decorated restaurant, and that is a good thing. Our country and our cities are made up of a diversity of cultures and a wide variety of people, and we should celebrate that we have these differences; there is no uniform American or uniform restaurant culture. But consistently labeling these establishments as “quirky” or “ethnic” —and especially when those modifiers are applied to people and reinforced by local publications—makes this diversity seem weird or abnormal, when, in reality, it’s really amazing.

We’d love to know your thoughts on this essay and on these questions, especially with this particular type of content. Even though it’s tempting to just yell this, it’s good for all of us to explain and discuss.