Ever so meticulously, I angle my chopsticks and scoop up three distinct seaweeds from my Pokeworks poke bowl. The crunchy nori mingles with briny ogo seaweed from Hawai’i and the tough hijiki seaweed straight from Japan’s coast. Savoring this complex bite, I reach my chopsticks into the bowl to scavenge for another seaweed scoop. With the opening of the Hawaiian-Japanese fusion restaurant Pokeworks in Harvard Square in March, the fusion food fad remains a sweeping influence on and around college campuses. With fusion food, the opportunities for experimenting with and creating food concepts by drawing from distinct cultures become limitless. It’s exciting for both customers and chefs. On the other hand, fusion food has another meaning where the term “fused” is taken literally, merging distinct cultures into one blanket term, as is common with “Asian cuisine.”
Asian fusion restaurants and foods offer convenient ways for chefs and owners to share multicultural backgrounds and expose people to cultures they may not typically encounter. If people crave food with several distinct Asian influences, Asian restaurants with a menu of different Asian cultures can serve this need. However, this umbrella name presents a problem when fusion Asian cuisine emerges as one homogenous culture rather a group of different Asian cultures with their own distinct and thriving food scenes.
The Recurring Phenomena of a Generalized Asian Culture
Throughout history, Asian people from different countries have been perceived as sharing one culture. On the evening of June 23, 1982, Vincent Chin, the son of Chinese immigrants, was brutally accosted by two white men. His killers were motivated by increasing competition from Japanese car companies.. While it’s important to note that the Asian American community rallying for Chin’s justice transcended various cultures, his death illuminated the common assumption that all Asians are interchangeable. This quick categorization of Asian people is problematic because it denies Asian people the opportunity to express their culture accurately.
Thirty-four years after Chin’s death, The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News aired a segment in October 2016 where Jesse Watters mocked Chinatown residents and visitors. In one particular conversation with an elderly Chinese man, Watters inquires if a man knows karate, a Japanese style of martial arts. Later, Watters attempts TaeKwonDo and plays with nunchucks, which both come from the Korean tradition. None of these martial arts belong to Chinese culture, but Watters’ segment perpetuated that stereotype. Watters’ stereotyping of martial arts emphasizes the convenient, but extremely lazy unwillingness to truly understand the cultural distinctions on a massive continent.
Government policy and data aggregation serves as another example of this problematic phenomena. According to the Washington Post, in 2012 the majority of immigrants to the United States came from Asia and Latin America. The United States government, however, has failed to make the distinctions clear between Asian countries when reporting data in city and state-wide surveys on health, education, and discrimination. States such as Massachusetts have noticed this distinction and have tried to disaggregate Asian American survey data to better understand the diversity of Asian American and Pacific Islander subgroups. In January 2017, Massachusetts State Representative Tackey Chan introduced a bill that called for a way to identify the state’s five largest Asian and Pacific Islander subgroups on surveys. Supporters of the bill, including Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center, have constantly rallied for data disaggregation. In an interview with NPR, one supporter said, “we should be united in uplifting our community members who have been continuously calling for data disaggregation so they will not be left invisible.” The current data disaggregation debate highlighted another way Americans simplify complex Asian cultures.
Fusing Asian Foods
Many restaurants and chefs inadvertently make the mistake of lumping together distinct Asian cultures. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, an Asian restaurant called Roppongi Ramen serves ramen, boba milk tea, Vietnamese spring rolls, and a variety of other Asian foods, according to their menu. Roppongi is the official name of a Tokyo district and ramen — wavy wheat noodles submerged in a fish or meat flavored broth — comes from Japanese cuisine. On the other hand, boba originates from Taiwan, and spring rolls are from Vietnam. However, the menu does not articulate which menu items belong to specific Asian cultures. Shops like Roppongi Ramen can be seen throughout the United States; Roppongi Ramen is not an exception and illuminates the common and problematic marketing strategy of grouping Asian foods of different cultures together.
Harvard University Dining Services is also occasionally guilty of falsely advertising cuisines by using umbrella terms. Allison Pao, a Harvard Freshman Food Literacy Project Fellow, became puzzled when she saw the sign “Asian Stir-Fry” in the dining hall. “I think that food is a window into other people’s cultures,” Pao said in an interview with the HPR. “When restaurants or dining services try to recreate different types of foods, I think that it’s really important that they take care to not only remain authentic to a certain food culture but are also aware of the context of food and the naming of food.” Instead of placing stir-fry under the umbrella term of “Asian food,” HUDS should clarify how frying vegetables in hot oil and stirring noodles in a wok stems from Chinese culture, not Asia at large. While HUDS may be trying to expose students to many varieties of international cuisine, they should reconsider how food labels affect students’ perceptions of specific food cultures.
At Asian and Asian-influenced restaurants, chefs and waiters should be intentional about how they advertise their food business and educate customers on the cultural origins of menu items, especially new customers trying certain Asian cuisines for the first time. A person’s first interaction with specific Asian cuisines is the most important because it sets a standard for Asian food experiences. If this experience is non-authentic, the newly inaugurated Asian foodie will have inaccurate conceptions of Asian food. Peter Yang, the Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Pokeworks, home of poke bowls and “sushi burritos,” explained the process of opening the first location of Pokeworks in New York City. “We were the first location in New York City for poke and hardly anyone knew what poke was,” Yang said in an interview with the HPR. “I think it’s the responsibility of the restaurant or vendor to educate a bit but it’s goes both ways. The consumer needs to be more aware about what they’re eating these days and not only learn about the food, but also the culture behind it.” While customers should try to learn about different Asian cultures in their free time, restaurants have a responsibility to promote cultural education about their food. It would be unfair to assume that all customers have access to a multicultural education in their own community, and so restaurants should facilitate these first authentic interactions with food.
Ultimately, this reluctance to assume the burden of education is not surprising, because restaurants are businesses trying to appeal to customers. In an interview with the HPR, Merry White, a professor of anthropology at Boston University, explained why certain Asian restaurants that have chosen to fuse Asian cultures, such as Chinese restaurants featuring sushi bars, should not be thought of as simply “Asian.” “They weren’t seeking to create an Asian restaurant,” she said. “They were being smart about marketing food for people who wanted a variety of Asian food without calling it an Asian restaurant.” Although this type of restaurant may not be initially invested in cultivating cultural lessons about Asian foods, social awareness about Asian cultures and people should be a priority in order for restaurants to respect the culture of origin of the food they serve.
Asian food offers a way to explore a new culture without traveling directly to Asia. A customer’s first interaction with Asian cuisine should be as authentic as possible in order to prevent inaccurate first impressions and assumptions about Asia, Asian-American culture, and Asian people. Furthermore, education about the different Asian cultures will deepen the overall food experience. White also believes in the power of knowledge when it relates to food: “The more knowledge you have, I think the more you will appreciate the food. The knowledge of [food] really does enhance your experience with it.”
Image source: Flickr/Poke Bowl.