the inauthenticy of experience (and the food of the diaspora)
Restructure, in White American culture is General Tso's Chicken and Chop Suey, discusses Jennifer 8.Lee's summary of the myths that non-Chinese Americans have about Chinese food. I wrote this blog post prior to having seen the footage, which actually contains a lot of stuff I already knew (the creation of chop suey, the hostilities, etc) but which might be new to people who don't know a lot about the history of food in the Chinese Diaspora. Other people who have also discussed this today are sanguinity here, Johanna at Vegans of Colour here, Dr S here and restructure reposts at racialicious here (linked so you can read the comments).

The ingress of Chinese people through significant immigration (THE DIASPORA) into another country has often been followed by hostilities and aggression. The evolution of Chinese food over the years has been a sort of extension of this, at first remaining strict but then gradually altering to the foreign environments.The development of regionally acclimatised cuisines was at first a response to these hostilities, an attempt to make people feel more at ease with Chinese food and therefore more at ease with Chinese people. As Lee mentions, chop suey, a quintessential dish in Chinese restaurants across the USA, was created for the purposes of softening up the Caucasians, as it were, to be more amenable to Chinese people.

Restructure notes that Caucasian-Americans think that eating Chinese food is evidence of being all worldy and so on. These attitudes extend to Australia, so don't get complacent! "Multicultural cuisine" is seen as evidence of/a benefit of multiculturalism in Australia, and so are "cultural events," and complaints have been made that often these multicultural activities are being restricted to private events/within the home (ref). Those selfish not-white people! etc. So everybody want to go watch the lions dance in the new year so they can show off how accepting they are, and to eat lots of Thai food, but at the same time consider a mosque to be impinging on residents, demonstrating the superficial understanding and acceptance of not-white going on.

Dr S briefly suggests that some people might argue that we should try to only eat representative or "authentic" food, but such an argument is inherantly problematic. The food upon which I was brought up is by this definition inauthentic, being a centuries old fusion of Chinese, Indian and Malay cooking, called Nonya. Yet I would not suggest that the Chinese-Malaysian style is any more or less valid than Sicilian, and I am certainly not about to stop eating it due to its inauthenticity.

Extending on the idea of inauthenticity, does that make something like a vegan laksa inauthentic? It's traditionally made with a whole lot of seafood, so its lack surely makes it as inauthentic as making it without coconut milk. On the other hand, that's why mock meat was created in the first place, so you can't really call any Chinese dish made with mock meat inauthentic - it was done for religious reasons centuries ago.

The idea of defining "authentic" food is further problematised by the idea of authenticity. I was recently accused of not being Chinese, due to my birthplace not being located in the PRC. Although I am not a food, nor a style of cooking, I feel this example highlights how problematic it is to arbitrarily draw lines, and the ways in which some people look to impose an authority on a situation (or perhaps define themselves) by their knowledge of authentic versus inauthentic.