Chinese Restaurant Owners Dismiss Discrimination — with Good Food
Imagine you are Wong Fu, the owner of a Chinese restaurant, and you are encouraged to run it by hunting for cats and dogs in the back alley, evading taxes, dodging immigration officers and exploiting your staff to a “sweatshop” speed.
That is what a new video game, “Dirty Chinese Restaurant,” asks of its players. You earn points for every misdeed, and, the more horrifying things you were able to do, the higher score you will get.
As word of “Dirty Chinese Restaurant” video game has spread, the Chinese community in New York expressed its anger and disgust.
Elected officials whose districts encompass a large Chinese American population lashed out at the developers of the game in a tweet that urged Google and Apple not to allow its release.
“Clever name for your company… but bigotry is not cool,” said City Councilman Peter Koo, who represents District 20 in Queens.
“Dirty Chinese Restaurant” was initially announced in 2016, but it came under fire late September this year when Chinese community activist Karlin Chan shared information about the game’s upcoming formal release on Twitter, triggering widespread public outcry.
While some video game enthusiasts expressed willingness to try it out, the game didn’t make it to its release day, because the protests have had an impact.
The game’s developer, Big-O-Tree, whose company’s tagline is “because being politically correct is so boring,” originally said that “Dirty Chinese Restaurant” was a mere “satire.” However, after failing to silence the increasingly heated criticism from the public, the developers changed course and canceled releasing the game, publishing a statement on their website to “apologize to the Chinese community.”
“After careful consideration and taking the time to listen to the public’s opinion we have decided it’s not in anyone’s best interest to release Dirty Chinese Restaurant,” said the company. “Out of respect we will begin removing all marketing media pertaining to DCR off our Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube accounts.”
But to the Chinese community, especially restaurant owners, the sting of the game still remains. Many of them have spent their lives combatting these stereotypes, but the discrimination persists.
Among those who still hurt is Chen Lieh Tang, 66, owner of the newly opened Hwa Yuan restaurant in Chinatown, Manhattan. Having been in the restaurant industry for four decades, Tang denounced the game as “ridiculous.”
Son of a famous restauranteur, Win Fat Tang, who is largely credited with bringing Szechuan cuisine, especially cold sesame noodles, to New York, Chen Lieh Tang felt that he still has something to prove to Americans. After the opening of Shorty Tang Noodles earlier this year in Chelsea, Hwa Yuan, a three-storey restaurant with over 350 seats, opened its doors just week ago.
Tang is proud of the high standards of hygiene he keeps running his own restaurant, just as his father did when the family opened the first Hwa Yuan in 1968.
“Be it French, Japanese, Italian, Chinese… every restaurant experiences the same thing and cleans its kitchen the same way. How’s there a difference between Chinese restaurants and the others?” Tang said. “It’s all discrimination.”
However, not all restaurants show the same level of hygiene, according to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which conducts annual inspections of New York City’s restaurants for issues including food handling, food temperature, personal hygiene and grades them accordingly with letter grades A, B and C.
Chinese restaurants didn’t make it to the top, as French has the highest percentage of grade A, but they are far from in the bottom. Filtered by cuisine, restaurants that show the lowest grade A percentage are these: Latin, South Asian and Spanish. As for the average number of violations per restaurant, South Asian, Spanish and Korean cuisines perform the worst, according to NYC Open Data, an online database that publishes and updates daily inspection results from the department.
Tang comes to his restaurant’s kitchen every day, cooking as many bowls of sesame noodles as possible, teaching young Chinese trainees how to cook and attending to every detail of the kitchen.
His way of showing people that Chinese restaurants are making improvement, and that the ugly stereotypes should be abandoned, is by working hard at running clean and elegant restaurants.
“I’ve lived in the U.S. long enough to understand racism,” Tang said. “My goal is to represent Chinese food culture. I am going to revive Chinatown in East Broadway and let people know why we deserve to be the best.”
Representation of Chinese, and on a broader perspective, Asians, has been discriminative for a long time, according to Min Kahng, a Korean American playwright who is known for his musical, The Four Immigrants: An American Musical Manga, which chronicles how four Japanese immigrants chased their American dreams in the face of an anti-Japanese prejudice.
Kahng thinks that at a time when Asians are still struggling to find meaningful representation as minorities in American media, a game like this can have devastating impact on its audience.
“Satire has its place too, of course,” said Kahng. “But the association of ‘dirty’ with ‘Chinese’ is not one I think we need of. This game certainly does nothing to help the perception of Asians in North America.”
Influenced by the game are not only experienced chefs and regular restaurant goers. Joe Rong, owner of Joe’s Steam Rice Roll who opened his Guangdong cuisine restaurant seven months ago in Flushing, Queens, is also feeling outraged.
To get the permission to open a restaurant, Rong said, requires rounds of health inspection from officials, which is why the scenes portrayed in Dirty Chinese Restaurant wouldn’t make sense.
“I remind my staff every day, before and after work, to keep our kitchen clean and never leave garbage bags overnight, otherwise there will be rats and roaches,” said Rong. “We have an open kitchen. Customer see it for themselves how we keep everything clean and how we prepare their food.”
Like Tang, Rong sees the game as a perpetuation of anti-Chinese racism, but was nevertheless hopeful talking about his ambition of changing the way people think of Chinese and Chinese food through good cooking.
“In Guangdong, China, steam rice rolls are the everyday basic, but no one specializes in it in New York,” Rong said. “Haters are gonna hate, but I am still introducing steam rice rolls to New York. I want to be the one that makes it famous.”
