Surprise! Bad Representation Exists: Have They Run Out of Provinces Yet?
Here's my first attempt at writing about "bad Asian representation"
Hi everyone, I’m back after a long hiatus… sorry about that! But today, I’ve returned with something new: an example of bad Asian representation.
To refresh everyone, the reason I even created Literary Lazy Susan (LLS) was to make a site for as many Asian American/Asian pieces that reflected our experiences throughout history well. However, with “good” things come the obvious opposite, “bad” things.
And in the case of LLS, the bad manifests itself in Calvin Trillin’s The New Yorker’s poem, “Have They Run Out of Provinces Yet?”, posted in 2016. It is a satirical poem about Chinese food and pretentious food-blogging written by a white man, yet its tone comes off as very different.
Below is the poem:
Have they run out of provinces yet?
If they haven’t, we’ve reason to fret.
Long ago, there was just Cantonese.
(Long ago, we were easy to please.)
But then food from Szechuan came our way,
Making Cantonese strictly passé.
Szechuanese was the song that we sung,
Though the ma po could burn through your tongue.
Then when Shanghainese got in the loop
We slurped dumplings whose insides were soup.
Then Hunan, the birth province of Mao,
Came along with its own style of chow.
So we thought we were finished, and then
A new province arrived: Fukien.
Then respect was a fraction of meagre
For those eaters who’d not eaten Uighur.
And then Xi’an from Shaanxi gained fame,
Plus some others—too many to name.
Now, as each brand-new province appears,
It brings tension, increasing our fears:
Could a place we extolled as a find
Be revealed as one province behind?
So we sometimes do miss, I confess,
Simple days of chow mein but no stress,
When we never were faced with the threat
Of more provinces we hadn’t met.
Is there one tucked away near Tibet?
Have they run out of provinces yet?
At first glance, this poem seems like a simple, distasteful piece about Chinese food. However, as an avid foodie and Chinese activism advocate, I also immediately took notice of the casual dismissal of the complexities of Chinese cuisine. Trillin addresses these dishes as if they were something novel, only for him to discover, since he’s there to “discover them” and they can’t seem to “run out.” However, the ma-la of Szechuan or the soup dumplings from Shanghai aren’t new, and they don’t exist for the pleasure and exploration of non-Chinese people. They are simply meant to be enjoyed and not to be objectified in weird ways. Furthermore, he mostly doesn’t even mention the classic dishes of certain provinces, classifying the diverse array of dim sum from the Guangdong area to “just Cantonese,” or he breezed past Xi’an and Shaanxi without even dropping a dish or two. Of course, I don’t expect him to name every single dish in existence, but to make an entire poem about Chinese food and only mention one authentic dish and a spice (mapo, which isn’t really what it’s called, but I’ll go deeper into that later) is rather ironic.
What are your thoughts on his objectification (if you will) of these foods? You can disagree 100%, and I’m very open to your thoughts.
My final thought about this poem relates to something I’ve heard someone say: “comedy punches up, not down”. This means, satire coming from someone with a more privileged place in society, a white man, the jokes come off as disrespectful. He has since apologized (since this was from 2016 afterall), but he still thinks his satire regarding food blogging is unproblematic. However, I disagree since it doesn’t come off as a piece commenting on social media and the depiction of food on it; instead, it errs on the side of sneering at Chinese food and culture.
One of his final jokes come in the form of, “so we sometimes do miss, I confess,/Simple days of chow mein but no stress.” He sees “authentic” Chinese food as represented by an Americanized dish despite acknowledging authentic foods in Chinese provinces, so this final joke leaves the final tone of the poem as one that diminishes Chinese heritage to something watered-down or only good when Americanized. And to go back to mapo, he misuses mala, meaning numbing spice, and replaces it with an abbreviated meaning of numbing spice grandma. He’s on the right track to be correct, but he still doesn’t follow through, and while this error might not be intentional, it definitely feels dismissive of the Chinese culture. Of course, I might be stretching, but this is also the first time I’ve ever written about “bad representation,” so if you have any constructive feedback, I’d love to see it in the comments!
I don’t have any more questions about this poem/piece, but if you have your own thoughts, please be free to comment and add on to whatever I said!