I was on Instagram this morning, and I noticed that a (White) colleague of mine, along with her (White) husband had celebrated their 7th wedding anniversary. They decided that since their wedding anniversary coincided with the Lunar New Year period that they’d host a small dinner party at a Chinese restaurant nearby and call it a joint Lunar New Year/7th wedding anniversary celebration. This felt a bit weird to me since neither of them is from any culture that celebrates Lunar New Year, nor did it look like they had any Asian guests, but hey, to each their own. If they want to celebrate other cultures, all power to them! I’m all for inclusivity.

But then, I saw the menu for the party, and I immediately cringed… hard. They had stereotypical ha gow (shrimp dumplings) and vegetable potstickers as starters. It wasn’t terrible, but entirely predictable. Plus, dumplings are a traditional Lunar New Year food. But then when I saw the mains, I immediately felt annoyed: beef and broccoli, orange chicken, and vegetable fried rice. It couldn’t have gotten more White-washed/Americanized than this. I felt like an entire caricature had been made of my culture, that they didn’t know the first thing about what significant cultural foods are eaten during the Lunar New Year period by any Lunar New Year celebrating culture or why — and maybe they didn’t even care. They clearly didn’t do any research or put any true thought behind this. Instead, they chose stereotypical “Chinese” dishes to satisfy a White audience that would match whatever notion they had in their head of what Chinese people might eat for Chinese New Year. It was pretty upsetting to see this.

This colleague and I get along. We both travel a lot, and we both love food. She loves to bake her own sourdough and occasionally likes to cook. But I always knew we probably couldn’t be real friends… because I had a feeling this is probably how she saw my culture. And I guess the feeling was right. And if I were to ever bring this up to her, how her joint Lunar New Year/wedding anniversary meal was an insult to Chinese culture and Lunar New Year traditions, I doubt the conversation would end well. Because for many people, they want to believe what they want to believe about cultures they are superficially aware about. They want to believe that pho and banh mi are what make up Vietnamese food, and that’s it. They want to believe that General Tso’s chicken, in its sugar-laden, sticky, gooey form, is what Chinese people across the diaspora eat on the daily. And when they are told otherwise, they “other” it, ignore it, and compartmentalize it far, far away from them… and they stick with what they “know,” which are the White-washed versions of whatever that culture’s food is. They don’t want to believe that what they are doing or saying could potentially be offensive or wrong. They’re like the “nice, White parents” from the parenting podcast I previously listened to: well meaning, well intentioned, but with awful execution that they are a hundred percent blind and tone-deaf to.