Alien Comforts: the Languages and Foodways of Chinese Americans and Hawaiian Locals in U.S
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University of Connecticut OpenCommons@UConn Doctoral Dissertations University of Connecticut Graduate School 7-29-2015 Alien Comforts: The Languages and Foodways of Chinese Americans and Hawaiian Locals in U.S. Popular Culture Jared Demick University of Connecticut - Storrs, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://opencommons.uconn.edu/dissertations Recommended Citation Demick, Jared, "Alien Comforts: The Languages and Foodways of Chinese Americans and Hawaiian Locals in U.S. Popular Culture" (2015). Doctoral Dissertations. 895. https://opencommons.uconn.edu/dissertations/895 Alien Comforts: The Languages and Foodways of Chinese Americans and Hawaiian Locals in U.S. Popular Culture Jared Demick, PhD University of Connecticut, 2015 My project deals with how the grotesque and simplifying distortion of Chinese American and Hawaiian Local languages and foodways has been used to promote facile multiculturalist encounters and the ways in which contemporary writers from those ethnic groups have attempted to articulate other ethnic formulations free from what I call minstrel gestures. These writers instead valorize innovation and transformation over an adherence to past traditions already pillaged and stereotyped by hegemonic interests. This strategy—which I dub the creole relational mode—has worked to varying degrees of success in creating the possibilities for oppositional cultural formations. While these oppositional cultural formations are often liberating, they sometimes can obscure persistent interethnic tensions in U.S. culture. The project’s contribution to the existing scholarship lies in its central claim that language and food are invested with so much meaning in U.S. interethnic discourse because these two forms of difference are easily appropriated and internalized by individuals across otherwise rigidly constructed ethnic boundaries. Alien Comforts: The Languages and Foodways of Chinese Americans and Hawaiian Locals in U.S. Popular Culture Jared Demick B.A., University of Massachusetts, 2007 M.A., University of Connecticut, 2009 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut 2015 i Copyright by Jared Demick 2015 ii Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation Alien Comforts: The Languages and Foodways of Chinese Americans and Hawaiian Locals in U.S. Popular Culture Presented by Jared Demick, B.A, M.A. Major Advisor ________________________________________________________________________ Sharon Harris Associate Advisor _____________________________________________________________________ Clare Eby Associate Advisor _____________________________________________________________________ Christopher Vials Associate Advisor______________________________________________________________________ Cathy Schlund-Vials University of Connecticut 2015 iii Table of Contents Introduction: Modes of Interethnic Encounters in U.S. Popular Culture 1 Ching Chong Chinglish: The Minstrelized Languages of Chinese Americans 27 An Ambiguous Tongue: Pidgin in Hawaiian Local Strategy 78 Multiculturalist Guides: Contemporary Chinese Cookbooks in the U.S 122 Taste with No Shame: Local Cuisine in Hawaiian Popular Culture 153 Epilogue: The Persistence of Ghosts 187 Bibliography 189 iv Introduction: Modes of Interethnic Encounters in U.S. Culture As we navigate our way through the second decade of the twenty-first century, it has never been easier to market and consume even the most obscure cultural products across ethnic and national boundaries. I just purchased a cassette of Inuit Country-and-Western music from a record label based in Mississippi and received the tape in Connecticut in just under a week. Diners in New York City can visit Café at Your Mother-in-Law in Brighton Beach, an establishment that specializes in the cuisine of ethnic Koreans who were exiled to Uzbekistan in the 1930s (Silberstein). Foodies in Portland, Oregon chastise each other if they have not sampled the northern Thai food served by American surfer-turned-chef Andy Ricker (Knowlton). Teenagers in the Ivory Coast cultivate a form of slang called nouchi that borrows extensively from U.S. movies and television as can be seen in the term macgaiveur, which means magic, or the term ken, which is an opportunity to make money, a word derived from the name of David Carradine’s character in Kung Fu (Newell 51). Through the twenty-first century’s complex infrastructures, interested individuals can easily access cultural products across physical and social distances; no longer does one’s sense of taste need to be determined by the culture one was born into. This kind of easy access to culture has aided in the propagation of the ideology of globalization, giving the illusion that human societies are merging into a general mishmash. In other words, having access to other cultures is oftentimes portrayed as cultural mixing. However, this kind of conflation can sometimes nefariously obfuscate the complex nature of intercultural contact. As some borders between nations, societies, ethnic and racial groups break down in the name of neoliberal economic schemes, others are erected and reinforced in order to maintain 1 particular hierarchical social formations. Just because individuals are interested in the cultural products of another ethnicity does not mean that they wish to change how they relate to that ethnic group. Members of a hegemonic group especially tend to appreciate and appropriate aspects from the cultural traditions of the very groups that they marginalize in socioeconomic terms. This has been especially true in the United States over the past thirty years in which the rise of multiculturalist philosophies valorizing authenticity and novelty have been accompanied by an obsessive need to more clearly define what it means to be an American. As a result, U.S. popular culture has been suffused with the intertwined impulses of fascination and disgust when considering the cultural practices of its marginalized groups. How else can one explain the fact that Chinese food is the most consumed restaurant cuisine in the nation, but that a Hollywood film studio can still release a movie like Seth MacFarlane’s Ted (2012), which features a cartoonish Chinese American character who speaks in a grotesque pidgin reminiscent of the kind used in anti-Chinese immigration plays staged in nineteenth century California? How else can one explain that despite the fact that Hawaiʻi has long been conceived as America’s very own Arcadia, the habits and mannerisms of Hawaiian Locals—the ethnically mixed population descended from the plantations’ immigrant and Native Hawaiian workforce—are lampooned or just plain ignored by the Mainlanders who either visit or relocate to the archipelago? My project studies how contemporary U.S. popular culture increases access to non-white cultural traditions under the guise of multiculturalism while seeking to maintain the present socioeconomic inequalities that characterize modern-day American life. I also investigate how individuals from ethnic groups not classified as white use popular culture to articulate rebuttals to portraits constructed by hegemonic interests. Members of the U.S. white hegemony have 2 perennially attempted to make the practices initiated by ethnic groups seem inauthentic— accusing those groups of betraying their home culture’s origins—in order to freely appropriate aspects of those practices without guilt or the burden of learning complex contextual information.1 In order to temper one’s enthusiasm for the ways of other ethnic groups, these hegemonic cultural appropriations often take the form of grotesque impersonations, which I dub minstrel gestures. Food and language are the two most common targets because they are the most immediate forms of difference that emerge in interethnic contact. The differences in the words that leave our mouths and the foods that enter them starkly testify to how individuals from different groups experience the world in fundamentally unique ways. Members of marginalized ethnic groups in the U.S. have not remained silent when encountering the grotesque renderings of their languages and foodways, however. In fact, artists from those groups have focused on food and language as a way to articulate how their identity formations are more adaptable, more complex, and more uniquely local than those of the U.S. white majority. In fact, I argue these artists counter the U.S. white hegemony’s obsession with authenticity with what I dub the creole relational mode, a form of nonhierarchical cultural interaction that refuses to value cultural origins over creative adaptations. I could have studied how contemporary U.S. popular culture imagines the food and languages of a whole host of marginalized ethnic groups. However, I decide to focus on two 1 I wish to clarify what I mean when I use the words ethnicity and race. By ethnicity, I mean a shared set of cultural traditions that guide one’s daily routines and inform one’s sense of identity (this happens to varying degrees, of course). My definition of race (at least in the context of the Western Hemisphere) comes directly from James Kyung-Jin Lee: “Race is better imagined as a verb than as a noun; it is not so much a description of a particular human condition as it is the production of one. The activity of race provides all Americans with a profound sense of agency, a way to place themselves in a terrain of social struggle and to derive meaning from that landscape”