Anytime a video with Chinese language or themes goes viral on the Internet, I always get barraged with links by friends on Facebook. But yesterday there was a video about China that was suspiciously absent from this trend. I saw it everywhere online, but nobody was seeking me out to say, “Look at this! America meets China!”
I speak, of course, about Alison Gold’s hit single, “Chinese Food,” made by Patrice Wilson, producers of such viral media hits as Rebecca Black’s “Friday.” Perhaps people were afraid that such a work was not worthy of intellectual discussion. They have never been more wrong.
When the song opened up with a Chinese man explaining how to make pancakes in Chinese while cooking noodles, I knew there would be some special cultural clashes upcoming. “Add some milk!” he says, while swirling around noodles with long wooden poles.
Now, I had the same initial reactions as everyone. The visceral rawness of the lyrics touched me as much as anyone else. But I also felt a sense of connection with the makers of the video over certain aspects of the art—such as the difficultly of translating English into Chinese.
For example, the first line of the piece, subtitled in Chinese, is:
After ballin’, I go clubbin’.
There are many different schools of thought on how to translate English colloquialisms into Chinese. Producer Patrice Wilson chose to make a brave choice in running against traditional scholarship and choosing the “Google Translate” school of translation theory. His translation:
成球后，我去泡吧。
Or, “After becoming a ball, I go clubbing.”
Hmm. We’ll wait to see what the peer reviewers think about the translation of “ballin’”. The term is a bit tricky to define, but anyone whose university gives them access to UrbanDictionary could tell you that ballin is defined as “slang for someone hype.” On the positive side, the seven-character format brings to mind Tang-dynasty poetry, renowned for its brevity and meter.
(For the curious-minded, they did get the second part correct—“泡吧Pao Ba” or “dawdling at bars” is actually the correct way to say “going clubbing” in Chinese, and for what my money’s worth, a much more honest translation than the English.)
But I know that most Americans when confronted with a pre-teen singing in a vanity video don’t consider linguistic minutia. Instead, they bring up the only logical issue—Is this racist?
On the surface, the racist argument looks compelling. We do have Chinese people smiling and looking Chinese, and also Chinese people smiling and making Chinese food. That’s pretty racist already. Also, there were pandas—though the panda turned out to be a black guy, so that’s not racist, albeit narrowly.
We also have a confusing section where the girls are wearing Japanese robes and geisha make-up. If there had been one Chinese girl and one Japanese girl in the film and the American public had been unable to tell them apart, then by the standards of the American Knee-Jerk Reaction Committee’s 2007 report on “Racism in America,” that would clearly have been racist. Under clause 27b, the concept: “All Asian people look alike.” is deemed solidly racist.
But as is, there were two cute white girls in makeup, so instead the whole thing is not racist, but rather playfully ignorant. Amazingly, Americans have a huge gut reaction to being perceived as racist but are not as worried that they may have mixed up two complicated and rich cultures. Perhaps this is because not knowing about Asian cultures is considered normal in America, but we’d like the think that being racist is not normal.
Of course, as a white American, I really don’t get the say on whether the video was racist or not. So I asked some of my Chinese-American friends what they thought. They agreed to broadly represent large groups of people who look like them, but only anonymously. Some parts of our conversation:
Friend one says:
“I think it’s idiotic, but not offensive.”
He also mentioned that one of the saving graces was that the man in the beginning was actually speaking mandarin Chinese. When I heard that, I thought: talk about high standards for cultural fidelity in media! The character that is supposed to be Chinese actually speaks Chinese!
Friend two says:
“It’s painful to watch because it’s a horrible song and a horrible video, but not because it’s offensive.”
So we have decided that revulsion to idiocy overcomes attacks on identity. Let’s get that published on a quotes site somewhere.
She continued: “I’m glad the little girl loves Chinese food enough to sing an entire song about it.”
Indeed, Chinese food is one of the aspects of Chinese culture that the Chinese themselves are very proud about. Last week I was part of an interview panel selecting Chinese candidates to go to America as Fulbright Teaching Assistants. When asked what aspects of Chinese culture they wish to share with Americans, well over half of them mentioned food as a way of connecting to Americans. There are many different regional cuisines, and the food culture is so rich that it inspired one of the most popular television shows of the last year, “A Bite of China”, which is probably my favorite thing that Chinese state media has ever produced.
So as silly as “Chinese Food” might seem to us, in China, people would probably not be upset at the concept—more at the idea that the lousy food we consume under the name of Chinese food is what we associate with their culinary culture.
Oh, and at mixing up Chinese and Japanese culture. They don’t like that. There’s some history there.
“Chinese Food” doesn’t strike me as offensive. It does irk me that a rich (and ostensibly well-educated) American child’s knowledge of China is not expected to exceed wontons and chow mien, when children her age in China are staying up late buried under mountains of English homework from the age of six, learning from textbooks that cost their poor family dearly. China is making the effort to understand America—there are more people leaning English in China than there are native English speakers alive. Seeing “Chinese Food” makes me wish there were a thousand videos out there showing this one to be an anomaly—but there aren’t.
But even so, learning about culture should start with a fascination. If there’s interest in Chinese food, maybe someone will think to go to China on vacation. Maybe they’ll learn a little and be inspired to study abroad there, or to send their kids to learn Chinese. Those are all steps in the right direction.
In the end, perhaps friend two sums it up best: “Patrice Wilson needs to stop making these ridiculous songs.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself.