You aren’t getting the self-deprecating theme in the poem. He isn’t satirizing a culture that is not his own.

Yes, the most amazing thing about the largest nation earth is that Chinese people never satirize American culture.

I would love to read James Baldwin’s thoughts on the upper-middle classes fetishization of food, actually. I don’t understand a bunch of people getting all upset because they read a harmless poke of fun, that’s all.

It’s his whole jam now, after a long career of newswriting, nonfiction and columns. If anyone would even bother to look at wikipedia before piling on, they might find that in the context of his other work and his life, he truly seems to not only not be a racist, but pretty progressive. It’s true, he is an old man.

No but seriously how about expecting readers to approach texts with more intelligence and skepticism instead of asking writers to dumb themselves down to readers who can’t understand simple literary concepts like irony and the distance between the author and the speaker?

I’d share your concern, but as an Irish-American, I’m still reeling from Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, so I can’t be of any help.

I normally enjoy reading Angry Asian Man, but I don't feel like he understood who the butt of the joke of that poem is supposed to be. When I first read that poem I was 95% certain it was mocking the practice of white urbanites/hipster/foodie types Columbusing ethnic cuisines to feel culturally superior. I feel like…

I totally agree. Of course, the piece could be meta and satirizing the type of person that would woefully misread something in an unthinkingly PC way, totally missing the point. But since it’s Jezebel, I’m guessing it’s not doing that. The poem pretty clearly has very little to do with China and a lot to do with…

Like most sixth graders, the author of this report fails to consider that the author and speaker are not necessarily the same person and that the author might be using the poem to critique the speaker’s perspective.