Chinese people who have read Calvin Trillon, The New Yorker, or The Nation would, I assure you, have no trouble with this. Those who found out about it because some clueless millennial picked up his parents’ magazine by accident after being “educated” to find offense whenever possible (even if it meant exposing poor…

It isn’t ironic racism. It’s satire with no hint of racism. The man loves bean curd. Cries when his favorite bagel shop closes. Engages in debates over barbecue. When he laughs at foodies who are frantic if they’ve missed the newest or best Chinese kitchen, he’s laughing at himself.

Not too worry. Mr. Trillin’s critics display little diversity, less literacy, and zero complexity. If they had one iota of any of the above, they’d know this is an ode to the food he loves the most. If you’ve lived in and love a city with a thousand Chinese restaurants, tried to crack the code, find the perfect fried…

Debate, if you see it a worthwhile use of your time, the accuracy of Trillin’s portrayal or the quality of his couplets, but I immediately identified the speaker as a Keeping Up With the Joneses type who felt the need to be on board with whatever the “hip” “new” cuisine was and felt confused and overwhelmed by it all…

Wow. Calvin Trillin once wrote “Why would anyone want to move away from a city that has a thousand Chinese restaurants”. His late, much loved wife Alice taught English to many native Chinese speakers. He once suggested that she assign the task of translating the characters over pictures of dishes hanging in his dozen…

Great - but at the same time my culture doesn’t exist for you to poke fun at white people.

Grasping at straws here. Hipsters aren’t the only people who see themselves as culinary adventurers (cf. Anthony Bourdain, Andrew Zimmern), and Trillin is a fucking 80 year old who has experienced more generations worth of cool white people trying to gain cool points through food. The poem clearly reads as satire, but…

I think it’s absolutely insignificant because Trillin is satirizing other people’s opinions. I’m pretty shocked that anyone could even pretend to think otherwise.

I don’t think that’s what’s happening here, though. Calvin Trillin (a white person) is poking fun at other white people who are using their familiarity with Chinese cuisine as a signifier of their awesomeness.

Actually, the best thing about America, is yeah, I DO get to to write about Chinese food in America from my perspective, and you get to complain about it. Both of us are allowed to express whatever very deep, important feelings on it that we have, in silly rhyming lines or in emotionally overwrought comments on Jezzie.

Wait, you want the poem to fit in a fucking moral coda about how the speaker of the poem is in the wrong and has learned his lesson about cultural/culinary appropriation?

Yes, clearly the writer is “pissed at the wide variety of Chinese foods available.” This is reading comprehension 101.

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.

I’m asking for people to think before they write stupid things on the Internet. To consider whether or not their emotional reactions are valid given the evidence in front of them. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes intellectual reasoning trumps an emotional reaction.

This idea that we’re supposed to privilege a bad, uninformed reader’s gut emotional response to a text over an informed reader’s intelligent, nuanced understanding is ludicrous. Intellectual reasoning is the tool we as human beings have developed in order to raise ourselves above the instinctual, limbic/autonomic…

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 feel like "but it's satire" is an overused defense of bad writers, but in this case I'm pretty damn sure that poem is satirizing western foodies Columbusing “exotic food” for cultural capital. It’s not exactly subtle either: “Then respect was a fraction of meager / For those who'd not eaten Uighur" and…

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…

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.