But like, if you’re here for your two-minutes-hate because the Gay Talese teardown moment is over, please proceed to make whatever uninformed assumptions about authorial intent suit your agenda. Trillin is not your enemy, though.

Right. They are “trendy” to certain Americans. I should have put the trendy in scare quotes. And the story of Chinese food in America is more complicated than your “been around for longer than you have” slam suggests, although, yeah, I wasn’t born in the 19th century. http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/14/foo… But look, I…

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…

Angry Asian Man ought to celebrate Chinese cuisine the way Mr Trillin has for 5 or 6 decades, cover politics and culture, travel, do some research, before he writes. You’re not all always going to be in 6th grade. Someday you’ll know that Bud Trillin’s hero (well, one of his heroes) was a guy who carried a note in his…

Have you ever read Mr. Trillin’s work? His serious reporting over 50 years on race relations, politics? His equally passionate writing about food (with himself mostly the object of his humor?) He’s a man who write’s about the quest for the prefect.... any bit of food, in any place.

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…

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?

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 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.