Wade-Giles Romanization and Chinese food

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From Clarissa Wei, "The Struggles of Writing About Chinese Food as a Chinese Person", Munchies (4/24/17)

I hold myself to high standards when it comes to writing about Chinese food, yet I live in a world that can be quite insensitive in their approach to the cuisine.

For example, many writers (especially on the East Coast) still use the Wades-Giles spelling of Chinese locations, a phonetic system that was invented by British diplomats Herbert Giles and Thomas Wade. It is a dictionary that is largely outdated and widely inaccurate in its representation of Chinese phonetics. In the Wade-Giles system, Sichuan is Romanized to Szechuan. Nanjing is Nanking. Beijing is called Peking. These writers are the same people who still refer to Guangdong province as Canton.

For his work, Giles won an award from the French Academy. Meanwhile, the Chinese laughed. Chinese scholar Gu Hongming declared that the Giles dictionary is "in no sense a dictionary at all. It is merely a collection of Chinese phrases and sentences, translated by Dr. Giles without any attempt at selection, arrangement, order or method." To add insult to injury, Thomas Wade was a British soldier who fought and likely killed Chinese people in the First Opium War.

Editing notes (proofreader/fact-checker mode) by Rich Warmington:

It is a dictionary

No, it's a romanization system.

that is largely outdated and widely inaccurate in its representation of Chinese phonetics.

WG may have various drawbacks, but I don't think it's inaccurate, let alone "widely" inaccurate. If a word is written in WG, its pronunciation is specified precisely enough to be rewritten in Pinyin, I believe.

In the Wade-Giles system, Sichuan is Romanized to Szechuan.

According to a conversion table on the Web, sì is ssu4 in WG and chuān is ch'uan1. So 四川 would be Ssuch'uan in toneless WG.

Nanjing is Nanking. Beijing is called Peking.

According to the same source,these would be Nanching and Peiching respectively in toneless WG. According to Wikipedia, "Peking is a spelling created by French missionaries of the 17th and 18th centuries" (which is well before Wade developed his system in the mid 19th century).

These writers are the same people who still refer to Guangdong province as Canton.

Canton is the city of Guangzhou (WG Kuangchou). Do writers use "Canton" to refer to the province?

For his work, Giles won an award from the French Academy. Meanwhile, the Chinese laughed. Chinese scholar Gu Hongming declared that the Giles dictionary is "in no sense a dictionary at all. It is merely a collection of Chinese phrases and sentences, translated by Dr. Giles without any attempt at selection, arrangement, order or method."

That sounds more like Giles' book "Chinese Without a Teacher". His dictionary isn't "a collection of Chinese phrases and sentences". Here's a sample page. The entries appear to be arranged in a logical order.

Comments by leading Sinologists and China scholars:

1.
Tedious and largely uninformed blather.

Strange that she's writing English in the alphabet of the Romans, whose unprovoked invasion of England killed no small number of the natives of the land….

2.
It's her comments about Wade-Giles romanization that are "widely inaccurate!" If used correctly, W-G can represent the sounds of Chinese just as accurately as Pinyin or Yale or GR. The spellings "Nanking" and "Peking" are NOT Wade-Giles!

3.
I think her complaints about Wade-Giles are total cheap shots.  Modern China owes a lot of what has been good in its modern culture to British imperial diplomats and missionaries.  I often refer to Guangdong as Canton; so what?

4.
Speaking "as a scholar person", … I no longer wish to engage in polemical retorts to "as a X person" persons, regardless of the value of X and especially on subjects I care about, such as Chinese language.

5.

I think the situation re Chinese food is very different in the UK from what this author describes — owing, no doubt, to the very many Chinese restaurants and takeaways we have, mostly run by people from our former colony of Hong Kong. Even  in small villages, if there is only one place to buy hot food, it will probably be Chinese, or if not that then Indian. Hong Kong cuisine has virtually displaced our traditional fish 'n chips. "Let's go out for a Chinese."

Indeed I remember being shocked once when, driving into Yuma, AZ, and hungry for an evening meal,  we chanced on a Chinese restaurant but found the food to be unrecognizably and disappointingly Americanized.

All our newspapers use the PInyin spelling for Chinese names nowadays. You see no references to "Peking" or "Canton" except perhaps in history books. I notice, however, that various Chinese academics and people from Taiwan write their names in WG, but that is their choice. The penalty, of course, is that people don't bother with the apostrophes, so that you don't know whether plosives are aspirated or not.

Hong Kong names in the UK typically use the romanization that produces "Cheung" etc. But their topolect is mostly what we still call Cantonese. ("Ng"  is often made nto "Ing" or "Eng" to help us out.)

6.
This sort of ignorant ranting is not worth wasting time over: as you well know, for at least 50 years a succession of Chinese (and Japanese) writers have established themselves as leaders in the field of English-language writing about Chinese cuisine (both in the scholarly literature and in popular cook books). Why does she not mention their names?

7.
Wei's use of the expression "widely inaccurate" is probably based on a misapprehension that that's what people are saying when they say "wildly inaccurate".

8.

I hold myself to high standards when it comes to writing about Chinese food, yet I live in a world that can be quite insensitive in their approach to the cuisine.

She says she has high standards of writing, and in her article she says she is a journalism graduate, but her English is perhaps a bit shaky. I'd say the adjective "their" is used incorrectly in this sentence.

For example, many writers (especially on the East Coast) still use the Wades-Giles spelling of Chinese locations,

The way this sentence is phrased, she makes it sound like WG is a system of spelling Chinese locations, rather than Mandarin words in general.

a phonetic system that was invented by British diplomats Herbert Giles and Thomas Wade.

Wade devised a system that was later modified by Giles.

9.
It appears to me that Clarissa Wei first formed the opinion that non-Pinyin romanization in writing about Chinese food is an outdated practice, which is a reasonable view to hold, I suppose, but then she put together a very poor argument for that view, in which she conflates Giles' dictionary with his romanization system, confuses Wade-Giles with the postal romanization system, quotes a critique of Giles' dictionary as if it had anything to do with the quality of his romanization system, and makes an ad hominem attack on Wade.

10.
Yeah, her article was OK enough, although a little chauvinistic. But she's only a journalist, and not astute enough to recognize her limitations in knowledge about phonetics and lexicography, and in fact about the whole pinyin-Wade Giles thing (and further not to be confused with pre-existing conventions for place names) which, for a journalist, is a real point-deducter. Not the lack of knowledge per se, but to know when you're pontificating about stuff that some of your underlying information and terminology is a little hazy.

David Prager Branner and Yuan-yuan Meng, in "[A] Curious Lexicographic Relic of the Cultural Revolution", Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 23.4 (October, 2013), offer a serious evaluatory comment about Giles's dictionary.  Here's the abstract of their paper:

This paper considers the fact that many verbal Chinese idioms are defined in recent Chinese-English dictionaries with misleading parts of speech — they are generally described only as being nouns. This situation originates in the 1978 Hàn-Yīng cídiǎn 汉英词典 of Wú Jǐngróng 吴景荣, whose definitions have exerted overwhelming influence on the field since then. We document Wú's principal sources and the viewpoints that motivated him, including the heavy political pressure to which his lexicographic team were subjected in the late Cultural Revolution. In addition, we consider Wú's anomalous misreading of the purpose of the influential Giles and Mathews dictionaries, which had been to document the many senses of each character with multi-character words, rather than to document multi-character words per se.

Remarks by Chunmei Du, a specialist on Gu Hongming:

The question of language, food, and identity. Well, aren’t those easy topics?J

About the Wade-Giles system. I have to confess that it was new to me when I first came to the States in 2003. Now I think about it, I learned some of these terms in Wade-Giles romanization more like part of the English vocabulary, especially those for which the pronunciations resemble less/little the Pinyin ones that my generation grew up with in mainland China.

On a side note, there was a controversy in 2009 that a Tsinghua professor mistranslated Chiang Kei-shek as Cháng Kǎishēn 常凯申, a more or less direct back transcription, as she did not know the Chinese characters for the standard Romanization of 蒋介石’s name. The professor was much laughed at by the community, as people felt that a senior scholar from a prominent university should know better. There were also defenders and the tones of some were quite nationalist and political. The following one proposed cleaning the Chinese language and clearing out the Western Romanization of Chinese names. http://www.zaobao.com/forum/letter/taiwan/story20090618-46204

I have some information on the Chinese names of Gu Hongming and overseas Chinese in the manuscript of my forthcoming book. Gu used Hong Beng Kaw/Kaw Hong Beng when he was a student at the University of Edinburgh, a transcription of his name in Southern Fujian dialect. Some time after Herbert Gile’s A Chinese-English Dictionary that consolidated the Wade-Giles system of Romanization in 1892, his name had become Ku Hung-ming, in which Gu adopted the Mandarin pronunciation using the Wade-Giles system. Following the example of traditional Chinese literati, Gu also adopted several style names (hao).

Most overseas Chinese in Malaya in Gu’s generation had Chinese names, although they did not necessarily know how to write the characters. When Romanized for interactions with foreigners, these names would be transliterated according to the topolect spoken by the individual bearing the name. While some later altered the transliterations of their names to comply with the Wade-Giles Romanization standard after they came to China, others kept the original spellings. For example, Wu Lien-teh, a second generation Penangite whose father had come from Canton, was known as Ghoh Lean Tuck (G. L. Tuck) when he was studying at Cambridge. He later adopted the Wade-Giles spelling as Wu Lien-teh, the name he used to sign his English books. Wu Tingfang was known as Ng Choy (Wu Cai 伍才) in Hong Kong in the 1870s, spelled to reflect in the name’s Cantonese pronunciation. In contrast, Lim Book Keng and Song Ong Siang, both third generation immigrants from Fujian, used these transliterations of their original Hokkien pronunciations throughout their lives.

About Gu’s critique of Giles and Wade, I feel in a way it is similar to this author’s [Clarissa Wei's] critique of the American (white) elites. They are both political and ideological, aiming at their Western audiences, more than just being scholarly. Gu believed that the Chinese should interpret Chinese culture to the world, not Western Sinologists or missionaries like Giles, Wade, James Legge, or Arthur Smith. Gu was not as interested in the literal/technical translation of the Confucian classics as interpreting their philosophical meanings. One irony is, of course, that Gu was a newly reinvented Chinese defending “authentic” Chinese culture to Westerners. This author interestingly is a Chinese-American defending the position of Chinese food/race in the American nation, against what she sees as the dominant white culture.

From an ordinary Chinese reader’s point of view, I can understand the frustrations in and political backgrounds of this piece. But it also reminds me of the Western restaurants in China today, of which every menu includes pizza (including some Chinese versions of it), spaghetti with meat sauce, steak, and whatever else that restaurant is supposed to specialize in. Now there are the debates of Orientalism, reverse Orientalism, and Occidentalism, etc, and one can definitely argue about the unequal power structure behind such apparent similarities. But I actually feel more relaxed than the author about the food/language problem and think the situation is more a result of market choice than political decision (conscious or unconscious) per se. Perhaps as more of an “outsider” to the American racial system than a Chinese-American who grew up in it and deeply affected by it, my “nationalist” feeling in this case is less acute. To the Chinese scholarly community in America, the Wade-Giles versus Pinyin, traditional versus simplified characters divides may become an issue some time in the future, I guess.

One last note is that both Chinese fermented tofu and cold salted duck 盐水鸭, which I love, are regional, even in China. Once I brought a packaged duck to my classmates in college and many from the north were scared to eat it first, as the duck looked pale and they thought it was still raw.J Both foods are much easier to find in other parts of China now, as people have grown familiar to the commodities and as economy and consumption grow.

I guess I ended up saying more about myself than Gu Hongming.J  But I enjoyed the article and thanks for sharing. It is always nice to see my hometown mentioned, Nanjing or Nanking.

A final note of my [VHM] own:  Wade-Giles has some conspicuous phonological virtues, such as distinguishing clearly between consonants that are voiced and unvoiced, aspirated and unaspirated.  Indeed, of all the many Romanization systems for Mandarin that I know of, WG is probably the most scientific in resembling IPA with regard to a number of significant phonological features.

[h.t. Anne Henochowicz; thanks to John Wells, Su-Chong Lim, Endymion Wilkinson, Tom Bartlett, Mark Swofford, and Neil Kubler]



44 Comments

  1. Carl said,

    April 30, 2017 @ 9:11 pm

    Pinyin is great system of Romanization for people who speak Chinese, but expecting English speakers not trained in it to pronounce it correctly is like expecting them to pronounce French words correctly if they have never seen written French, oh oo ay (oui)?

    Wade Giles is still tough, but at least in the ballpark. For example, I have a friend named Xiao, and I've watched as people repeatedly pronounce it "zow" because X must mean Z, right? "Hsiao" is also opaque, but "he-shao" at least can be easily corrected to something close enough.

  2. Travis said,

    April 30, 2017 @ 9:20 pm

    I'm not sure which I like less, "Szechuan" for being so unconnected to any standard system of romanization, or "Ssech'uan" for having that ugly apostrophe in the middle (it's not a gotta stop like the Hawaiian 'okina, right?) and double ss at the start, and for just looking so damned unfamiliar compared to the "Szechuan" Spelling I've seen all my life.

  3. Jerry Friedman said,

    April 30, 2017 @ 9:34 pm

    But "Szechuan" is the reason for the "Sezh-wan" pronunciation I've been hearing all my life.

    Wouldn't the official WG be "Sse-ch'uan", by the way?

  4. Endymion Wilkinson said,

    April 30, 2017 @ 9:40 pm

    Ms Wei's remarks about the Wade-Giles romanization system ignore the fact that shortly after arriving in Hong Kong in 1842 Wade worked as his regiment's interpreter before becoming a consular official. Ms Wei also appears ignorant of the fact that the inventor of Wade-Giles was neither Wade nor Giles but Robert Thom (briefly the British consul at Ningbo who pioneered the switch in transcription systems of Chinese from Nanjing Mandarin to Northern Mandarin) and Thomas Taylor Meadows (who published the first "orthography" of Beijing Mandarin in 1847). Neither of these gentlemen were soldiers.
    Wade took over the Meadow's system and acknowledged that in his first textbook of Chinese (published in 1859). Giles acknowledges the inadequacies of his modification of Wade's system (and of his dictionary) in the prefaces to his first (1892) and second editions (1912).
    The details of the development of Wade-Giles, other European systems, and pinyin are in Chapter 4 (Transcription of Chinese) in my Chinese history: A new manual (Harvard 2015).

    Further to my remarks (quoted by VM at point 6) lamenting that Clarissa Wei appears unaware of the large number of Chinese (and Japanese) authors who have published books in English and other Western languages introducing Chinese cuisine to Western readers, I note that the Hollis Library catalog at Harvard lists 899 books on Chinese cooking published over the last 200 years. Most were written by Chinese authors (many writing in English). After a few early works, I list a few of my favorites (including the classic by Buwei Chao, the wife of the great linguist Y. R. Chao):

    Some early works:
    Wong, Ching Foo, Chinese cookery [and other articles for the Boston Globe, Brooklyn Eagle, and Cosmopolitan], 1885-1888.
    Chan, Siu Wong, The Chinese cook book, 1917.
    Sia, Mary Li. Chinese chopsticks: A manual of Chinese cookery, Peiping, 1935.
    Lee, M. P. Chinese cookery, London, 1943.
    Lee, Calvin, Calvin Lee's Chinese cooking for American kitchens, New York, 1954.
    Chan Sou, The House of Chan cookbook, New York, 1954.
    Cheng, F. T. Musings of a Chinese gourmet, London, 1954.

    Eight of my favorites:
    Chang, K.C. Food in Chinese culture, Yale, 1977.
    Chao, Buwei Y. How to cook and eat in Chinese, New York, 1945.
    Hom, Ken, Chinese technique, New York, 1981 (this American Chinese author, TV personality and entrepreneur was made an honorary member of the British Empire for services to Chinese cuisine).
    Huang, H. T. Fermentation and food science, Cambridge, 2000 (in Needham's Science and civilisation series).
    Hu, Shiu-ying, Food plants of China, HK, 2005.
    Lai, T. C. At the Chinese table, HK: OUP, 1984.
    Lo, Kenneth H. C., Cooking the Chinese way, London, 1955 (this influential writer, restaurant owner, and onetime Chinese consular official had published 29 more books on Chinese cooking by the time of his death in 1995. They sold over a million copies).
    So, Yan-kit, The food of China, London, 1984 (and four other Chinese cookbooks by this excellent writer).

  5. AntC said,

    April 30, 2017 @ 9:48 pm

    Thank you Victor. Hmm a thorny topic.

    At least in Britain, most Chinese restaurants/takeways will be owned/run by those of Cantonese background. (In Britain, that's usually called "Canton province". Calling it "Guangdong" would need further explanation.)

    I have fond memories of a Szechuan-style restaurant in South-West London suburbs in the 1970's. It was run by Cantonese, and spelled as I've put. That's also the usual spelling for translation of Brecht's "Good Woman of Szechuan".

    In terms of fact-checking, Wei could have consulted Wikipedia to see that "Szechuan" is not Wade-Giles.

    As ever with Chinese topolects, one question leads to another: was Wade-Giles adapted for Cantonese or Hokkien? Could Pinyin be adapted? (I guess it would have to handle the extra tones somehow.)

    How would a Cantonese or Hokkien speaker try to romanise their speech?

    In terms of Wei (and Gu?)'s criticising that Wade "likely killed Chinese people"; she could perhaps hold herself to "high standards" of fact and consider the actions of all the powers in history that have held sway over parts of China. Including the treatment of Szechuan province after 1948.

    I'm not seeing that Hong Kongers are ecstatic about the departure of the British; even after the scandalously dishonourable lack of responsibility shown by Margaret Thatcher.

  6. Gloria(22张小) said,

    May 1, 2017 @ 12:10 am

    The Political Dangers of Mispronunciation, posted by Victor H. Mair,a professor of Chinese language and literature on Language Log on April 5, 2017 is aimed to make a comment on an article called Party Officials Criticized for Mispronouncing Words during Public Speech from Chinascope on April 3. Is it just simply mispronouncing the words or it sent another kind of alarming signal? Different people have different opinions regarding this mispronunciation. Some take it just as a not intentional, and actually not uncommon thing let alone politically motivated while others sharply criticized it for it was those party officials lacking of enough preparations and responsibilities that resulted in quite a lot of laughter and jokes in China.
    From my perspective, behind such a phenomenon, it indicates a lot. First, those party officials have the biggest problem. For one thing, they did not take these speeches seriously and lack of enough preparations. What they did is not suitable to their statues. For another, they did not keep studying to enrich their knowledge. As leaders, they are supposed to set good examples to people. It is true that everyone makes mistakes consciously or not. However, it is unreasonable to blame poor literacy for mispronunciation. Second, there are something wrong with listeners including their subordinates, the media and the general public people. It seems that our Chinese people seldom have courage to question our leaders or authorities. What leaders say is right. Or maybe some of them just prefer to be apple polishers or the silence of the lambs so as to left truth behind. But this time someone walked out and criticized this mistake boldly and publically, I think, is a good beginning.
    All in all, it is no use crying over split milk. Therefore, urgent and effective measures should be taken to prevent something similar from happening again.

  7. J. Goard said,

    May 1, 2017 @ 12:18 am

    What I keep coming back to when I read harsh criticism of romanization systems is how, by contrast, essentially nobody cares that speakers of languages with preexisting Roman writing pronounce one another's place names differently from natives.

    English speakers would pronounce "Panama" more like Spanish speakers if it was spelled "Banama". For American English speakers, "Durango" should be spelled "Dudango". "Boston" should be spelled something like "Paston" in Spanish.

    The point of Romanization is to bring more languages into the fold of having stable, recognizable written forms that *will have significantly different pronunciations in all the languages they are used in*.

  8. John Swindle said,

    May 1, 2017 @ 3:25 am

    A Mandarin Chinese romanization system designed for English speakers would be the Yale system. It was valuable in its time. Fortunately the similar Hanyu Pinyin is used in China and internationally, so we no longer need a special Mandarin Chinese romanization system for English speakers.

  9. Jichang Lulu said,

    May 1, 2017 @ 4:12 am

    Not to pile on, but would Wei's own spelling of Taiwanese locations (e.g. Taitung) be more like insult, or injury? She refers to "34 provincial-level administrative units" represented in LA Chinese restaurants. Since that way of counting includes Taiwan, perhaps she ought to apply her Romanisation-burning rage cross-Strait. Unless, of course, she means 'provincial-level administrative units, possibly drawn from different countries', which would allow for different degrees of pinyinocentrism. That's still complicated, because we'd still need to decide which countries are admissible, and how to handle e.g. Fujian.

    On the epistemological front, I particularly liked this auctoritas she quotes: "This was something that had been on my mind already. I wanted to find the data to show that structural oppression exists."

    Stomach-churning though Wei's rant was, some of her actual articles and listicles on Chinese and especially Taiwanese cuisine are interesting. And obviously better researched than the anti-WG slurs.

  10. Jen in Edinburgh said,

    May 1, 2017 @ 4:50 am

    I know I've read somewhere about Chinese modifying the names of Western public figures (Obama etc) to make them easier to pronounce and write in English. Do they do the same thing with place names, and if so, is that significantly different from the Western names for Chinese cities? (Or from saying Londres, Edimburgo, Rome, etc.)

  11. Jen in Edinburgh said,

    May 1, 2017 @ 4:51 am

    Bother – easier to pronounce and write in *Chinese*

  12. David Eddyshaw said,

    May 1, 2017 @ 5:34 am

    "writing English in the alphabet of the Romans, whose unprovoked invasion of England killed no small number of the natives of the land…."

    I don't think the Romans ever managed to invade England. By that point they were too busy losing the entire Western half of the empire to the cousins of the English.

  13. Bev Rowe said,

    May 1, 2017 @ 5:49 am

    I have never understood why we have to be quite so pedantic about following changes in how countries name themselves and their towns. I don't call out French speakers for referring to my home town as "Londres", so why can't I go on writing "Bombay" or "Szechuan"?

  14. David Marjanović said,

    May 1, 2017 @ 7:27 am

    So 四川 would be Ssuch'uan in toneless WG.

    No, Ssu-ch'uan with a mandatory hyphen. Pinyin puts an apostrophe in front of every syllable (inside a word) that begins with a vowel; WG puts a hyphen in front of every syllable (inside a word).

    Indeed, of all the many Romanization systems for Mandarin that I know of, WG is probably the most scientific in resembling IPA with regard to a number of significant phonological features.

    When it comes to handling the back unrounded vowels [ɤ] and [ɯ], however, it just falls apart into confusion and chaos, as you just demonstrated for ssu [sɯ].

    I'm not sure which I like less, […] "Ssech'uan" for having that ugly apostrophe in the middle (it's not a g[l]otta[l] stop like the Hawaiian 'okina, right?)

    Indeed not. It's aspiration, IPA [ʰ].

    Wouldn't the official WG be "Sse-ch'uan", by the way?

    No; ss (or any other double consonant letter!) occurs exclusively in the syllable ssu. In case you're wondering, Pinyin zu and zi are distinguished in WG as tsu and tzu!

  15. AntC said,

    May 1, 2017 @ 7:28 am

    @Endymion [quoted by Victor] This sort of ignorant ranting is not worth wasting time over: … a succession of Chinese (and Japanese) writers have established themselves as leaders in the field of English-language writing about Chinese cuisine …. Why does she not mention their names?

    Yes, my first Chinese cookbook (1970's) was a Penguin paperback by Ken Hom.

    And Wei doesn't scruple against approriating other cultures' cuisine. She has several pieces about Amazonian food. Surely not something she would have learnt about growing up in Taiwan.

  16. David Marjanović said,

    May 1, 2017 @ 7:32 am

    Oh, forgot:

    I know I've read somewhere about Chinese modifying the names of Western public figures (Obama etc) to make them easier to pronounce and write in English. Do they do the same thing with place names, and if so, is that significantly different from the Western names for Chinese cities? (Or from saying Londres, Edimburgo, Rome, etc.)

    They do the same thing; they have to, because you can't write anything in characters that doesn't completely fit into a Chinese (Vietnamese, Korean?) sound system.

    Arguably, that's all like the -o in Edimburgo or the lack of -a in Rome.

  17. J.W. Brewer said,

    May 1, 2017 @ 7:38 am

    There's a broader pattern in English whereby toponyms that get used in fixed phrases often don't get updated/changed even if the toponym-as-such does. Thus, e.g. "Persian cat" rather than "Iranian cat," "Siamese twins" rather than "Thai twins," and "Bombay gin" rather than "Mumbai gin," making e.g. "Peking duck" rather than "Beijing duck" not at all surprising to someone who is more interested in English usage than in promoting hanyu-imperialism.

    (I would fwiw treat using "Wade-Giles" as loose shorthand for the whole range of common pre-hanyu romanization practices including postal-map spellings and the like as fine in a non-polemical context that wasn't purporting to be scholarly. But once you start complaining about Wade and Giles as individuals, I'm less inclined to be forgiving about that.)

  18. Victor Mair said,

    May 1, 2017 @ 9:03 am

    From a colleague:

    For a subtler treatment of cultural appropriation through food, see:

    "Why Is Asian Salad Still on the Menu?" (NYT, 4/27/17)

    Jennifer 8 Lee has also written extensively about Chinese-American food and its place in our culture.

  19. Ellen K. said,

    May 1, 2017 @ 9:14 am

    @J. Goard

    Someone who says, in American English, Dudango for Durango, would be pronouncing the wrong phoneme for the R in Durango. If speaking in an American English accent, it should be pronounced with an American English R in order to be using the right phoneme.

    A point which may be entirely irrelevant to the actual topic of this post. From what I know of Chinese I think you are probably right in your point you are making. I just don't think the same logic applies to Spanish words used when speaking English.

  20. Anne Henochowicz said,

    May 1, 2017 @ 9:18 am

    Thank you to everyone for your comments. When I sent this article to Prof. Mair, I had no idea just how many issues it had. I was simply struck that Wade-Giles isn't part of the problem Wei describes.

    For a subtler treatment of cultural appropriation through food, I recommend Bonnie Tsui's discussion of "Asian salad": https://nyti.ms/2qbBBtF.

    After Chinese immigrants in the U.S. were barred from working on the railroads and couldn't find anyone to hire them, they had to work for themselves, and they started opening restaurants catering to "American" tastes. Jennifer 8 Lee takes a deep dive into Chinese-American food in her excellent book "The Fortune Cookie Chronicles" and in the documentary "The Search for General Tso."

  21. Bathrobe said,

    May 1, 2017 @ 10:25 am

    Cultural appropriation through food? Chinese are not the only victims, although people like Clarissa Wei and Bonnie Tsui do their best to make it seem like they are. Try this (from 10 Facts People Should Know About Mongolia):

    "I am sure there are some people in the world who really appreciate a hearty Mongol meal. If you like mutton and fermented mare’s milk, you really are in for a treat. Wait, are you surprised that this doesn’t sound like BD’s Mongolian Grill? That’s because that restaurant is one big fat lie.

    "BD’s serves seafood, NY strip steak, and every kind of beautiful fresh vegetable you can imagine. It has workers, with swords, flinging your food around on a grill while they sing a happy “Mongol” song. Just…what the heck.

    "Mongolia is a landlocked country – it’s a rare day when they get seafood. NY strip steak? Are you kidding me? I’d saw off my right leg for one of those in BEIJING alone. Mongolia is a land of permafrost – getting a lot of different kind of veggies is a miracle.

    "I just can’t tell you how much BD’s goes against every memory of my Mongolian childhood. I do understand that it is a delicious restaurant, but I’m not really sure why they picked Mongolia. Maybe the idea that no one would ever know they were crazy?"

  22. Chris Button said,

    May 1, 2017 @ 12:14 pm

    Personally, I would take Bopomofo (Zhuyin Fuhao) over any romanisation. Having said that it's probably not the most user-friendly on a Chinese menu catering to foreigners!

  23. Joe said,

    May 1, 2017 @ 1:52 pm

    Concerns about cultural appropriation, at least in the Asian front, seem problematic to me. Jumping from cuisine to cinema, for example, there were concerns about "Ghost in the Shell" being "whitewashed" while audiences in Japan not only didn't care but really liked it. The Japanese response is complex and may be rooted in their own appropriation (and fetishization) of "whiteness" in manga and anime. But this is what typically happens when you follow the genealogical trail of any kind of "cultural appropriation" – the notion of sole "proprietorship" becomes rather murky.

  24. J.W. Brewer said,

    May 1, 2017 @ 3:45 pm

    It is not clear to me that the Asian-immigrant groups to the US whose ethnic cuisines (with or without Americanization) have failed to become broadly popular with a mass US audience of other ethnic backgrounds feel fortunate to have been spared the risk of appropriation. Korean and esp. Filipino food are what I'm thinking of here, as the numerically-large ethnic groups that are underrepresented in the U.S. restaurant scene outside their own communities; although Chinese and Japanese have been longer-established in the US, Vietnamese and Thai food, and/or some inauthentic/Americanized variant of the same, seem to have done quite well in breaking through to a broad audience in recent decades.

  25. flow said,

    May 1, 2017 @ 4:28 pm

    One small thing. Rich Warmington comments on the passage: '[…] Chinese scholar Gu Hongming declared that the Giles dictionary is "in no sense a dictionary at all. […]"' with the following words: 'That sounds more like Giles' book "Chinese Without a Teacher".'

    Maybe that's what it sounds like—yet at least https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Chinese-English_Dictionary does quote Gu Hongming as follows:

    "It is this want of philosophical insight in Dr. Giles which makes him so helpless in the arrangement of his materials in his books. Take for instance his great dictionary. It is in no sense a dictionary at all. It is merely a collection of Chinese phrases and sentences, translated by Dr. Giles without any attempt at selection, arrangement, order or method. As a dictionary for the purposes of the scholar, Dr. Giles' dictionary is decidedly of less value than even the old dictionary of Dr. Williams. (1915: 120)"

    This in turn is linked to https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:The_Spirit_of_the_Chinese_People.djvu/166, where a facsimile is to be found.

    The real irony, to me, is that providing "a collection of Chinese phrases and sentences […] without any attempt at selection, arrangement, order or method" is really what makes some of the great Chinese dictionaries so great (their vast selection of quotes that is), and so very Chinese (i.e. hard to consume except you really put in some time for dedicated study).

    Not sure exactly which classical Chinese lexicographical work Gu had in mind when he called out Giles for having written his (alphabetically arranged) dictionary 'without any attempt at arrangement'.

  26. flow said,

    May 1, 2017 @ 5:27 pm

    One more small thing. It had occurred to me that Ssu(-)ch'uan is actually not the canonical Wade-Giles spelling, because it drops the accent over the letter u.

    I wasn't sure at first, but there's an online version of Gile's dictionary here: http://ebook.lib.hku.hk/CADAL/B33646119/ (sadly, this is one more site that 'breaks the web' by not reflecting page changes in the URL as it should; page 1295 is here: http://ebook.lib.hku.hk/CADAL/B33646119/pdf/00001295.pdf)

    On that page we read:

    四⁴ 10,291
    四川 the province of Ssŭchʻuan.

    Notes: —The symbol used to indicate aspiration is a 'turned comma', not an apostrophe; this can be clearly seen by enlarged the page displayed under the second link, above.

    —I believe the breve over the u in ssŭ can be omitted without ambiguity, as ssu can only be 四思斯; 速俗宿 has a single s (as in Pinyin): su

    —Giles here writes the name of the province *without* the intermittent hyphen.

    —The comparative list of transcriptions over at Pinyin Info Wade-Giles has many flaws: it uses U+0060 GRAVE ACCENT (`) for aspiration, which is for typesetting what Comic Sans is for typography (i.e. a no-go area). It also drops the accents of both ê and ŭ, but retains ü. Granted, you can still unambiguously read the transcription, but does it qualify as Wade-Giles?

    —The listing at http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/mulu/wgpy.html does use an inverted comma for aspiration and correctly writes 门 mên 蒙 mêng but drops the breve in 思 ssu.

    In summary, let me say that my impression is that Wade-Giles has failed, largely because typography. In the extreme, a transcript like CHUHSING BLVD. could mean any of (what is in Pinyin written as) chu-, zhu-, qu-, ju-. Since tones are almost *always* omitted (even by Giles himself except as superscript numbers near the characters!) in Wade-Giles, the ordinary-people way of writing CHU could indicate any one of no less than 16 distinct syllables.

  27. Eidolon said,

    May 1, 2017 @ 6:59 pm

    "Concerns about cultural appropriation, at least in the Asian front, seem problematic to me. Jumping from cuisine to cinema, for example, there were concerns about "Ghost in the Shell" being "whitewashed" while audiences in Japan not only didn't care but really liked it. The Japanese response is complex and may be rooted in their own appropriation (and fetishization) of "whiteness" in manga and anime. But this is what typically happens when you follow the genealogical trail of any kind of "cultural appropriation" – the notion of sole "proprietorship" becomes rather murky."

    Cultural appropriation is a much more common problem in food than in other domains, with "false branding" being the primary culprit. When an American chef invents a dish and then labels it "Asian," he or she is trying to take advantage of the "Asian" label for marketing benefits. When said dish in fact has little to do with Asian cuisine, it becomes cultural appropriation in its most classic form and could be considered a variation of trademark abuse, which we have laws against.

    While one could strive to argue that cultures are not brands and cannot be "owned," the simple fact is that cultures function very similarly to brands in the dining business. Labels like "Chinese," "Japanese," "Italian," "French," "Asian," "Oriental," etc. have intrinsic market values and being able to attach your creation to them is very useful. Combine this fact with the all too frequent practice of making up stories about your culinary recipes, and we have a hot mess of misleading labels and false advertisements, which is not limited to ethnic cuisine but also affects, for example, the use of ingredients – ever wonder what "red snapper" stands for in menus? Hint: the vast majority of the times, it's not actually the fish.

    By contrast, in films and other media, generally speaking when a film is advertised as a Japanese film, it is a Japanese film. The subject matter, indeed, maybe appropriated, especially in the case of adaptations, which form a grey area. But when white actors play the role of Asian characters, the audience isn't deluded into thinking that they are watching Asians; and failures to attribute the source material, in film, are rare. You see in large letters at the beginning of "Ghost in the Shell" that it was based on the works of Masamune Shirow. But in food, very rarely do you ever see credit to the original creator – and most of the time, in fact, there wasn't a known creator. It is in this context that cultural appropriation becomes particularly significant, as it could – and has, in many cases – lead to people falsely associating entire categories of cuisine to cultures that never had a hand in producing them.

    Of course, it's not an issue that affects only one culture's cuisine, as these examples show. http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/packages/italian-cooking-basics/italian-recipes-that-arent-actually-italian

  28. Victor Mair said,

    May 1, 2017 @ 7:14 pm

    From Bathrobe:

    In her article, Clarissa Wei refers to an "obscure desert plant" that is used to give noodles their elasticity. She links to her own article about it, which is of considerable interest.

    Finding out more about this obscure plant, the penghuicao, is slightly challenging as she starts out with the wrong scientific name, Halogen arachnoideus, which is not found anywhere else outside her article. Later she uses the correct name, Halogeton arachnoideus, which can be found at Wikipedia among other places. Chinese Wikipedia gives the name of the genus Halogeton as 盐生草属. No help there in finding the penghuicao.

    To find penghuicao in Chinese you need to know the characters, which Clarissa, despite being gung-ho about her Chinese heritage, fails to supply. Eventually I found that 蓬灰 pénghuī ('peng ash') is made from a plant known as the 蓬蓬草 péngpéngcǎo, a desert species found across north China and central Asia. (蓬灰草 pénghuīcǎo appears to be used in the industry, as Clarissa studied at a beef noodle soup school in Lanzhou, but the standardised name in Chinese is 蓬蓬草.)

    The main useful ingredient in Halogeton arachnoideus is potassium carbonate, a white salt that forms a very alkaline solution in water.

  29. liuyao said,

    May 1, 2017 @ 9:36 pm

    It's a bit of a surprise to see Mr Wilkinson so into books on Chinese cuisine.

    @flow at last got it straight. I doubt how much people follow the strict Wade-Giles, even in scholarly publications. One of the few places on the net that had all the accent marks straight is the digitized Eminent Chinese of Ch'ing Period http://www.dartmouth.edu/~qing/WEB/ (barring some typos). In there, place names follow the postal system.

    My impression is that Szechwan (not mentioned above) is the most common form in Chinese restaurants in the US. Anyone could corroborate?

  30. John Swindle said,

    May 1, 2017 @ 9:40 pm

    I believe in Canada they spell it "Saskatchewan."

  31. Jenny Chu said,

    May 1, 2017 @ 10:14 pm

    Endymion Wilkinson: "the Hollis Library catalog at Harvard lists 899 books on Chinese cooking published over the last 200 years. Most were written by Chinese authors (many writing in English)." vs Clarissa Wei: "Of the 263 entries under the "Chinese" recipe filter on the New York Times food section, almost 90 percent have a white person listed as author in the byline. Only 10 percent of the recipes are authored by Chinese writers."

    So has there been a change? The 899 books in HOLLIS are spread out over the last 200 years; the NYT catalog is presumably newer.

    If so, this might support Wei's conclusion that once Chinese food became desirable / trendy, writers with Chinese-sounding names could no longer get their articles published as they were pushed aside by [??] white men.

    There are a lot of fun A/B testing experiments you could do with this:
    – Publish the same article with two different bylines (let's say Clarissa Wei vs. Clarissa Wade) and see which one gets more views/likes/publisher interest.
    – same thing with a Chinese-American sounding name, like Clarissa Wei, vs. a more Chinese-sounding name like Wei Han.
    – put two versions of the same item on two different menus at the same restaurant, e.g. "Canton noodles" vs. "Guangzhou noodles" and see which one gets more orders

  32. Jenny Chu said,

    May 1, 2017 @ 10:17 pm

    @AntC – "How would a Cantonese or Hokkien speaker try to romanise their speech?"

    There are a few competing systems.
    https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cantonese/Romanization_Systems

    The fact that none of them have "won" makes life awfully difficult for Cantonese 2L learners and is a contributing factor to the abysmal state of Cantonese knowledge among non-Chinese in Hong Kong.

  33. B.Ma said,

    May 2, 2017 @ 12:21 am

    @AntC / Jenny Chu

    I think "Romanisation" of speech by Cantonese speakers is a bit of a misnomer. We "Englishise" it. Those living in a French country may "Frenchify" it. (I use Englishising to mean what I describe below; Anglicising would mean turning Prof Mair's Chinese name into Prof Plum.)

    In Hong Kong amongst my social circles (most of whom are roughly equally proficient in English and Cantonese), we just write out whatever letters we think would lead a monolingual English speaker (I guess with an RP / Gen Amer / Gen Aust accent, depending on our background) to produce a sound that best approximates the Cantonese sound. We don't care about rules or consistency between phonemes.

    Wikipedia also lists the "Hong Kong Government Romanisation", but to me this feels like a Wade-Giles equivalent (because of the plosives)

    Many Hong Kong people use CPIME as a phonetic input tool. Although this gives you a choice of several Romanisations, it requires some practice as the pingyam of certain sounds doesn't feel correct intuitively.

  34. AntC said,

    May 2, 2017 @ 12:47 am

    Thanks @Jenny There are a few competing systems. [to romanise Cantonese or Hokkien] … The fact that none of them have "won" makes life awfully difficult …

    Yes I did a bit of digging around and came to the same conclusion.

    I notice that on the page of Giles' dictionary that @Rich links to from the O.P., there's a long list of romanisations. Presumably "C. tou" means Cantonese; and "H. t'au" means Hokkien; etc. So what romanisation system are they using?

    … a contributing factor to the abysmal state of Cantonese knowledge among non-Chinese in Hong Kong.

    I lived in Hong Kong 1991-92. It was fairly easy (as a non-Chinese) to at least pick up some Cantonese — but purely spoken. The Cantonese people I was working with were complaining they supposed they'd have to learn Mandarin by 1997. I wonder nowadays if for non-Chinese it is too perplexing which topolect they're supposed to master? (Or at least perhaps that's just a new excuse. In a year I picked up more Cantonese than ex-pats who'd lived there decades.)

    Re Hokkien, on a recent trip to Taiwan I noticed there were two romanisation systems in play. While most signs used Pinyin, well-established names continued with the older system, for example "Taipei", "Kaohsiung". I assumed the older romanisations were Wade-Giles, but in view of the discussion here w.r.t. "Szechuan", "Peking": I'm wondering if either they're older/Portuguese/Dutch/missionary romanisations; or they're (whose?) romanisations of Hokkien names. (Taiwan was occupied by the Japanese from 1895, so was perhaps relatively immune from Mandarinisation until the KMT takeover 1945/1948. Taiwan didn't officially adopt Pinyin until 2009, says wikipedia.)

  35. Bathrobe said,

    May 2, 2017 @ 1:51 am

    I'm sure those politically incorrect American school kids who said "eeew" didn't realise that a couple of decades down the track they'd be an exhibit in a resentful rant about white people appropriating Asian culture or the wild inaccuracy of Wade-Giles.

    I'm afraid that these very American complaints of 'cultural appropriation' don't cut a lot of ice. In China itself, cultural appropriation is rife. Several decades ago, Beijing had whole neighbourhoods (notably Ganjiakou) of small Xinjiang restaurants serving excellent food. They were cleared out by the authorities in an attempt to create a modern city of orderly apartment blocks. The restaurants were also unpopular with locals because the Uighurs were seen as petty thieves.

    Now, Beijing's most popular Uighur restaurant, A-fun-ti, established in the mid-90s, is run by a Han Chinese. Why are the restaurants run by Uighur people themselves (or related groups) on the second tier? Perhaps it's because of the business acumen of the Han Chinese owner, helped by his vision that delivering a full package (music, dancing) would help bring in the crowds when a straightforward restaurant would not.

    There are plenty of other cases of cultural appropriation to be found. For example, a "Vietnamese" restaurant I came across in Jianwai Soho where nobody even speaks Vietnamese. This has more to do with the enterprising spirit of the Chinese than any authenticity in the food. Nobody in China bats an eyelid. Why is it such a big thing in the U.S.?

  36. Richard W said,

    May 2, 2017 @ 1:52 am

    @ flow, who wrote "[Gu] called out Giles for having written his (alphabetically arranged) dictionary 'without any attempt at arrangement'."

    From Wikipedia's sample page of Giles' dictionary, it appears that while the characters are arranged in alphabetical order, the headwords within a section relating to a character are not arranged in alphabetical order (nor by an ordering of characters based on stroke count or radical).

  37. Jenny Chu said,

    May 2, 2017 @ 1:58 am

    @AntC – For someone who likes learning languages, it's true, spoken Cantonese is not terribly difficult to learn. And there is some of the British "they should all speak English!" attitude left over here and there. But arrogance / laziness among expats isn't the whole story.

    Even when I started coming to HK in 1996 or so, and definitely by the time I moved here full time in 1999, people were already constantly saying, "Why do you want to learn Cantonese? Mandarin is easier." Usually, if pressed, they would then tell me it was because "there are more tones" (but no one could agree how many …

    http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=31255

    …) or because "it's just/all/too much slang."

    Yet these seemed to be fake reasons. Instead, I always attributed a good deal of this resistance to:

    1. Lack of proper teaching infrastructure, a big part of which is lack of a really standardized pinyin / romanization / transliteration system
    2. Too much English available – people aren't "forced" to learn
    3. Psychological aftermath of colonization: "If you, the foreigner, intend to learn Cantonese, it must be because … oh no! Because my English is bad … damn it … I knew it … "

    And today, it is even more the case than before that people are shocked at my speaking / wanting to learn Cantonese. It seems to be getting ever more common to learn Mandarin (definitely only Putonghua, nothing else; there is no other topolect being taught). Adding to the 3 reasons above, there are now

    4. more and more mainlanders in Hong Kong
    5. more and more HKians who know Putonghua
    6. perceived political pressure

    … meaning that to be "safe", maybe you'd better learn Mandarin after all. Anyway … the HKians all will understand it … and the visiting mainlanders wouldn't understand Cantonese … .

    Coming back to the non-standardized transliteration: indeed, how shall I learn even how to say my address, when the street sign says "Tsing Fung" on one end and "Ching Fung" on the other end (same Chinese character)?

    @B.Ma – indeed, "We don't care about rules or consistency between phonemes." !! That's crystal clear! But it's not helping us learn … :(

    Should I be looking for another reason?

    7. We don't want damn foreigners learning our secret language!

  38. Vanya said,

    May 2, 2017 @ 4:41 am

    7. We don't want damn foreigners learning our secret language!

    I have encountered an attitude similar to that in many countries where a "non-international" language is spoken. Romania, Croatia, Slovakia. It is not so much hostility towards foreigners as perplexity. People just don't understand why a foreigner would want to learn their language. Most people don't enjoy learning foreign languages and the idea that someone would choose to spend time studying a language for no obvious professional or romantic reason seems either weird or suspicious.

  39. flow said,

    May 2, 2017 @ 4:59 am

    @Richard W—the plan seems to have been to present the material in a rather deeply-ordered fashion. I quote (at length, sorry) from the relevant Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Chinese-English_Dictionary):

    "The dictionary is alphabetically collated by Beijing Mandarin pronunciation romanized in the Wade-Giles system, a, ai, an, ang, etc. Within each syllabic pronunciation section, characters sharing the same phonetic element and different graphic radicals are arranged together, for instance, the phonetic ai4 艾 (number 32) "mugwort; artemisia" is followed by ai4 哎 (33, with the mouth radical) "an interjection of surprise", ai4 餀 (34, food radical) "food which has been spoilt", and ai4 鴱 (35, bird radical) "the hen of the tailor-bird".

    […]

    Giles attempts to arrange the subentry example words and phrases according to the order of the translation equivalents. The dictionary's approximately "hundred thousand examples" diversely range from the "best and highest planes of Chinese thought" to everyday words and nursery rhymes (1892: vii).

    […]

    As a general rule, Giles explains (1892: vii), "the meanings found in the Classics stand first, and more modern and colloquial meanings follow. But to this rule there are some striking exceptions, purposely introduced, so as not to impair any value this Dictionary may have as a practical book of reference."

    Whether Giles succeeded in both keeping to his plans and executing them such that they are of recognizable value to the user, I do not know; I'd have to take a much closer look at his work.

  40. Thorin said,

    May 2, 2017 @ 10:03 am

    Is it really accurate for her to refer to Jinhua as a "modest" city?

  41. Jonathan Smith said,

    May 2, 2017 @ 11:24 am

    @Jenny Chu
    Did not know such attitudes were so prevalent in HK. Tragic, as an appreciation among native speakers of the intangible value of their language — a value by itself sufficient to account for why "foreigners" would find learning the language a productive use of their time — is essential to long-term preservation… an issue which I had the impression was beginning to enter public consciousness there, what with the encroachment of Mandarin.

    Speaking recently with a Zhuang tax-driver in Baise, Guangxi, when I responded to her compliments on my Chinese by saying that I was interested in learning Zhuang, her surprised response was that "it's impossible/can't be learned!" (學不來的!) This is not a surprising impression to have as, due to practical considerations, basically no one does learn the language, but it still amounts to the same kind of language death-wish as the HK attitude Jenny Chu describes.

    As for cuisine, etc., surely there is no calculus for 正宗 'right pedigree'. Is it the cook, the food, some combination, some other? In the States, reactions like the above have to be understood against a long history of marginalization / exoticization / outright racism; in isolation no one will be able to articulate what precisely is objectionable about the act of a white person wearing qipao or making ramen.

  42. Jean-Michel said,

    May 2, 2017 @ 6:42 pm

    @AntC: As ever with Chinese topolects, one question leads to another: was Wade-Giles adapted for Cantonese or Hokkien? Could Pinyin be adapted? (I guess it would have to handle the extra tones somehow.)

    There is a (roughly) Pinyin-based romanization for Cantonese and three other southern Chinese languages (not Hokkien) developed by the Guangdong provincial government in the 1960s, but it's pretty obscure: Guangdong Romanization

    There's also a Pinyin-based scheme for Sichuanese. Like the Guangdong government romanizations, it uses numbers for tones rather than Pinyin-style tone marks, even though most Sichuanese dialects only have four tones; I assume they don't use the Pinyin tone marks because Sichuanese tones don't map so neatly to the tone marks devised for Mandarin (specifically due to the presence of two falling tones in Sichuanese).

  43. Will said,

    May 4, 2017 @ 5:46 pm

    She is also (in)famous for trying to crowdfund her travels: https://la.eater.com/2015/6/24/8840301/la-food-writer-crowdsourcing-80000-china-two-years-indiegogo-campaign-recipes

    Overall, I think she's had a reasonable amount of success for the amount of time she's been doing what she's doing (probably because of her cultural background more so than despite it). She's a good self-promoter, and granted, it's a hard thing to make a career out of these days for pretty much anyone, but honestly, her writing is just Ok, and her research (as pointed out above) is generally sloppy.

  44. Eidolon said,

    May 4, 2017 @ 6:31 pm

    "Nobody in China bats an eyelid. Why is it such a big thing in the U.S.?"

    The owner of an ethnic restaurant not being of the same ethnicity as the food being served is not a case of cultural appropriation. His or her cooks being of a different ethnicity than the food they're making is also not a case of cultural appropriation, as long as they're not inventing their own recipes.

    The problem of cultural appropriation in food primarily has to do with chefs and branding. When an American fine-dining chef decides to invent his own Chinese stir fry recipe, and then presents it as Chinese cuisine, THAT is cultural appropriation, because the recipe isn't actually Chinese – it's American.

    The classic analogy from China is "Mongolian hot pot." Anyone familiar with the cuisine knows that hot pot isn't actually Mongolian cuisine. It is, however, advertised as "Mongolian" to take advantage of the exotic appeal of its culinary myth. This is cultural appropriation in its most basic form – the misleading use of one culture's branding – in this case, Mongolian – for the financial benefit of people who are not from that culture.

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