talking about “authentic” Asian food, restaurants, and culture is directly a form of racial capitalism because it draws upon ideas of an inherently Eurocentric view of what Asia is and commodifies that imperialist projection for the consumption of white people

When we use the term “authentic” in relation to Asian food, it usually means an absence of any influence of “Western” culture, but that entirely is predicated on the assumption that the “East” and “West” have a fundamentally irreconcilable divide

But it’s like... Asia is not just an absence of “Europeanness” - like go to Korea and you will see that Korean cuisine considers hamburgers, pasta, and other “Western” foods as part of its diet

It only became that way because the idea of a divide was necessary for imperialism

And “authenticity” usually carries an underlying notion of Asian people as foreign towards the “West” and characterizes us all as “FOBs”, which ignores the history of Asian people throughout the Eurocentric world

Where I’m from in SLC, UT, there’s a restaurant called Charlie Chow’s. By most measures of “authenticity”, it would be considered to be a “bastardized” Chinese food.

However, the restaurant was started in the 1800s, but bc it doesn’t feel “foreign”, it isn’t “authentic” lol

Authenticity is touted because white people (and even diaspora Asian people) think authenticity makes commodities more valuable, but it relies on the extraction and commodification of a racial identity of “Asianness”