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Martin Roberts
June 2019
Since the turn of the new millennium, and particularly over the past decade, a major transformation has been taking place within U.S. food culture. In part this has involved the emergence of a new kind of food-based media content that is no longer limited simply to the food TV of the Food Network or the lifestyle cinema of Eat Pray Love or The One Hundred Foot Journey, but now involves social and streaming media platforms, from Twitter and Netflix to Vice’s Munchies channel and online food channels like Tasting Table or First We Feast. It has also involved an increasing reaction against the hegemony of international haute cuisine and its cult of the gourmet or “foodie,” and the rise of an alternative food culture focused on global street foods and embodied by the subcultural figure of the “chowhound.” A key aspect of this transformation has been the catalytic role of a new generation of Asian-American chefs, who have rendered twentieth-century notions of “Asian cuisine” increasingly obsolete and propelled the hybrid cuisines with which they grew up into the culinary mainstream. It is these chefs and their transformation of U.S. food culture that are the central subject of this essay.
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The illustration evokes the familiar visual style of graffiti: against a background splash of colors evoking a throw-up, the Asian chef wears a white kitchen apron, a blue reverse baseball cap, and a large pair of DJ headphones. Crouching low over a white table scattered with utensils and small bowls of ingredients, he assumes an angular, cool stance, the fingers of his left hand poised above a bowl of spicy sauce in a pose that exactly mimics the hand movement of a scratch DJ. The image’s primary focus, though, is over on the left page: elongated by foreshortening, his tattooed right arm reaches into the foreground, where his enlarged hand rests, palm and fingers upturned, on a vinyl record on a turntable. Above the fingers appears the title, scrawled in the black handwritten style of a Sharpie tag: A Street Food Remix. While mixing ingredients into a sauce, the chef is simultaneously DJing. It would be hard to imagine a clearer affirmation of the analogy between the creativity of the chef and that of the hip-hop DJ. Just as the music of hip-hop juxtaposes and manipulates sampled breakbeats and vocals from vintage vinyl records, the image suggests, remixing them into something new, so too food preparation also involves a process of mixing, both in the literal sense of mixing together different ingredients, but also the more symbolic one of sampling and juxtaposing cuisines rather than vinyl records.
The chef is the Los Angeles-based Korean-American chef Roy Choi; the illustration appears as the centrefold of a book about him called Chef Roy Choi and the Street Food Remix (2017), also appearing in a smaller format on the back cover. It was produced by Choi’s friend and fellow Los Angeleno, the graffiti artist Man One, whose illustrations lend the book its distinctive visual design as a hip-hop-inspired graphic novel. Co-written by Jacqueline Briggs Martin and June Jo Lee, the book’s textual component recounts Choi’s experience growing up in LA’s multiethnic culture, eating at his parents’ Koreatown restaurant, and his launch of his food-truck business Kogi, the inspiration for Jon Favreau’s 2014 movie Chef, for which Choi was a consultant. Kogi’s signature item, the Korean taco, samples both from Korean and Latin-American cuisines that Choi grew up with, perfectly embodies the idea of the chef as DJ, sampling and remixing ethnic cuisines to produce something new and distinctive. The term remix itself recurs like a mantra throughout the book: its opening page is titled “A Ramen Remix,” scrawled like a graffiti tag onto a USPS Priority Mail label along with a short description of Choi’s method of preparing ramen noodles, above a graphic of a bowl of noodles topped with slices of American cheese. A later page titled “A Fast-Food Remix” depicts a young Asian girl reaching out to grasp an overflowing burger being handed to her by the unseen chef. The book’s closing double-page spread, titled “A Neighborhood Remix,” presents an overhead view of Choi and a group of children around a table packed with Korean banchan and ingredients, next to another Priority Mail label with instructions for assembling the popular Korean rice-bowl dish bibimbap.
Since the launch of Kogi and the publication of his culinary autobiography, L.A. Son (2013), Choi has become a prominent figure not only on the L.A. food scene but in the rapidly-expanding world of food media. References to hip hop are equally prominent in these online media: in a video for the Tasting Table food blog featuring close-ups of Nike sneakers and the kind of gang-sign finger gestures familiar in hip-hop music videos, Choi, clad in a purple hoodie decorated with musical instrument patterns, demonstrates how to prepare his signature instant noodle dish of his childhood over a lo-fi hip-hop soundtrack (by Paris-based producer Fredric Doan, THEDEEPR). The CNN-produced Street Food with Roy Choi (2014) was a web series of eight mini-episodes 3-4 minutes in length featuring creative artists from a variety of fields, including fashion blogger Michelle Phan, filmmaker Jon Favreau, No-Reservations author Anthony Bourdain, and Mike D of the Beastie Boys. Hip-hop is again a constant reference, from the lo-fi soundtrack that scores the opening credits to the comic-book graphic overlays reminiscent of Man One’s artwork for the street food book discussed earler. In one episode, Choi sits in on a recording session with two Korean-American hip-hop producers, beatmaker Jennifer Lee (TOKiMONSTA) and rapper Jonathan Park (Parker, Dumbfoundead); as Lee and Park lay down tracks, the three swap experiences on the challenge of gaining recognition as Asians in the African American-dominated world of hip-hop and the restaurant business respectively. Park also appears with Choi in a video for the First We Feast food blog (2015), freestyling rhymes as Choi assembles ingredients for his version of the Korean pajeon (pancake).
If the remixing of the hip-hop DJ can serve as a metaphor for the multiethnic cuisine of LA, the reverse also applies. In a podcast for the Song Exploder series, Jennifer Lee breaks down a song from her album Lune Rouge (2017) called “Bibimbap,” a multi-layered composition that combines a sampled loop of the gayageum—a traditional Korean stringed instrument—with beat loops, electric piano chords, and her own ethereal vocals. Complementing Roy Choi’s analogy, she explains how the mixing together of diverse ingredients in the popular Korean rice-bowl dish bibimbap becomes a metaphor for her remixing of the track’s diverse sound sources:
I tend to make this correlation between food and music quite often. They’re all about layers. . . . Bibimbap is a Korean dish; it basically translates to “mixed rice.” It’s sticky rice, and then you have spinach, beans, brown potato, shoot things, shredded carrots, and then on top of that a fried egg. And the way that you eat it is you have to just like mash it all together. So with this song, I named it “Bibimbap,” but I didn't think I was going to keep it that name. I thought you know, eventually I’d come up with a more profound and more serious name for it. . . . But when I really took a step back and listened to the entire song, and the idea behind it, I realized the song very much is the dish itself, a bunch of different ingredients coming together to create this recipe.
In Choi and Lee’s discourses about their respective creative practices, food and hip-hop music become interchangeable metaphors for one another; each is just a different form of remix of elements from diverse cultural sources.
“I grew up in the subway cars of Brooklyn, and graffiti was the wallpaper of my childhood,” writes chef Edward Lee. “I would often trace the fluid lines of a black tag with my fingertips, feeling the wild stroke of a derelict hand that had dared to leave its mark on the world” (2019). Although his style of cuisine is very different from Roy Choi’s, Lee shares many frames of reference with him. Like Choi, he is a Korean-American chef, who in this case grew up in Canarsie, Brooklyn rather than Los Angeles. Like Choi, he runs a successful restaurant business, his restaurant 610 Magnolia in Louisville, KY. Like Choi, he has authored several books, beginning with his culinary autobiography, Smoke & Pickles (2013), and the recent travelogue Buttermilk Graffiti (2018). Like Choi, he is a prominent figure in online food media, notably as one of the two chefs featured in the third season of the PBS, Anthony Bourdain-produced series, Mind of a Chef (2014). Like Choi, he has developed a new style of Asian-American cuisine that hybridizes the food culture of his transnational Korean heritage with the foodways of his restaurant’s location, in this case Southern cuisine. And as the the title of Buttermilk Graffiti makes clear, like Choi he perceives his contribution to Asian-American food culture on through the lens of hip hop. While Choi identifies with the figure of the hip-hop DJ , however, for Lee it is the graffiti artist that serves as his role model. As a teenager in Brooklyn, Lee himself experienced the graffiti culture of the time at first hand, and both in his writing and interviews draws analogies between it and his later experience as a chef. In an animated sequence from the opening episode of his Mind of a Chef series, Lee amusingly recounts his first embarrassing experience of putting up a tag using his own name, when acting as lookout for a graffiti artist friend. He goes on to draw an analogy between tagging and working as a chef as ephemeral yet consistent markers of personal identity:
Many years later, I look back on it and I find a very similar thing with cuisine. That tag, it’s your one signature mark: it’s the same line, it’s the same diagonal, it’s around and you fill it in, but it’s never the same because there is the human element involved. I make the same dish every night, it’s the same recipe, but every day is going to be a little bit different. The tags will evolve over time, but you never have a record of what you did six months ago to compare it against; it’s just gone. The only thing that’s left is what’s in your head. There's something so beautiful about that, and yet so crushingly tragic.
In a recent New York Times article, Lee further explores the affinities between graffiti as an art form and the art of the chef:
There is an undying paradox in graffiti that makes it the most tragic form of art — it is the act of being anonymous while simultaneously aspiring to fame. You are known for your tag, not your real name. Your identity is hidden, but your tag is everywhere. It is both profane and sacred. At its core, it is nihilistic. And that is why I love it. Because pretty food is the same. I am a chef and there is a connection between the permanence (or lack thereof)of food and street art. When the culture of graffiti I grew up with died out at end of the ’80s, I longed for something as sublime and as useless as spraying art on a wall. I found it on a porcelain plate in a French kitchen (2019).
610 Magnolia is not a street food restaurant; yet while Roy Choi and Ed Lee belong to very different culinary worlds, they share an identification of their craft with hip hop, whether via the musical metaphors of remixing or the graphic one of the tagger’s signature
Other than via connections with hip hop musicians (Choi with Jennfier Lee and Park) or personal histories (Edward Lee’s participation in the New York graffiti scene), the identification of Asian-American cuisines with hip hop is equally evident in the growing number of hip hop-themed restaurants that have opened in U.S. cities over the past decade. In 2009, Ben Daitz and his college friend Ratha Chaupoly opened a tiny kitchen near New York’s Union Square, whose signature dish was the Cambodian num pang, a popular sandwich similar to the Vietnamese banh-mi that combines French bread and pâté with pickled vegetables. Daitz grew up in a secular Jewish household on New York’s upper west side, while Chaupoly grew up in Cambodia. Num Pang quickly acquired a cult following and has since expanded into six New York locations and an outpost in Boston. The restaurant’s num pang sandwiches are typical of the cosmpolitanism of New York’s food scene, but the brand also exemplifies the identification of Asian-American cuisine with hip hop. The Num Pang restaurants featured throw up-style murals by Serve, an artist from the graffiti scene based at the legendary Bronx tattoo shop TuffCity, while hip hop MCs supplies the soundtrack. The Boston store featured similar throw-up artwork by a local graffiti artist. The Num Pang cookbook opens with a comic book-style graphic depicting the owners posing on a cobbed street with num pang in front of an elevated section of the New York subway; above them, a subway car displays a fire-red throw-up of the restaurant’s name below the scrawled tag “NUMPANGSANDWICHSHOP.” The book’s inside back-cover graphic depicts the scene inside the restaurant, where a crowd of Black and Asian cool kids chow down below a throw-up with the caption “Sandwich Shop,” while to the right the brand’s signature rooster spins vinyl on a pair of turnables bearing the tag “DJNUMPANG!”
It would not be difficult to find similar examples of the identification of Asian-American cuisines with hip hop culture. A promotional video for Seoul Sausage Co., a Los Angeles-based barbecue food truck business started by Korean-American brothers Ted and Yong Kim, features a soundtrack by Korean rapper Vasco. Ruckus, a noodle shop in Boston’s Chinatown, is decorated with the pop art of Murakami Takashi’s Japanese Superflat movement rather than graffiti, but its prominent soundtrack and designer vinyl action figures establish another connection between Asian popular cuisine and hip-hop. Its pan-Asian sister bar, the Japanese-named Shojo, remixes sake cocktails and Taiwanese bao sandwiches with trippy Afrofuturist murals.
As the preceding examples show, hip hop has emerged as the defining metaphor for the current generation of Asian-American chefs, whether in terms of its musical practices of sampling and remixing or its visual ones of tagging and street art. I would argue that this is a recent development, originating since the turn of the millennium, and as such is symptomatic of a larger transformation both in the place of Asian cuisines within U.S. food culture, and the representation of Asian-American identities in the U.S. mediascape more generally. Its key characteristics include a preference for “street food” and its associated distribution outlets—food trucks, sidewalk carts—over the social distinction of fine dining and gourmet restaurants; a valorization of multi-ethnic mixing and hybridity over cultural essentialism; a redefined concept of authenticity based around ethnic immigrant histories rather than national identities. Other than Roy Choi, two other Asian-American chefs have been influential in this transformation: David Chang and Eddie Huang. Chang’s noodle shop Momofuku was at the time it opened in New York’s East Village a broadside to the high-end Asian fusion cuisine of Nobu, Vong, or SushiSamba. The success of Momofuku made Chang an internationally-known star chef, and the restaurants he has has since opened have been increasingly upscale; yet he has somehow still managed to position himself as a populist against the foodie establishment, blurring the distinction between street food and haute cuisine. Opened in New York in 2009, the same year as Num Pang, Eddie Huang’s Baohaus took a similarly populist approach, serving Taiwanese bao, a streamed bun typically filled with pork belly. Along with Chang, Huang has been among the most visible of the new generation of Asian-American chefs, authoring the autobiography Fresh of The Boat that was the source of the successful ABC sitcom of the same name, and hosting his own web show Huang’s World on Vice’s online multi-channel network.
The representation of Asian cuisine in the North-American mediascape can be divided into three historical phases; the first two are television-based, while the third migrates to social media and streaming video platforms. The first phase, which covers the three decades from 1960 to the late 1990s, is in terms of representation limited to Chinese cuisine; the Chinese chef plays the role of native informant for a white, English-speaking audience in the U.S. or Canada, introducing dishes, providing cultural information about them, and demonstrating preparation techniques; while the regional origin of dishes is acknowledged, “Chinese cuisine” is presented as a traditional, unified national whole. The earliest example of this phase is Joyce Chen’s PBS television show Cooking With Chen (1966), which was shot on the same set as Julia Child’s French cooking show. Martin Yan’s first demonstration of Chinese cookery on a daytime news show in Calgary, Canada in 1978, is a later example. In the U.K., Ken Hom’s Chinese cookery show for the BBC (1984) played a similar role during this period. In U.S. food culture more generally, this is the post-World War II age of Benihana’s teppanyaki restaurants, chop suey, General Tsao’s chicken, and the California roll, when Asian cuisines remain exotic and have to be adapted for white North American palates.
The second phase extends from the launch of the Food Network in 1993, and extends until around 2012. This period sees the rise of the celebrity chef, initially in the white Euro-American form of Emeril LaGasse and Wolfgang Puck, and later with the network’s licensing of Fuji TV’s Iron Chef (1999), with its rotating roster of Japanese chefs representing Chinese, Japanese, French, and Italian cuisines. Iron Chef and its U.S. spin-off Iron Chef America (2005-present) also inaugurate the new era of competitive cooking that was to dominante U.S. food television over the first decade of the new millennium, including the shows Top Chef (2009-present) and the U.K.’s MasterChef (1990, revived 2005-present), with its emphasis on spectacle and melodrama. In the “kitchen stadium” of Iron Chef, with its conspicuous consumption and elaborate judging rituals under the supervision of the mysterious aesthete Chairman Kaga, Asian cuisines are aestheticized to the point of decadence, positioned as markers of cosmopolitan lifestyle and social distinction. As in the impossibly cosmopolitan dishes of the Iron Chefs, this is also the era of Asian fusion cuisine, notably in Ming Tsai’s television show East Meets West [Food Network, 1998-2003] and in U.S. food culture at large, by Masaharu Morimoto’s Nobu, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Vong, or Ming Tsai’s Blue Ginger. The later part of this phase also sees the rise of younger, female Asian celebrity chefs such as Chinese-Australian Kylie Kwong, or the U.K.’s Ching-He Huang.
A striking aspect of these first two phases, is the complete absence of any representation of Korean cuisine either on U.S. food television or the fusion cuisine scene more generally, in spite of the longstanding presence of large Korean immigrant communities in Southern California and New York. It is this that begins to change with the first season of PBS’s series The Mind of A Chef on David Chang. Although Chang had made cameo TV appearances earlier, notably on Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations series, the PBS series was the first U.S. food television series to showcase a Korean-American chef. Chang did not conform, however, to the designated role of Asian chefs on U.S. television up to that point, either as native informant or celebrity chef. He was, in fact, only one of an emerging generation of Asian American chefs at the time that over the past decade have transformed wider understandings of Asian cuisine. In addition to Chang, they include Roy Choi and Edward Lee, Korean adoptee Danny Bowien, and Taiwanese-American food entrepreneur Eddie Huang. Referred to by one food journalist as the Asian American Funk Collective, these figures are more closely identified with hip hop than funk, but what they have done is to re-orient the concept of authenticity in food culture around their own personal experiences as Asians growing up in the U.S., whether in the multi-ethnic neighborhoods of Los Angeles (Choi), New York (Chang, Lee), Orlando (Huang) or Oklahoma (Bowien). Unlike the previous generations of Asian chefs in Western food media, they do not accept their designated role as representing the “authentic” cuisine of their culture of national origin; on the contrary, their cuisine is overtly “impure”, hybridizing Asian with other ethnic cuisines and mainstream U.S. ingredients—processed cheese slices, spam, Old Bay seasoning—with which they themselves grew up. Korean Americans Chang and Bowien have made their names as proponents and reinterpreters of Japanese and Chinese cuisine respectively, while Lee hybridizes Korean with Southern American cuisine. Authenticity in this case is defined in terms of the immigrant experience rather than some mythical national essence: what matters is the local rather than the global, the culture in which one grew up, irrespective of national context.
88rising is an example of what today would be called a multi-channel network, a creator and promoter and distributor of branded media content distributed across a multiplicity of social media platforms and channels. Its focus specifically on East Asian musical artists, however, makes it more like a smaller, cooler descendant of that dinosaur of the Asian media industries, the talent agency, from Japanese jimusho like Johnny’s to today’s K-pop factories. Launched in late 2015 by Sean Miyashiro, previously director of Vice’s electronic music channel, 88rising was conceived, as Miyashiro candidly admits (Hua 2018), as essentially Vice for Asians: a millennial-oriented entertainment network intended to promote both Asian and Asian-American music artists based both in the U.S. and across the East Asian region more generally. The 88 of the network’s name is derived from its resemblance to the Chinese kanji meaning “double happiness,” traditionally displayed against a red background as a symbol of good luck at Chinese marriage ceremonies. The network’s logo uses the number against a similar red background, followed by the Chinese character for “rising.” The duality of the symbol was appropriate, given the network’s dual project of bringing together and supporting both Asian and Asian American artists and their respective audiences.
Over the past four years, the network has proved a runaway success, adding offices in Los Angeles and Shangai to its New York base, organizing regular international tours, and in 2018 launching Head In The Clouds, the first music festival in the U.S. centered on Asian artists. It has been releasing music on the 88rising record label since 2016. Following the by now familiar industry model of multi-channel networks (MCNs) such as Vice or Latin-American network mitú, 88rising’s content is distributed and promoted across multiple social media platforms, with its web site largely limited to promoting the Head in the Clouds festival. 88rising’s diverse roster of musical artists is equally widely distributed: Rich Brian (Brian Imanuel Soewarno) and Niki (Nicole Zefanya) are from Jakarta; Jonathan Park was born in Buenos Aires to Korean parents, who relocated to Los Angeles when he was three; L.A.-based Keith Ape (Lee Dongheon) is from Seoul; Brookyln-based Joji is Japanese-Australian by birth and grew up in Kobe; Higher Brothers are from Chengdu, China, Lexie Liu (Liu Yuyu) from Hunan; Bangkok-based Phum Viphurit grew up in New Zealand; Brookyln-based Korean-American Yaeji (Kathy Lee) was born in Flushing, Queens; Kyoto-born Sen Morimoto grew up in Western Massachusetts and lives in Chicago. While their musical styles extend into R. & B., neo-soul, electronica, or occasionally jazz, what this diverse group of musicians has in common is their identification with hip-hop, both as music and lifestyle. 88rising has had close ties with African-American hip-hop from its inception: fans were unsure how seriously to take Rich Brian as a rapper until Miyashiro produced a reaction video well-known African-American rappers giving rave reviews of the video of his song “Dat $tick”; Brian subsequently went on to colaborate with several of them. Other 88rising videos feature African-American rapper Lil Yachty freestyling over K-pop hits. Rapper Jonathan Park (Dumbfoundead) introduced Sean Miyashiro to Korean underground rapper Keith Ape, and was featured in a remix of his cult hit “It G Ma”; and while the Higher Brothers may rap in Mandarin, their conspicuous streetwear and sneakers make their allegiances clear. Lexie Liu participated in the popular Chinese TV show The Rap of China. Canadian-Chinese rapper Kris Wu’s song “Deserve” became the first by a Chinese artist to top the iTunes rap chart.
While the double-happiness kanji is most commonly seen at Chinese weddings, Double Happiness is also a popular name for Chinese restaurants in the U.S.; in 2003 a PBS-produced cooking show featuring LeeAnn Chin and her daughter Kathy was titled Double Happiness. Given the term’s culinary connotations, it is perhaps unsurprising that in its first few years 88rising’s YouTube channel includes a series of food-themed videos called Eighty ATE. Content inlcuded features on everyday and street food (Korean “army stew,” kimchi, dumplings, steamed buns, bubble tea); restaurant-based shows in which network artists and their foodie friends sample esoteric items (duck fetus, silkworm pupa, fried scorpions); and a series showcasing the intricate concoctions of Kayama Hiroyasu, a.k.a. “Japan’s Greatest Bartender.” While the series has not been updated since spring 2017, 88rising artists Joji, Rich Brian, and the Higher Brothers are regularly featured on the YouTube channel for First We Feast, an irreverent online food-culture magazine, eating hot-sauce wings on its wildly popular show Hot Ones. In Sepetember 2018, Rich Brian and Joji even hosted their own cooking mini-series, Feast Mansion. Set in a glamorous mansion in LA, the show’s premise is that after the Head in the Clouds festival, the pair have been instructed by their boss (Miyashiro) to cook for the other 88rising artists at a series of pool parties. The twist is that neither knows anything about cooking, requiring that they bring in a professional chef from outside. In each episode, the guest chef teaches the clueless pair how to make spicy Indonesian chicken wings, the Japanese omelette dish omurice, sushi, and so on. As the pair mock-seriously try to execute instructions while trolling the chef with inane comments, the show becomes a comic send-up of the food-prep format. While they are both food lovers, the show implies, as musical artists Rich Brian and Joji are just too cool to bother themeselves unduly with cooking. The pair’s music is featured heavily on the shows soundtrack, with Brian’s popular rap song “History” as the closing credits, and the show features regular cut scenes shot in the style of music videos.
In the historical space between Joyce Chen’s PBS Chinese food-instruction show and Rich Brian and Joji’s insouciant incompetence on their Youtube show, we see the scope of the transformation that has taken place in Asian American identity over the past half century, from a national identity largely defined by cuisine to outsiders to a multi-ethnic one that identifies itself primarily in relation to popular music and only secondarily to food. While playfully invoking the longstanding association of Asian Americans with culinary expertise, most strikingly on Top Chef, the show makes fun of it by the knowing incompetence of the “chefs” in question. At the same time, it affirms a different, more recent cultural association of Asian American identity not with cooking but with music, not as as chef but as hip-hop producer. In this respect, Rich Brian and Joji distance themselves even from hip-hop-oriented chefs like Roy Choi, Edward Lee, or Danny Bowien.
The recent success of the Asian-American film Always Be My Maybe (2019) in this context provides an interesting recent example of this ongoing discussion of the connections between Asian American identity, food culture, and hip-hop. While discussion of the film has been tediously monopolized by the cameo appearance of Keanu Reeves, what has been ignored is the film’s problematically gendered discourse on food and hip-hop. The film’s rom-com narrative is structured around the very different lifestyles of its two protagonists: while Sasha Tran (Ali Wong) is an award-winning gourmet chef preoccupied with expanding her restaurant chain, her love interest, Marcus Kim (Randall Park), is—literally—a rapper in his local band. This renders him cool to Sasha, who is a long-term fan of the band, but as a long-term prospect jars with her own upwardly-mobile lifestyle until she is able to reconcile the two by recognizing its shallowness and next to the unpretentious simplicity of Marcus’s hip-hop lifestyle. What is problematic about this structure is the film’s gendering of cuisine as a female-dominated sphere and rapping as a correspondingly masculine one. The predictable solution to Sasha’s dilemma is a rejection of Asian fusion haute cuisine and an embrace of Asian soul food, in the form of the kimchi jigae made by Marcus’s mother that she ate when visiting his house as a child. Asian soul food thus becomes the middle way between hip-hop and haute cuisine: Marcus doesn’t have to give up rapping, and is happy to collaborate with Sasha on a common culinary project emerging from their shared experience: as Rich Brian would put it, they’ve got history.
What are we to make of this new figure of the Asian American cultural imagination, the hip-hop musician? In breaking with the oppressive model-minority stereotype, and the Asian chef stereotype, it must surely be seen as a positive development. Yet at the same time, we would do well to be circumspect about the Asian-American populist embrace of hip-hop, with its romanticization both of the “street” and its culinary counterpart, family-centered “soul food,” as the locus of authenticity and value. Both in its commodity-centered materialism and its incipient sexism, hip hop has incurred much critique in recent decades, and the unreflexive embrace of hip-hop arguably runs the risk of reproducing these ideologies. While ostensibly a vehicle for resisting the commercial culture of white middle-class America, it is hard to disagree that hip hop is today one of the economic powerhouses of the twenty-first century creative economy. To this extent, becoming a rapper or graffiti artists rather than going to Harvard or MIT may be less of an act of resistance to the “system” today than it may seem, but paradoxically just a new, more rebellious kind of conformity.
The reasons for this identification are complex, and have to with the histories both of hip hop and of U.S. food culture, as well as more recent factors. In the very large historical picture, first of all, it could be traced back to the common historical experiences of African-American and Asian-American communities of racist violence, political oppression, and stereotyping in a white-dominated society, and the solidarity that arose between them since the civil rights movement. Hip hop, it could further be suggested, has had an Asian component from its inception, emerging in part from the African American fandom for 1970s Hong Kong martial arts movies, from comparisons of breakdancing to martial arts choreography to the Wu Tang Clan. The growing number of Asian American hip-hop producers in recent decades, particularly on the West Coast in Los Angeles and San Francisco, has arguably been another factor, with producers like Jennifer Lee and Jonathan Park only part of a larger community.
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