Instant Yang: July 2011

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Inclement weather, but great seats, & #CCSabathia pitching a great game! #GoYanks!!!

See the full gallery on Posterous

But, sigh, just lost the no-no... :(

Posted via email from OriginalSpin

Monday, July 25, 2011

MY MASTER LIST OF ASIAN AMERICAN POP MUSIC: A Spotify playlist in progress. As of 7/26/11—3031 tracks by over 190 artists (click for list and links!)

Name of Playlist: "Asian American Means Awesome"

As of July 25, 2011

Number of Tracks: 3031

Number of Artists: Over 190

Posted via email from OriginalSpin

Friday, July 22, 2011

David Sedaris thinks Chinese people (and food) are repulsive, which makes me sad, because I used to like David Sedaris.

What do you do when a literary idol decides to take a huge metaphorical dump on the culture and civilization from whence your ancestors emerged? I'm not sure I've figured out the answer to that question yet. Because master mock-and-droller David Sedaris, who's unequivocally one of the great essayists of our time and a personal favorite of mine, has chosen to take his parodic talent and point it at China, its people and its food. Except the piece he's written for the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper is less amusing than it is venomous, xenophobic and dissipated.

Which, to be fair, describes many of his genuinely funny essays as well.

The difference, I think, is that in his adventures in France, Japan and, well, Raleigh, North Carolina, he is usually as self-deprecating as he is other-; he comes off as a general, equal-opportunity misanthrope in the classic Molièrean vein. He also actually bothers to create human characters and enliven them with dialogue, and often wit — they become his comic foils, or he theirs, in a widening outspiral of mannered absurdity.

Not so here. Sedaris announces from the outset that he dislikes Chinese food — "I'll eat it if the alternative means starving" — and thinks of visiting China itself as an unpleasant prospect: "'I have to go to China.' I told people this in the way I might say, 'I need to insulate my crawl space' or, 'I've got to get these moles looked at.' That's the way it felt, though. Like a chore."

But he goes anyway, after spending a week in vastly more civilized (but no less exotic) Tokyo — which he describes as sublime, delicate, and sanitary. And then, China. China, as described by Sedaris, is a land of phlegm-hawking savages who eat animals that no right thinking person would consume, and eat parts of those animals that no sane person would consider, preparing and presenting them in the most foul and revolting fashion possible. Also, Chinese people shit everywhere, they practically bathe in the stuff, and of course they have no problem eating shit, or at least things that eat shit.

In fact, shit, in its many forms — stinking, floating, abandoned, stepped in or, in his mind, coyly tucked into entrees — ends up being the closest thing Sedaris finds to be the satirical counter his prose always seeks out. He and shit engage in a kind of capoiera-like combat ballet throughout the 2700-odd word piece (though mucus and urine do occasionally enter the fray); by the middle of the piece, Sedaris's preoccupation has become less shocking than annoying, and by its final throes, less annoying than tedious. (He's brilliantly noted before that "Shit is the tofu of cursing and can be molded to whichever condition the speaker desires"; the larding-up of his narrative here with shit references points to what this essay really is, e.g., bulk filler with limited taste and nutritional value.)

So look, David: Chinese people eat weird food. There is a saying that "Chinese will eat anything with its back to the sky," and another that says "Chinese will eat anything with legs but a table and anything with wings but an airplane." These are Chinese sayings, I might point out — a sign that Chinese aren't exactly unaware that the "delicacies" that send prim Westerners off to their fainting couches are a little off the beaten path. But Chinese are far from the only culture that eats weird food, and fuck, given that you're from North Carolina, have you looked at what American Southerners traditionally eat? No? Chitlins! Possum! Muskrat! Bull testicles! Oh wait, you're from suburban Raleigh, so probably not, given that most of the more exotic dishes in Southern cuisine, like in most culinary traditions, was the offspring of necessity — invention midwived by destitution. If you're hungry enough, rodents will start to look tasty, as will chicken claws, stray innards and balls. And once you've eaten them long enough, all these things evolve into nostalgic signifiers — especially after you've pulled yourself out of poverty. They go from things you have to eat all the time to things you choose to eat once in a while, to remind yourself you don't have to eat them all the time anymore.

And this is what's truly ugly about your piece, David: For someone who's spent a lot of your career puncturing middle-class aspiration and self-delusion, your essay is unpleasantly blind to the fact that all of China is just a few generations removed from dire, desperate want, and that many people, like the peasant family you had such a bad experience sharing a meal with, continue to subsist on an annual income that's a tiny fraction of what a sophisticated awesome American literary superstar like you loses in his sofa. In a country of 1.3 billion people, even having braised pig's stomach to occasionally go with your daily rice is a fucking luxury.

But you should note: Those 1.3 billion people has a standard of living that's skyrocketing upward. They're crawling up and out of the economic muck, while we seem determined to drag ourselves down into it. And more and more of them are learning English and traveling abroad and reading international newspapers like the Guardian. So, just sayin': The next time you're eating at a fancy New York restaurant near a table of tourists from Shanghai...maybe you shouldn't turn your back on your Coke.

Posted via email from OriginalSpin

Monday, July 18, 2011

Also, bad journalism may cause ignorance? Fisking "MSG May Cause Weight Gain—Chinese Food Worse Than McDonald's"

Nothing irritates me quite so much in lifestyle journalism than the breathless Consumption Red Alert feature — that "investigative health reporting" staple in which a statistics-blind editorialist takes a survey or study out of context, misinterprets or inappropriately frames its conclusions, and backs it up with irrelevant quotes and facts or deliberate distortions in order to warn of some terrifying phenomenon. This article is a prime example. As Simone Walters writes for FYILiving: OH NOES MSG MAY CAUSE WEIGHT GAIN! CHINESE FOOD "WORSE THAN MCDONALD'S !"

How many ways can I rip this article a new one? Let's go line by line:

"Many items on a typical Chinese food restaurant menu are more than 1,000 calories. That’s half your caloric intake per day in just one meal": First of all, you're not talking about Chinese food, you're talking about Chinese American food — takeout stuff that bears the same resemblance to "typical" Chinese food as McRibs do to, well, ribs. But even giving Walters the benefit of the doubt here, Chinese food is not meant to be single-serving by definition. It's eaten family style, which means a few containers should serve four people. Only Americans embrace a one-dish-per-person concept for Chinese food, but I suppose the headline "Typical Manner in Which Americans Eat Fake Chinese Food May Cause Weight Gain" doesn't really grab pageviews, does it?
"According to a recently published study, MSG (monosodium glutamate), a flavor enhancer most often associated with Chinese food, may also contribute to weight gain.": First of all, MSG is in virtually every processed, packaged food, under names like glutacyl, autolyzed yeast extract, calcium caseinate, sodium caseinate, hydrolyzed vegetable protein, textured vegetable protein, plant protein extract and yeast extract. And while Chinese (and Japanese, and Koreans, and many Southeast Asians) have used it as a seasoning for centuries, the quantity usually used is minimal — it's a finisher, not a primary taste ingredient. There's usually less MSG in even crappy Chin-eez™ takeout than there is in Cheetos, for crying out loud. (Note: Link is to an MSG hysteria site.)
"The study measured the dietary MSG intake of 10,095 Chinese adults in order to determine if there was an association between MSG intake and obesity. The study found that participants who consumed the most MSG were 28 percent more likely to be overweight compared to those who consumed the least amount of MSG.": The first rule of Statistics Fight Club? Don't talk about Statistics Fight Club. The second rule? "Correlation does not imply causation." Repeat after me: CORRELATION DOES NOT IMPLY CAUSATION. There may well be an "association" between MSG intake and obesity, but is it because obese people eat more crappy junk food that contains MSG, or is it because MSG causes obesity?
It gets worse. In FYILiving's own reporting on the study, linked to by Walters, "A survey in the 1990s estimated an average intake of 580 mg/d [of MSG[ for the general population in the United Kingdom. It was, however, two-folds higher in Japan and Korea." The U.K. is 28th on Forbes's list of the fattest countries in the world; Korea is 123rd and Japan is is 163rd. So does this imply that MSG consumption prevents obesity? Nope. But that would be an equally valid (that is to say, invalid) conclusion based on the evidence cited by FYILiving.
But again, the study itself doesn't suggest that MSG causes obesity — merely that high levels of MSG in the diet of some Chinese consumers is associated with obesity. Now, let's consider what this means. The study was performed in China — an emerging market undergoing a rapid and wholesale societal transformation, in which a rise in affluence is an enormous factor and changing diet is a significant outcome. Given that MSG is in nearly all processed foods, and consumption of processed foods in emerging markets is directly correlated with rising household income, wouldn't it be more likely that the study was measuring the degree to which wealthy people in China can afford to eat junk food? Because, in direct contradiction to Simone Walters' ultimate conclusion, the less affluent people in that study are more likely to be eating Chinese food (as opposed to Western food) — not less. Chinese food is what Chinese people eat when they can't afford McRibs. And in China, as in most emerging markets, chronic obesity is positively correlated with household income (note: PDF link to Youfa Wang's seminal work on Chinese obesity and socioeconomic status).
The final kicker? "A major limitation of this study was regarding the accuracy of the MSG measurement. Like other food additives the intake of monosodium glutamate was difficult to measure accurately. The fact that only a few people had a high body mass index made it inconvenient to establish a straightforward link between obesity and MSG consumption.": In short, the study was drastically flawed in both input and outcome, and the fundamental characteristics of the pool used for research made it "inconvenient" to establish the very conclusion Simone Walters is asserting in blaring headline font in her article. So, move along, nothing to see here, people, but thanks for the clickthrough.
It would be remiss of me not to suggest how one might actually design a study to test a direct causative link between MSG consumption and obesity, so here goes: Take several groups of healthy adults of similar age and body mass index but diverse racial/ethnic background; make one a control group given a healthy but otherwise unrestricted diet (e.g., eat as much as you want), and give the other ones an identical diet, except add MSG to their dishes in varying controlled dosages. Keep them on their diets for six months. If there's more weight gain among the MSG groups than the control group, you have a good case for correlation. if there's a scalable effect (e.g. groups consuming more MSG had greater weight gain) then you have a good case for causation. Is that so hard, people?

I should note that I saw this article on the website of the Wall Street Journal and clicked on it mistakenly thinking it was actual WSJ content. It's not — it's "sponsor content," which nevertheless appears in the same presentation format and font as actual WSJ articles, but represents fodder from "the OneSpot Content Exchange, a paid-distribution network of sponsors" whose "publishers have paid to have their links appear."

Whether it's a good idea for the Journal to be renting out its diminishing credibility to content farmers is a blogpost for another day.

Posted via email from OriginalSpin

Wednesday, July 06, 2011

Ah, what might have been: @CNN's SpitzerWeiner—Politics Exposed.

A girl can dream.

Posted via email from OriginalSpin

Friday, July 01, 2011

Ballmer and Jobs #2: Under Development.

Further adventures of the dynamic duo.

Posted via email from OriginalSpin

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Instant Yang

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Inclement weather, but great seats, & #CCSabathia pitching a great game! #GoYanks!!!

Monday, July 25, 2011

MY MASTER LIST OF ASIAN AMERICAN POP MUSIC: A Spotify playlist in progress. As of 7/26/11—3031 tracks by over 190 artists (click for list and links!)

Friday, July 22, 2011

David Sedaris thinks Chinese people (and food) are repulsive, which makes me sad, because I used to like David Sedaris.

Monday, July 18, 2011

Also, bad journalism may cause ignorance? Fisking "MSG May Cause Weight Gain—Chinese Food Worse Than McDonald's"

Wednesday, July 06, 2011

Ah, what might have been: @CNN's SpitzerWeiner—Politics Exposed.

Friday, July 01, 2011

Ballmer and Jobs #2: Under Development.

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