This article was produced in collaboration with The Objective and is a part of its series “The Food Media Reckoning” — a collection of reporting, essays, and criticism about the holes that still exist in food media — and what its future could look like when we look to its past. Read more here.
As a kid, my favorite Sundays were the afternoons when church sermons were followed by a food excursion to Kang Kang Food Court in Alhambra. My family would, of course, order its famous sheng jian baos or Shanghai soup dumplings, which my siblings and I would scald our tongues on, in our greedy impatience. It was like a scene out of Kung Fu Panda as my siblings and I would duel over who would get the last dumpling rights — our parent’s beleaguered arbitrators trying to keep us fed and happy.
The San Gabriel Valley has some of the best Chinese food. Many of us Chinese Americans settled comfortably just east of L.A. proper and formed ethnic enclaves. But it was shocking to me that the other day, when I returned to my beloved Kang Kang Food Court — there was a trio of white girls sitting in the corner of my childhood restaurant.
Begrudgingly, I helped one of them grab a pair of chopsticks as they struggled to communicate with Mandarin-speaking servers. Of course, I couldn’t determine their motives for being there, but I was filled with a sudden, and irrational, dread that my favorite local spot could become one of those gentrified new-age Chinese restaurants without a single Chinese patron as white people flocked to its doors. It’s happened before — one doesn’t have to look further than L.A.’s Chinatown, which has become a tourist attraction, from hip yuppies eager to try the cultural eats while the local elderly residents are unable to buy basic groceries in that food desert.