"Dirty Chinese Restaurant": My take

Sometimes, it baffles me that in 2017 we have to make a statement about such an incident, but given the dominance of the alt-right in political discourse, the notion that we are constantly advancing towards progress and a egalitarian society is in itself a naive belief.

In an act of supposed "satire", and a rebellion against "Political Correctness", the newly formed indie game developer "Big-O-Tree" released their first trailer for a game called "Dirty Chinese Restaurant".  The premise of the game has players taking on the role of the chef "Mr. Wang Fu" and serving customers, while evading immigration officials and tax collectors and running an underground gambling facility.  Already Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne and Markham mayor Frank Scarpitti has denounced this game as spreading racism against the Chinese.

But what makes this game so controversial? Haven't we gotten a lot of restaurant serving games already?  Well aside from the fact that some of the "enemies" of the games are immigration officials out to deport your employees and tax collectors, what happens here is that this "game" pretty much relies on offensive and racist stereotypes of Chinese people, and posits this as "satire" or humor.  The gameplay involves hiring waiters and employees for the restaurant, with the option of forcing them to work in sweatshop conditions as a means of generating revenue and traffic.  Ingredients are gathered from two sources.  Either by hunting cats and dogs(the hunt prompt) or by gathering food from a trash can(the scavenge prompt), as well as the ability to put unsavory ingredients in food. The restaurant itself is very dirty and run down and has a polluted appearance, every single one of the waiters at the restaurant wear conical hats.  The manager of the player character is also highlighted as being very rude and demanding to his employee, obviously tied to stereotypes that Chinese people make bad bosses due to supposed aggressive behavior.

The web page for this game also describes the ability to bribe people such as immigration officers and the health inspector with money to get them off of your tail, and a screenshot highlighted the possibility of fighting street gangs and criminals to secure food for the restaurant.  The game also allows you to sabotage competing restaurants by planting bombs on the ships presumably carrying food that is being delivered to them.  The trailers also seem to reinforce sterotypes of ugly Chinese men lusting after attractive looking white women.

As a Chinese person myself, this "Dirty Chinese Restaurant" game is not only highly problematic, but also a VERY, VERY disgusting attempt at satire.  Chinese people have been, in the 19th and 20th centuries, sterotyped as opium smokers and compulsive gamblers, this was particuarly the case in Britain despite the fact that the Opium trade was literally forced at gunpoint on the Chinese by the British Empire.  When the Chinese came to California and British Columbia due to the gold rushes in these areas in the mid 1800s(the 1848 California Gold Rush and the 1858 Vancouver gold rush), as well as contributed their skills to the construction of nation-linking railways such as the Canadian Pacific Railway and the American transcontinental railroad, they faced various sterotypes directed against them by racists in the West.  Many Chinese laborers were sojourners that sought to provide income to their families through remittances due to the economic devastation caused by the aftershocks of the defeat of the Taiping Rebelion in China and the consequent lack of opportunities offered for Chinese on the mainland.  The nature of this work gave rise to racist sterotypes of the Asians as single men out to lust after white women and sell them into sexual slavery(AKA Prostitution).

The work of Chinese labour on nation-linking transcontinental railroads also made the Chinese targets of organized labor organizations such as the Knights of Labor.  While progressive for it's day in seeking an 8-hour work day, the end of child labor, and the willingness to organize women and blacks, it should not be overlooked that the Knights of Labor accused the Chinese of taking jobs desired by white men due to their willingness to work for less as a means of providing for themselves and to send remittances back home or a means for their overseas family to accumulate the money to join them in North America.

In many instances, employers played on the divisions between white and chinese labour during the construction of transcontinental railroads.  For instance, according to Anthony B. Chan in his article Bachelor Workers analyzing the role of the Chinese in constructing the CPR, during the construction of the CPR, the wages of Chinese labourers were kept low by their employers in contrast to white workers. White workers were also given better living conditions and food, while the chinese were only given a monotonous diet of rice and stale ground salmon, and had little medical treatment, with a growing list of scurvy victims as a result.  The racial animosity, according to Chan, was significant because it prevented Chinese and whites from forming an effective union to demand fair wages and job safety.  With this policy of divide and rule, politicians such as Amor de Cosmos and Noah Shakespeare, who was part of the Anti-Chinese Society were able to milk racism against the Chinese by playing on the fears of white workers on the Chinese taking up low wage jobs, with CPR employers relying on racist journalists as a link between themselves and racist politicians to spread anti-Chinese sentiments to divide the workers.

The climate of xenophobia fostered by anti-Chinese sentiments led to the imposition of laws prohibiting Chinese from entering North America.  In the United States, this was represented by the Chinese Exclusion Act, signed into law by President Chester A. Arthur, on May 6, 1882 that prohibited immigration for 10 years, even through it was never truly repealed until 1943, when it was replaced with the Magnuson Act allowing Chinese back into the US, through in very limited numbers(105 a year).  In Canada, anti-Chinese immigration laws were represented by first the Head Tax which forced the Chinese to pay $50 before immigrating to Canada, and this bill being constantly amended to increase the tax until it reached $500 in 1904; the Canadian government collected $33 million from the head taxes.  Finally on July 1st, 1923, the Canadian government passed the Chinese Immigration Act to permanently bar Chinese immigration from Canada.  This remained in place until 1947 as the provisions of the Chinese Immigration Act was incompatible with the UN Declaration of Human Rights.  The Canadian government however would not apologize or provide compensation for those whose lives were destroyed by these draconian immigration policies until 2006 in response to greater calls for redress of past grievances.

What the historical experience of Chinese-Canadians show is that in the past Chinese-Canadians have been attacked and disenfranchised on the basis of the stereotypes present in this game.  Regardless of if the creator genuinely wanted this to be satire or not, the bringing up of these negative stereotypes in a way adds to the discourses within society and may end up normalizing negative stereotypes.  One could argue that it's the 21st century and no one would willingly accept the stereotypes presented in this game, but what if the influx of stereotypes into any given media allows for people to see it for it is, and for ignorant people to frame their perceptions of Chinese people on the basis of these stereotypes.  The more apathetic or ignorant a population are to these stereotypes, then the more they will be normalized, or rather re-normalized into society and lead to bigotry, xenophobia and disenfranchisement of the vulnerable minorities.  Consequently efforts to perpetuate such sterotypes must be resisted.

Of course, people can argue that excessive political correctness would lead to authoritarianism.  Regardless of any merit in that statement, which has been used to justify a place in society for hate speech or hate material, even if we live in a society where efforts to "police" speech is seen as counterproductive or autocratic, it does not give the far right or satirists the right to say anything they want.  At the end of the day they would still have to face accountability for their action.  If the government chooses not to take action on the basis of freedom of speech, then someone might find it in their interest to take actions themselves.  Just because one has something to say does not give their speech special treatment due to democratic principles.  If one believes it's fair to express hateful views, then it's also fair for people to express opinions exposing just how hateful and backwards said views are and take it on themselves to warn others of said worldviews.  

My thoughts on the NDP leadership race

On September 18, members of the New Democratic Party(NDP) of Canada vote for their new leader replacing outgoing leader Thomas Mulcair.  Naturally, hard right news outlets paint a “boring” and uninspiring picture of the NDP race as irreverent due to the space between their conservative-leaning ideology and the social democrat(abeit moving to the centre) ideology of the NDP.  More liberal-leaning outlets give more adequate coverage by contrast.  As a hard democratic socialist leftie myself, this race I feel is really relevant.  Namely, the question of: With the rise of left wing populism worldwide through the campaigns of Jean-Luc Melenchon, Jeremy Corbyn, and Bernie Sanders himself (in spite of his relative moderate stances and the fact that he’s just a social democrat, abeit much better than what passes for rational questions in the US), how would the NDP address the need to move left to address the key issues of our time and challenge the injustices of neoliberal policies and the alt-right?  Or would they choose to maintain supposedly pragmatic and centrist policies, and grow weaker as a result?  My primer analyzing the NDP race will go over the policies presented by the NDP candidates, as well as provide my own analysis of who I am supporting in the race in ranked choice, as well as my own take on the media coverage of the candidate of my first choice, the coverage of which I have a lot of problems with.