From "Yellow Fever Restaurant at California Whole Foods Sets Off a Debate" (NYT).
Naming a restaurant after a horrible disease and inviting charges of racism — it's just so extreme maybe you have to laugh.
But this is — I thought — the Era of That's Not Funny.
ADDED: I've never forgotten this description:
A viral disease, it was called yellow fever because the skin of victims often turned sallow. The real symptoms, however, were high fever and black vomit. Yellow fever came into America aboard slave ships from Africa. The first case was in Barbados in 1647. It was a horrible disease. A doctor who got it said it felt “as if three or four hooks were fastened onto the globe of each eye and some person, standing behind me, was dragging them forcibly from their orbits back into the head.”From Bill Bryson, "At Home: A Short History of Private Life."
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60 comments:
I ate at Yellow Fever once.
It was beriberi good.
It was always my favorite "that's not funny" joke:
Q. "How many lesbians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?"
A. "That's not funny."
It would be interesting to see a turning point where people just shrug and refuse to be offended despite the insistence of our betters that we should be. I suspect they'll cave.
I appreciate the sense of humor.
Unless the owners are part Thai, part Vietnamese, part Chinese, and part Japanese, then they will get slammed by the Arrogant Fools yelling Cultural Aporopriation.
Fuck them. The Chinese restaurant I go to serves Mac-N-Cheese for kids. This is the US. We or our ancestors all left the shitholes of the old sod behind. We take what we like from other cultures and mash it up here.
Pho is a Vietnamese soup dish (and delicious). There are a number of pho restaurants in the US named Pho King, run by Vietnamese people. These restaurateurs are second or third generation Americans, so they understand English and perfectly happy with having a crude name for their restaurant.
(If you don't know Vietnamese, you don't know that 'pho' is pronounce 'fuh' with a short 'u' with a flat intonation.)
We know what yellow fever is but do the age-challenged?
Somewhere in the discussion of this I got the idea that "yellow fever" was offensive because it referred to a phenomenon of (white) men being especially attracted to Asian women -- such men being said to have "yellow fever". And that is offensive because it seems to affirm the legitimacy of the ideas (1) that men can find women sexually attractive and (2) that white men can find women of other races to be especially sexually attractive. In an ideal world that is free of sexism and imperialism, such ideas would not be legitimate. Until we reach that ideal world, we need to resist all forms of repression.
Oh, did I say "repression" ? I meant "oppression".
"How many lesbians..."
Lesbians!!
I think you mean feminists.
It's not funny without feminists.
Why would lesbians say "that's not funny"?
The restrooms are labeled "Hispees" and "Herpes"
The Translate Server Error restaurant serves stewed dork, "retreat and think of" cakes, Jane bacteria starch, strange taste peanut, lettuce in pain, and peasant starch meat pan fry little croakers, so the Yellow Fever has some spicy competition.
I remember eating at a "Sambo's Restaurant" back in the day. Their mascot was black, but later they made him look like an Indian. You could get away with that back in the early 1970s.
I get it. Sort of a Saturday Night Fever. Perhaps we should restrict our naming conventions for loaded meanings. This will, of course, render the social racketeering industry nonviable.
Like that 17 year old who was twitter mobbed for her prom dress, all you need to do is say “too bad.” Good for them.
Did Althouse post on that? She thinks whites doing yoga is evil so maybe she'd support the hate-mob.
Yellow fever was and still is deadly.
It makes as much sense to call a business establishment "The Typhoid Lounge", or "Dysentery Donuts", "Cafe Malaria".
Maybe they can set up a video screen and show their patrons what it’s like to die from Yellow Fever, with the black vomit and all. Just a thought.
My first thought was that it's a take on the movie "Jungle Fever." Like a love for all things Asian, not the disease.
The half-Asian in me finds it insulting, Insulting! that you round eyes immediately associate Asians with a disease..
That's disgusting. Who would eat at a restaurant named for a deadly disease? What about Sam an' Ella's Diner?
As for racism, it seems to me "Yellow Fever" is a term used to ridicule and denigrate white men for being attracted to Asian women.
"Yellow fever is traditionally known as a virus transmitted by mosquitoes, but the phrase is also used to describe a sexual fetish for Asian women, often by white men."
Why a "fetish"? Isn't it simply a preference, an attraction to a certain type? How is that a fetish? Is it perverted? And why "often" white men? Why not Latino men, or black men, or even South Asian men? If they're attracted to East Asians, don't they have yellow fever? For that matter, do East Asian men attracted to East Asian women have yellow fever? If not, why not? Couldn't they be attracted to other women instead?
"Lesbians!!
I think you mean feminists."
A distinction without a difference.
Buwaya
No. Yellow Fever is a play on words in a way your examples are not.
It's not unknown for groups to latch onto a derisive term and embrace it as a defiant point of pride. “Queer” for example. Isn’t that what’s going on here? “Yellow is beautiful “
"Dr. Padoongpatt said the Kims’ statements hint at a more troubling issue: It is not that they do not know how loaded the phrase is — it is that they know and do not care. 'We want to be able to say, Just educate yourself,' he said. 'But not caring is much more aggressive. It’s much more explicit, and basically mocking.'"
OMG, we can't control other people's behavior with the native scolding vocabulary of undergraduate SJWs (just educate yourself!")? What is this world coming to?
They (sniff, sniff) know and do not care. They're (sniff, sniff), aggressive and explicit. THERE ARE PEOPLE OUT THERE WHO ARE NOT RESPECTING OUR AUTHORI-TAY! How...how can this be?
They're....they're...mocking us.
You know what term needs to be "embrace[d]...and reinterpret[ed]...positively for ourselves"? "Faggot". It's not perfect now, because it's still a synonym for "gay", and being a faggot in the contemporary sense in which I want to use it is not about being gay. Being gay doesn't make you a faggot, and there are plenty of non-gays who are complete faggots. I don't know what this Dr. Padoongpatt's sexual orientation is, but he's a total faggot. As are the rest of the indignant quoted here.
Anyway, that's always the first word that pops into my head when confronted by people like this, and I don't know of any other word in the American vernacular that more concisely and accurately conveys the essence -- the thin-skinned self-importance, the pettiness, the humorlessness, the frustrated control-freakery, the advanced Dunning-Kruger status -- of these human toothaches.
That the restaurant is in a Whole Foods is hilariously perfect.
Blogger Oso Negro said...
I remember eating at a "Sambo's Restaurant" back in the day.
I remember being read the story Little Black Sambo in 1st grade in the early 50s, in Virginia.
The teacher was black (Cab Calloway's daughter, in fact) and several of my classmates were black. By the nature of the school, I suspect that the teacher selected the book from the library. Not like today where teachers are told what books to use.
I don't remember any problem.
John Henry
Angel-Dyne
Yes.
OT: All the posts, including mine, on my Facebook Timeline today ask the question, "Does this post contain Hate Speech?" with a button for Yes and No. The Purge has begun.
I doubt all will get the "alternate" meaning.
The implication if illness in an establishment selling food is idiotic marketing.
wrong history - they should rename it yellow peril
the reference would be to
Definition of yellow peril
1 : a danger to Western civilization held to arise from expansion of the power and influence of eastern Asian peoples
2 : a threat to Western living standards from the influx of eastern Asian laborers willing to work for very low wages
Some commercial hot sauce names:
Assplosion
Burn a New Asshole
Butt-Pucker
Bootie-Burner
Colon Cleaner
Flamin' Flatulence
Red Rectum Revenge
It seems disgusting but ironic names don’t kill a product.
Ever order Death By Chocolate? Or Bird's Nest? Paltrow got even richer selling “Goop”.
Sounds like Dragon Energy is on their menue.
The name of the restaurant is clearly not a reference to the disease. It relates to when non-asian people only date or like asian people - as in "he/she has yellow fever, the only person he dates is asian" - and it's not limited to only men liking asian women. It goes both ways. Definitely a bold statement, but kudos to them.
buwaya said...
Yellow fever was and still is deadly.
It makes as much sense to call a business establishment "The Typhoid Lounge", or "Dysentery Donuts", "Cafe Malaria".
Retirement opportunity for you, Buwaya! You could open a Philippine restaurant called 'Sal Manilla's'!
Check out the trailer for "Crazy Rich Asians." Fantastic book (a series of three) about wealthy Chinese.
In the movie trailer, the mother (I think) calls the half-Chinese fiancee of her son a banana.
Because she's yellow on the outside, white on the inside, you see.
I'd call that racist, except minorities can't be racists. Only whites.
"Cracker Fever" could be a resturant name.
Reminds me of the case over the band name The Slants that went all the way to the Supreme Court. Some Asian kids wanted to name their band The Slants and the government refused to let them trademark the name. The kids won eventually.
When I first heard the name I assumed it was a play on the term "jungle fever".
buwaya: The implication if illness in an establishment selling food is idiotic marketing.
Whole Food's clientele are people who mostly have no concept of living under conditions of endemic disease brought about by inadequate sewage systems or lack of insect control. What they don't experience, doesn't exist, as outbreaks of "third world" diseases and infestations in swpl-y districts attest. Having to deal with non-potable tap-water and pathogens in food is just something they associate with their cool "adventure" travel, not the default state of human settlements.
Besides, they probably don't even know what yellow fever, the disease, is. (Aside from an alleged psychological malady said to be suffered by certain white men, as diagnosed by spiteful white swpl-ettes.) You could probably name a Mexican restaurant "Aztec Two-Step", or an Indian eatery "Delhi Belly", and the patrons wouldn't get the joke or be put off their feed.
I remember eating at a "Sambo's Restaurant" back in the day. Their mascot was black, but later they made him look like an Indian. You could get away with that back in the early 1970s.
Only the original Sambo's in Santa Barbara is still open.
I remember being read the story Little Black Sambo in 1st grade in the early 50s, in Virginia.
The restaurant was originally named for the owners, but they adopted the Sambo imagery when they learned of it.
The Black Vomit restaurant is going to be a harder sell.
"Cafe Malaria" has a real ring to it.
Gin and Tonics for all my friends.
I've never forgotten this description:
Reminds me of the description of breakbone (dengue) fever I heard from a victim. Same virus family as yellow fever, iirc. (The teller said that "breakbone" was a very apt description indeed for what it felt like.)
bagoh20 said...
"Cracker Fever" could be a resturant name.
We already have Cracker Barrel.
That name is sufficiently politically incorrect that I would probably eat there once a week.
It means Asiaphile."
It wasn't named after any disease.
Same with the Ayds diet plan.
In Philly, there was (and still might be) The Long March Coffeehouse. Not a peep from anyone that I can recall.
"How dare these Asian people not care about how white people will think this is racist and intolerable!"
Indeed, how dare they?
Who do they think they are, not viewing everything through the lens others demand they do so? Next they'll think they have agency or something.
"Yellow Fever" is most likely a take on white men desiring Asian women. I see it all the time on the internet, at least at the sites my, uh, my friend visits. Yeah.
To think that it is a reference to the disease, is analogous to opening "Chad's Gym" and thinking it is about Chad Everett or the Republic of....
"Yellow Fever" is most likely a take on white men desiring Asian women.
"Rice Queen" is a term for white men desiring Asian men. Not a bad name for a restaurant in some neighbourhoods.
Whole Foods sells unboiled, untreated, unfiltered water in sealed bottles. And people think it’s the restaurant name that would make customers sick!
I'm a connoisseur of tropical diseases.
I've had Malaria, Dengue, Typhoid (and varieties, unspecifiable "paratyphoids"), etc., and etc. Many varieties of dysentery of course. Luckily did not have some of the big killers out there, tuberculosis or cholera.
The original Sambos is still open on the beach in Santa Barbara
"Luckily did not have some of the big killers out there, tuberculosis or cholera."
Cholera is fairly easy to treat. My chief of surgery was in India during WWII. He had been running a hospital at the end of the Burma Road. He was there during a big cholera epidemic.
He told us that they had "coolies" in the hospital caring for the victims. They would take a 5 gallon water bottle and fill it at the tap. Then they would add the right amount of salt. They would mix it and go to the bedside of one victim. They would do a cut down on an arm vein, then insert a glass tube attached to a rubber tubing from the water bottle. They would in a gallon or two of that salt water, completely unsterile. Then they would take out the glass tip and tie the vein with a bit of string, also unsterile.
The patient would have a shaking chill as the water bacteria were cleared while the coolie would go to the next case. He said the ward was filled with recovering patients with little bits of string protruding from scars on their arms.
The mortality was quite low.
TBC is another story, especially before 1948.
It's like the "N-word" - Asians are just reclaiming it for themselves.
A fine description of yellow fever is to be found in the Aubrey/Maturin books of Patrick O'Brian, when Dr. Maturin catches it himself and chronicles the progress of the disease. Almost as interesting was when he was poisoned by the hind flipper spurs of a male platypus, through ignorance of their venomous properties.
There is a Mexican restaurant here in Minneapolis, named for a dance. "La Cucaracha".
...The Cockroach.
It's actually a pretty high-end place.
Disgusting names alone will not turn aside the clientele.
(Though I think the Star-Tribune still gives the "La Cucaracha Award" to poorly-named restaurants.)
Yellow Fever epidemics were mosquitoe borne in sea ports . That is why the wealthy merchants of Charleston, SC sent their families upcountry away from their town houses during the Summer. They lived in relatively wealthy communities like Cashiers and Highlands that were popular for having a 4,000 ft elevation climate.
Africa used to be called the "White man's grave yard" - even the slave ships which only stopped briefly to buy slaves from the African Chieftain's lost 15-20% of their crew from malaria and yellow fever.
Even as last as 1898 - it was a deadly disease. In four months, we lost 2,000 men in Cuba to Yellow Fever vs. 500 in combat.
John Bell Hood lost a leg AND an arm in the Civil war but still survived only to die in the 1878 New Orleans Yellow fever epidemic, along with most of his family.
Its also why, until the 20th Century, no one thought of the Caribbean as a "Tropical paradise"
Malaria, Yellow Fever, no refrigeration, no air conditioning. And no insecticides.
In Vanity Fair one of the characters is sent to "Swamp-town" in the Caribbean which gives you an idea of how attractive it was looked upon.
The Chinese restaurant I go to serves Mac-N-Cheese for kids.
A buddy of mine went to a Chinese restaurant that served mashed potatoes...which sounds strange until you realize the restaurant was in Idaho.
There was a restaurant in Seattle for years called Two Dagos from Texas. The phone book refused to list them. They served Tex-Mex, Italian, Cajun, etc. Insanely spicy. I ordered the spiciest thing on the menu once and the people sitting across the table and two seats down from me said my food was making their eyes sting. I managed to eat half of it before my stomach started cramping.
Yellow Fever hijack!
Yellow Fever was first shown to be transmitted by mosquito by Walter Reed (the guy they named the hospital after) in 1900. Before that, one theory was that it was transmitted by infected clothing / personal belongings.
The way they proved it wasn't was to ask for volunteers from American troops stationed in Cuba to wear infected clothing for weeks. Which took amazing courage -- it would be something like sitting on a toilet seat to prove that AIDS can't be transmitted that way -- if everybody thought that it could be transmitted that way.
They proved mosquito transmission by randomly exposing volunteers to infected or non-infected mosquitoes. This being a disease that causes painful death in about 1/3 of the people it infects, this was an ethical ball of worms. One way they worked around this was to have the experimenters expose themselves to the same mosquitoes, with the same odds. It wasn't a perfect system (some people believe that one of the experimenters was so distraught that he exposed himself non-randomly to infected mosquitoes -- and died), but it's an interesting approach to the problem.
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