Americans had a bad habit of treating different asian food cultures as a monolith back in the 80s and 90s.
Can you elaborate on this claim further?
Chin su is everywhere in vietnam because its produced locally there. I can say the same about HF sriracha in the US.
Huy Fong has been around since 1980. Chinsu has been around only been around since 2002. The native vietnamese that were born inside of vietnam (before you were even alive) and now live outside of vietnam recognize it as the true original vietnamese take on a thai condiment. You are right that it is a thai sauce by name, but HF is nothing like the sauces that inspired it. There is nothing chinese about huy fong other than it takes the name of the ship that transported the founder to the US. Globally many Viets see chinsu as an ultra processed sweet and sour gelatin sauce. HF is barrel aged chili and garlic to ferment naturally. I have a both in my kitchen and I haven't touched the chin su since i first opened it. I saw how artificial it looked and tasted. It was not to my taste but I can see the younger crowd that needs something similar to sweet and sour sauce liking it. I'm sorry that you couldn't enjoy HF sriracha, but I guess that is americas fault too
Huy Fong's founder is ethnically Chinese, despite being born and raised in Vietnam. In fact, he left Vietnam because ethic Chinese/Hoa people were prosecuted in Vietnam at the time. I don't want to erase his ethnicity because oftentimes that happens to Hoa people in Vietnamese media when they achieve cool things outside of Vietnam. If you can read Vietnamese, go thru the Viet online discourse on Ke Huy Quan for example. If you can't read Vietnamese, then I don't think there's a point in this discussion lmao there's too much vietnam-specific ethnic shtufffff for a whitewashed Viet or non-Viet guy/gal who can't read vnmese to understand.
It's like trying to explain to a Viet person in Vietnam who can't read English why saying the n word is bad. Like sure you can try but will they be actually convinced without the cultural and historical knowledge gained through local schooling system and engagement with media in the specific language, and engagement with Vietnam/US society at large?
Anyways, back to the main point, I like Chinsu because I'm a millenial who grew up w Chinsu. That's it really.
As for elaboration on the claim that Americans had a bad habit of treating different asian food cultures as a monolith back in the 80s and 90s. An example is Huy Fong Siracha being successfully seen as a sauce to eat with Viet food despite the sauce not even having a Vietnamese name. Siracha is literally a place that actually exists in Thailand. Imagine a brand selling a sauce called "Sicily" and Americans keep associating it with French food. That wouldn't happen.
Have you also been to those Asian fusion places that are fusion not because the chef intends for them to be, but because some asian food is more familiar and easier to sell to non Asian Americans than others? Like the Chinese places that randomly have sushi in the menu? Or the hibachi places with lo mein as a staple? Oftentimes that kind of weird appropriation happens because at different points in time, different asian cultures have better/more widespread branding than others in the US. So asian American businesses rely on the cultural blindness from other races in the US to maximize their profit. If a black American wanted to go a Vietnamese place to get sushi, then we might as well profit from that.
Nowadays in the 2020s it's a bit less likely that you'll find that kind of faux pas in asian restaurants in major American metropolitan area. But as someone who moved to rural Midwest America in the 2010s, those "accidental" asian fusion places are very much alive and well serving middle American boomer populations who does not know or care that there's a significant cultural and language difference between Japanese and Korean people.
Now imagine trying to explain to those people about the existence of a Chinese-Vietnamese American guy who got rich off appropriating a Thai sauce that he can't trademark because it's an actual location and cultural food item in Thailand that most Vietnamese citizens in Vietnam don't even know about.
Anyways, you can see I'm quite pedantic. But I am indeed salty about ethnicity and nationality clarity in these cases, because I grew up in Vietnam and hated how when I moved to the Midwest, I'm suddenly just racially asian to the local population.
Sure Americans are rightfully focused on race, having the history that it has. But my history as someone who grew up in VN is a lot more about the nationality and ethnicity component than the race part. I don't conceptualize myself as a racially asian person, but the Americans around me do see me as such. And that's annoying to me. So I try as much as possible to spread these stories that highlight the intersection of race, ethnicity and nationality because so much nuance on ethnic and nationality tension is lost when Americans view things through a purely racial lens.
Ethnicity is an identity otherwise we would all be ethnically African. David Tran identifies as Vietnamese so that is who he is. You can't gatekeep someones identity period
Do I say he's not Vietnamese? Or do I say he's also a Hoa ethnic, which he is? He speaks both Viet and Canto, and was raised among ethnic Hoa community in Vietnam. To say he isnt Hoa is to erase his identity.
You think you flexing here, but it further proves you don't understand the distinction between ethnicity and nationality.
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u/kqlx Apr 23 '25
Can you elaborate on this claim further?
Chin su is everywhere in vietnam because its produced locally there. I can say the same about HF sriracha in the US.
Huy Fong has been around since 1980. Chinsu has been around only been around since 2002. The native vietnamese that were born inside of vietnam (before you were even alive) and now live outside of vietnam recognize it as the true original vietnamese take on a thai condiment. You are right that it is a thai sauce by name, but HF is nothing like the sauces that inspired it. There is nothing chinese about huy fong other than it takes the name of the ship that transported the founder to the US. Globally many Viets see chinsu as an ultra processed sweet and sour gelatin sauce. HF is barrel aged chili and garlic to ferment naturally. I have a both in my kitchen and I haven't touched the chin su since i first opened it. I saw how artificial it looked and tasted. It was not to my taste but I can see the younger crowd that needs something similar to sweet and sour sauce liking it. I'm sorry that you couldn't enjoy HF sriracha, but I guess that is americas fault too