I (Japanese female, not an American but living in the US for 10+ years) started to notice how the word umami is overused. High end restaurants and food marketing seem to use it. I even found there is a picture book titled Umami by an author (Caucasian male) who doesn't seem to have a strong connection to Japanese culture. Maybe it's passed the over hyped period but I'm getting tired of how the word is overused. And I don't know if people are using the word correctly. I recently read about Sim Liu's comment about boba tea. How I feel about the term over/misused may be similar to how he reacted to the boba tea thing.

We got the book, "How We Say I Love You" from the Dolly Parton library. the gist of it is a Tawainese American girl discusses how they show their love in actions instead of saying "I Love you." I believe the author is Asian American, but I wonder if its accurate to other Chinese or Tawaianese American experiences or if it's perpetuating a stereotype.

https://www.amazon.com/How-We-Say-Love-You/dp/0593428390#immersive-view_1732992610021

Genuinely curious the etymological history

Im a viet 21 yro girl in college, i used to give them elaborate handmade cards with poems or like useful crafts but i ran out of ideas lol and i feel like theres nothing i can buy them that they cant buy themselves. My dad really likes technology as does all other asian dads and my moms a pharmacist. My grandparents are like normal asian grandparents.

As an Asian it bothers me to go to restaurants with non Asian friends or see non Asian people at the restaurant using chopsticks for every dish.

Example — giant plate of friend rice comes out. They’re reaching for their chopsticks trying to eat and scoop fried rice from the plate into their mouths.

Don’t get me started on chopsticks for egg rolls and crab rangoons.

It’s so painful to watch and I know they’re trying to adopt the culture but at one point it’s like cultural appropriation. We’re allowed to use other utensils and our hands but also not every dish is a chopstick dish.

If you’re eating family style with a small bowl of white rice in your palm then sure you can use chopsticks because you’re also lifting the bowl to your mouth.

But fried rice is not sticky so the grains don’t stick together you can’t really pick that up with chopsticks and especially not from a plate on the table all the way up to your mouth.

I saw my friends struggling to pick up an egg roll with chopsticks and eating friend rice with chopsticks while I was eating the same thing with my hands and spoon and told them hey you don’t have to eat with chopsticks and they were like oh well I like to try to remain authentic for the experience

Hi Reddit! I’m a baker who loves experimenting with flavors for my shop, and lately, I’ve been playing around with some oatmeal/granola bar recipes. I want to offer something unique and fun—flavors that take inspiration from my Asian culture and favorite fruits and desserts.

Here are a few flavor combinations I’m working on:

Flavor Ideas:

1. Mango + Coconut Drizzle
   • Inspired by Thai Mango Sticky Rice
2. Passionfruit or Guava + Li Hing Drizzle
   • Inspired by Hawaiian treats
3. Lychee + White Chocolate Drizzle
4. Dragon Fruit Jam
5. Yuzu + White Chocolate Drizzle
   • Inspired by a Lemon Bar
6. Caramelized Pineapple + White Chocolate Drizzle
   • Inspired by Taiwanese Pineapple Cake

I’d love your feedback on these! Which flavors sound the most appealing to you? Do any stand out as something you’d love to try? Are there other flavor combinations you think might pair well with oatmeal or granola?

Thanks so much for your input—it helps me refine my ideas and create something people will truly enjoy! 🙌

Have you enjoyed it? What are some pros/cons?

For me personally, I’ve embraced more the duality of my experiences (being both Asian and American) than when I lived back in the States

Calling all /r/AsianAmerican lurkers, long-time members, and new folks! This is our weekly community chat thread for casual and light-hearted topics.

​

• If you’ve subbed recently, please introduce yourself!
• Where do you live and do you think it’s a good area/city for AAPI?
• Where are you thinking of traveling to?
• What are your weekend plans?
• What’s something you liked eating/cooking recently?
• Show us your pets and plants!
• Survey/research requests are to be posted here once approved by the mod team.

For me, Lẩu(anyone who’s Vietnamese could recognize this dish).

Hello everyone. I’m not sure if this is the right place to ask this question so hopefully this doesn’t come off as rude. I’m white and my very sweet MIL is Chinese and she got me a Chinese calendar to hang on my wall. I’m hosting a family diner with my husband’s family on soon and I’d like to hang the calendar up before my MIL comes over. I did some light googling to see if there were any rules about where to place a hanging calendar and found some info about auspicious Feng Shui placements, but I don’t know how hard-fast or common these rules are. I would be very appreciative of any feedback on where calendars are usually placed. Maybe I’m overthinking this, but I don’t want to be disrespectful by placing it incorrectly.

Hey squad. I'm having my second child with my wife. The first child is becoming sentient and people are starting to ask me questions about how we intend to raise them.

For a point of reference I'm a Cambodian/Viet but I've always just identified as Cambodian because I don't look Vietnamese... and she's 100% Cantonese. Our upbringings were similar but had some differences and thankfully we both just identify as Asian American

1.) I lost my entire ability to speak cambodian, I can speak basics but it's essentially lost. My side is dead I only have my parents and siblings

2.) she has strong ties to the Cantonese side amplified by her ability to understand and speak. She still has her cousins/grandparents/siblings.

3.) our child currently looks more mixed like me. Darker skin(tan), bigger eyes, double eyelids.

4.) her fear is that Chinese culture will be lost.

5.) some of her grandparents are hella racist. "That child isn't ours it's not Chinese"

Plan: prob introduce to Chinese school Cantonese, some knowledge of Cambodian when I can. Teach her how to deal with exclusion from a group. Eg I was told I wasn't Asian by Chinese kids Growing up, again hella confusing cause Viet kids were.

Anyway point is. Mixed cultures, any regrets that you wish your parents did? How about when you look more like one parent but are culturally closer to the other? Let me hear your tips or stories so I can gain insight.

“Look how cultured I am!” You are now as cultured as an ESEasian baby, congratulations

I’m actually curious about Asian Americans experiences abroad. Are you treated differently? Were your experiences mostly positive or negative? Which places would you visit and which places would you avoid?

Hi!! I’m a Vietnamese-American college student who is struggling to find a nice gift for my Viet dad. For some reason he is super hard to shop for.

A few things he’s into: Gardening, Karaoke, and Cooking.

He does enjoy materialistic/nice items as well but I am a tad too broke for that. Please let me know what yall are buying your dads!! I am so lost.

Wife has us staying with her BIL, his wife and their parents for a week in BILs 2 bedroom condo. Initially I rented out a guest suite in the condo building so we could stay there and her parents could stay with her brother in the 2 bedroom. They refused to let me stay there, with her parents insisting on sleeping on the couch in the living room instead. I feel bad, but whatever if they don't want to. But the entire week my wife also has not been allowing me to close the bedroom door either. She thinks its antisocial. We've stayed with her BIL before and she doesn't close the door but it's never been this long, and as an introvert having no privacy for literally a week is wearing on me. I'm Asian American too but never heard of this before. Is this an east asian cultural thing? Am I being unreasonable?

I am originally from Hawaii. I lived in Korea for a good portion of my life which is where I met my wife. We decided to move back to the states, but couldn't afford Hawaii so ended up moving to Iowa.

We want to relocate to a different city and settle down there. Iowa is nice, but we really don't fit in here mainly due to lack of diversity, things to do, and extreme cold weather. We get stared at everywhere we go in public (which I'm pretty sure is because we're Asian) and food options suck.

What are some decent sized cities you can think of with a good Asian American population, that doesn't get too cold and where the cost of living isn't too expensive?

For context, I’m one of those Asian-Europians who grew up in a non-Asian environment (there would be 1 transient family every few years in our school who has also Asian, though typically from a different country). Anyway, I was thrilled when I came to New York to meet Asian Americans. It felt natural, our group of friends are mixed Asians, Latinas and white women. Especially during Covid, we hung out like 3x a week together, so needless to say we were very close. Our friend group started growing apart, forming smaller friend groups - sad but totally normal. I did notice one friend i was SUPER close with (blonde Canadian) act really weird towards me, very cold, unresponsive and went out of her way to not congratulate me for things. When we watched shows and someone Asian would say something about repressive feelings or moms shaming us in front of friends or shoes coming off before entering the home, we’d laugh it off and say something like “that’s so Asian” and she would glare at us and say “you know, white people do that too”. I brushed it off, but it turns out she held a lot of resentment for moments like that when she wasn’t privy to the joke.

I thought maybe I was just being paranoid but others started to see it too. So someone asked her what her beef was with me, and she told them that I convinced our mutual friends to be friends with “only Asians”. I was shocked and a little disgusted. The truth is a lot of us grew apart from her because she was kind of a nasty b*tch she to us after she broke up with someone in the group. But instead of reflecting what she’s done wrong, she blamed it on me making it about race. Which is wild. I was so heartbroken, not only because all of my childhood friends are not Asian, but because if our entire friend group was white and distances ourselves from her, this wouldn’t even be a thought.

Another girl in our friend group, who is Latina, is very sweet and the life of the party. But when one of the Asian girls in our group told her she was scared to go on the subway (after a random Asian woman was pushed onto the tracks amidst the peak of the Asian Hate movement), she was dismissive and said “oh this country makes everything about race”.

I’m very conflicted about whether or not to stay friends with these people. The dismissive one, we’re courteous and still go to events together but none of us go to her anymore with real issues. The Canadian has since made being Canadian her entire personality, as a “I’m special too” statement. To be clear, none of us have ever try to put a spotlight on ourselves being Asian, it’s just what we are. I’ve always had international friends and this has never been a problem. Have y’all experienced friendships like this before? What do I do?

There are companies (F50) where engineers will speak to each other in Mandarin at work and that's considered normal. Indians have risen to CEO's and CTO's of household name companies. It's so rare to see people of Korean or Japanese descent probably because most Koreans don't go into STEM and Japanese people don't really study in US, not sure what's going on with Japanese Americans though.

They might as well be aliens lol. I’ll explain. I’m Asian and I visit California. I’m pretty plain looking, glasses, don’t stand out much. I mind my own business. When I’ve gone to gyms, markets, stores in majority white US towns, there is some amount of small talk expected. Which I’m not used to. Particularly the upscale gym where my cousins go, I regularly see the same people in classes. I feel out of place there but the classes themselves are lovely.

When it’s a majority white class, the ladies enjoy small talk and socialising. It’s kind of nice but they never include me in the conversation. In fact, a few of the ladies straight up ignore me. I decided I could be more friendly. So I tried to think of topics to start conversation. But older white ladies end up telling me what to do. They’re not interested in relating or connecting, they feel the need to state their opinions. Like be the know it all, be in control, whatever it is white women care about.

For example, one day just to start conversation, I asked a question about a game the gym was having. A lady who is a regular answered by telling me that the rules were written on the board, like I should’ve known. The next day, I walked into class and didn’t notice she was next to me when she asked out of the blue, “Do you know if there’s 12 people in class or 13?” I didn’t even know what she meant, so I told her I didn’t see how many open slots there were, and she said she didn’t know if the class was full. When I realised she meant I should move over because I was taking up space for 2 people, I told her as such and stepped away from her. Then she said, you can always come back if there’s 12. Eventually another lady did come next to me. But the way it went down was weird and made me feel uncomfortable. Did I miss something culturally? Because I felt like she was trying to intimidate me. Her tone was like she took offence by something I said or did.

This has happened to me with other older white (and black) women as well. When I am just being myself, rather quiet, or say something directly, I am judged for the worse. This doesn’t happen with younger women or other races.

I hate guessing what these women think, and then second guess myself … how do you all handle/make friends with white women? Any tips?

Another example of weirdness is, same gym, an older white lady asked how was class. One time I said challenging, and her reply was, it’s supposed to be hard. I overheard other ladies replying saying they loved the class, which was apparently the right answer and she kept welcoming them back. From then on I only said great and thank you, which feels so unnatural to me.

What do you all think?

UPDATE: Wow, thank you for your replies! I’m female by the way :) To add context, I went to the classes to focus on exercise and noticed over time the same faces. The chatty ladies happen to be white. But they small talk with only other white women (I didn’t realise this at first). I thought why not socialise and was surprised how they reacted, since the overall gym vibe is pretty nice.

Coronavirus and recent events have led to an increased visibility in attacks against the AAPI community. While we do want to cultivate a positive and uplifting atmosphere first and foremost, we also want to provide a supportive space to discuss, vent, and express outrage about what’s in the news and personal encounters with racism faced by those most vulnerable in the community.

We welcome content in this biweekly recurring thread that highlights:

• News articles featuring victims of AAPI hate or crime, including updates
• Personal stories and venting of encounters with racism
• Social media screenshots, including Reddit, are allowed as long as names are removed

Please note the following rules:

• No direct linking to reddit posts or other social media and no names. Rules against witch-hunting and doxxing still apply.
• No generalizations.
• This is a support space. Any argumentative or dickish comments here will be subject to removal.
• More pointers here on how to support each other without invalidating personal experiences (credit to Dr. Pei-Han Chang @ dr.peihancheng on Instagram).

I live somewhere fairly rural and completely lacking in any asian grocery stores or similar options so for a while now, I've been using Say Weee! to buy everything that I can't in person. It's been great -- quick shipping, quality products, and gives me acess to fresh veggies and cuts of meat that I wouldn't be able to get without driving three hours to the nearest city.

Today though, I logged on and see that suddenly I can't see any of the fresh veggies, fruits, meats, or half of the bakery section that's normally available. No notice from Say Weee! or anything saying that they've changed what's available for my area. It really sucks, I literally made a cart of stuff to buy last night and only didn't check out yet because I wanted to call my mother and make sure I was grabbing everything we needed.

Suddenly this morning it's all marked unavailable and the veggie/fruit/meat sections no longer even show up for me. It's really saddening. I wish Say Weee! had at least given some sort of notice???

Does anyone have any alternative online grocers that they use, ideally affordable? I was planning to cook a special meal for my grandmother's 89th birthday and now I worry I'll be letting her down, as I work and can't just set aside 6 hours for a round trip to the city.