This final paragraph also brings to mind the entire practice of naming one’s Asian eatery with stereotypical names, in addition to using a yellowface font. And not just Chinese restaurants - I’ve seen Japanese, Korean, even Indian restaurants use this style of type, which of course makes absolutely no sense.” If your sign is something really nice in Helvetica, people might go, ‘Is that really a Chinese restaurant?’ So there’s a commercial incentive for takeout places to use this typeface. “Fail to use this kind of lettering and you run the risk of being overlooked. Given the unpleasant associations of the typeface, why did so many Asian eateries end up adopting it? “In many places it’s become a signaling device,” he says. (“You’ll see caricatures with slanted eyes and buck teeth,” says Shaw.) Since they were first invented, chop suey/chopstick fonts have been used in a broad-spectrum manner to represent faux Asian culture, often paired with extremely stereotypical representations of Asian people. “That’s why you get these stark daggerlike shapes, that to the untrained eye, may look like ‘Asian’ script” - but which in reality simply signify a generic exotic, non-Western aesthetic. “But of course, the problem is that they were drawing these fonts, not painting, and following pen conventions rather than brush ones,” he says. The roots of the font seem to be an attempt to emulate the swashing brushstrokes used in Chinese calligraphy. So what are we supposed to make of this? GOOD’s summary of the whole phenomenon is quite tidy: “ethnic” fonts survive (on weird free font websites) because “they are good at what they do: distill an entire culture into a typographical aesthetic that becomes a signifier to the uninitiated.” Are these fonts problematic? Yea.These dumplings are totally more authentically Asian because of the use of that "Asian"-looking font! The only way they could be more authentic is if the website also had a Flash player looping some mandolin music when you click in.Įver wonder where those ubiquitous pseudo-Asian “chopstick” fonts that are routinely used to mimic Asian languages come from? Jeff Yang tackles the history of this typeface, and the casual racism that arises from its usage, in his latest article: Is Your Font Racist? Lee’s website for her book Fortune Cookie Chronicles) and the derogatory way in which it is more often utilized by people and groups like Hoekstra and Abercrombie & Fitch are radically different. ![]() But of course a strategic and sometimes even ironic use of the font ( like Jennifer 8. And all these years, I’ve wavered between hating this font for being kind of racist and being okay with it for being so over-the-top kitsch (I think I might even own a t-shirt that uses the font). After all, it is a really easy identifier. And Chinatowns today certainly perpetuate the font’s usage. Chinese American restaurants actually used the font strategically as it was an easily recognizable way to basically say “we serve Chinese food.” You could actually say that the font became popular in much the same way as the dish it was named after – something that catered to preconceived American notions about what was Chinese. Apparently the type, which tries to mimic(ish) Asian calligraphy styles, became popular when used in a poster aimed at attracting tourists to San Francisco Chinatown after the 1906 earthquake. There are, of course (as a quick Google search illuminates) other versions of these “Chinese-style” fonts – karate font, chow fun font, takeout font, wonton font – all splendidly named to evoke standard American Chinese food images (I will presently just ignore the fact that the linked list of 30 Chinese-style fonts also includes a manga font and Osaka sans font, which are, you know, not Chinese).īut returning to the topic at hand, what’s the deal with these typographies? I know and you know that we see them everywhere, in Chinatown, on board games, menus, random things. ![]() More than just because of its use of the font in Pete Hoekstra’s terrible racist ad, its obvious to most people that whatever is written in the “chop suey” type fonts is related to China and Chinese things. So you can imagine I’m pretty interested in “Chinese” and “Asian” typefaces and was intrigued by a recent article on GOOD interrogate where the chop suey font comes from and why they’re used and at times, useful. Pretty ones, ugly ones, skinny ones, fat ones, overused ones, undervalued ones, and even the poor font that gets beat up every day in gym class (by which I of course mean Comic Sans). ![]() I must confess, I am unabashedly obsessed with fonts.
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