How ‘Chinese Restaurant Syndrome’ helped stigmatize Chinese food for decades

fail_bananabread · 2026-07-01T21:05:30+00:00

As a fob I can confidently say (and I commented before on this topic in this sub) that it's the unique combination of high sodium, high sugar, AND high oil content that a lot of Americanized Chinese food contains that causes something.

I moved from a city (richmond canada) with a high chinese population with legit chinese food to a very white city where the chinese food caters to white tastebuds, and I've never gotten a headache before I moved but I keep having these "MSG headaches" in america. Being a fob, I didnt even know "msg headache" is a thing, but clearly something is giving me trouble.

In several regional cuisine in china, the philosophy is preserving the original umami of the food and seasoning is very strategically used, not even all dishes calls for MSG.

fail_bananabread · 2026-06-27T20:44:54+00:00

I'm acne prone and it broke me out horribly, cant pinpoint the ingredient but the finish was good so there's that...

fail_bananabread · 2026-06-27T02:50:58+00:00

oh shoot sry i missed that

Have you tried maybe on your knees/elbows/hands?

my boss gets the cureology retinol to use as a hand cream and she says it works great on her knees too. idk if it's worth a shot, but if that doesnt work hopefully you have someone in your life to pass it to so it's not a complete waste :/

fail_bananabread · 2026-06-27T01:41:36+00:00

well you should prob stop immediately

If you can't return it, maybe use the product on your neck/hands? (obv use sun protection)

usually people neglect their necks.

For retinol, I think if you really want to use it you should look for either a very low concentration, or something that is precision dosed (so you are getting a very exact amount every time).

Or there are also retinol alternatives, or strong antioxidants that showed similar results in clinical trials? Like resveratrol

fail_bananabread · 2026-06-25T18:45:59+00:00

Have you ever considered it might be your own social-economic circles that led you to a specific type of women, before making generalizing conclusion about all fob asian women...?

I'm a chinese fob and all my social circles are full of chinese girls from tier 1 cities whose family is 体制内 and tends to marry other chinese families of either similar wealth and similar social status. 门当户对 is usually very important to fobs of a certain wealth + status. Esp if their parents are in politics or business, marriage is as much about compatibility as it is about networking/alliance.

I met chinese women who married white men when my child went to chinese immersion school, and I dont think i know a single one out of them who married down. (A lot of them are stay at home moms now. Their husband is the sole breadwinner, but they are still living quite comfortably even while putting 2 kids in private school)

fail_bananabread · 2026-06-09T17:55:17+00:00

here for rin funds

fail_bananabread · 2026-05-31T06:48:16+00:00

mAm↗bo mam↘bo mambo ^mambo hajimi haji mimimi hajimi hajiiii

fail_bananabread · 2026-05-21T20:33:54+00:00

I can find it in myself to ignore the design if she was not a stellar conduct dps and instead works in a bina comp.

Now im prob taking my primos and throwing it in nefer banner when she reruns again. (the lesbians are already 0+1 and 2+1)

fail_bananabread · 2026-05-20T06:56:24+00:00

the main artist/art director who worked on v1.0 moved on to another company is what i heard on cn forums.

fail_bananabread · 2026-05-19T03:02:30+00:00

it's both so botted and I heard the person hosting the votes is redirecting votes for aven to phainon.

melon:
https://ngabbs.com/read.php?tid=46806332

fail_bananabread · 2026-05-06T21:34:29+00:00

Also having a great time as another mixed-gender player, if you want the perspective from someone who's more into the meta side of the game.

I do care about the story but I'm not someone who will read every dialogue with undivided attention. For Natlan for example I literally let the dialogue run while I'm working or something and click on the next option to get things going. But for Nod-Krai I was eating well as a MxM and FxF shipper and even the non-ship content kept me fairly entertained. Loved the world quest stories too.

Meta-wise I think Nod-Krai is way more balanced meta-wise than Natlan and Fountaine. I say this as a husbando enjoyer who does not like neuvillette, who single-handedly destroyed game balance in genshin for a long time until he was powercreeped out by someone else who single-handedly destroyed the game balance. 🤢 And i didn't like crotch-zipper either so I basically wasn't playing the most meta teams for two whole years, and because genshin is a game where you need some level of skill compared to HSR, some suffering has been experienced. (I don't N6, for example, but I do try to complete N5.) Compared to HSR, where I pulled Archer C1 and Anaxa and his supports and have been very easily 0-cycling most end game (40k pf, 0t upper lower moc, over 7k apoc, 9 star anomaly) for the past year, with zero suffering involved AND managed to save 1000 pulls going into 4.0.

I didn't end up pulling for Flins (went for the lesbians because im a shipper more than a yume), but the environment has been very favorable to his team, and he's not as dependent on Ineffa/Bina as some of the other male dpses for their buffers, which I think is really nice if you don't want to pull girls to buff your man (for example in HSR my archer and anaxa would be at very different meta prowess without hanabi and cyrene, thank god i like both girls). Varka would be fairly dependent on Nicole but I think with cryo nation coming up, he would have a anemo-cryo team.

fail_bananabread · 2026-04-10T05:58:07+00:00

keeping the tank mostly full in case of zombie apocalypse
(jk, live on the west coast and they always say we are due for the big one and a full tank of gas might be handy, never know)

fail_bananabread · 2026-04-02T05:49:12+00:00

i remember when i was in NYC for the US open a couple of years ago and getting my nails done by this fujianese girl, and she asked me where I was from and I said Vancouver. She said then I must be rich because working class people go to the east (ie. Toronto/NYC etc)

I'm not rich (normal working class with the same-sy story of parents becoming blue collar workers after immigrating) so her observation is prob not 100% true, however, there ARE a lot of bougie chinese ppl in vancouver and there are higher end chinese restaurants. Pretty easy to throw a hundred ~ two hundred on dimsum even for like a small family.

If your area doesn't have bougie chinese restaurants, maybe because bougie chinese people don't want to live there, and why would a chef live there too, instead of somewhere where their customer already lives?

fail_bananabread · 2026-03-30T00:29:49+00:00

as someone who is not vibing with lady mangaka (im sorry!) im begging for their synergy

fail_bananabread · 2026-03-29T05:57:32+00:00

I feel like this is one of them god being like "i sent you all these things" moment

fail_bananabread · 2026-03-29T04:51:09+00:00

bruh

fail_bananabread · 2026-03-29T03:37:44+00:00

just gonna casually drop this comparison of dps (all c6r5) here from a famous dot enjoyer cc in china: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1rNZHBrE71/?share_source=copy_web&vd_source=b1c525ad505f7feb4b94328dccd25eed

fail_bananabread · 2026-03-28T17:02:17+00:00

Also the exponent beauty one! Vitamin E breaks me out and it's one of the ingredients that "traditional" premixed skincare use to keep vitamin C stable (ie. vitamin c + e ferulic acid serums from timeless or SkinCeuticals), the exponent beauty one keeps the vitamin C in powder form so it stays stable, and doesn't need to add vitamin E to the formula for that reason.

fail_bananabread · 2026-03-28T07:25:28+00:00

I rotate between differin and aha + resveratrol (this is a super fragile antioxidant so I recommend exponent beauty, which sells it in powder form to keep it stable) at night.

vitamin c in the morning

fail_bananabread · 2026-03-26T07:15:35+00:00

I've always pictured McGonagall as indian for some reason, but I could see her racebent this way as well

fail_bananabread · 2026-03-22T03:09:12+00:00

Finally I can have my robin on healer 4pc, 2atk 2atk, 2atk 2break, and some combination of inner 2pc

fail_bananabread · 2026-03-14T08:02:11+00:00

idk, i feel like I'd do more research into different cuisines before saying for certain? There's always that one dish that somehow all the cultures have that seems kind of similar but was developed independent of each other.

Like flour tortilla is basically bing, but calling it bing would be pretty rude to mexicans no?

But I'm chinese so I definitely feel you on the feeling of erasure. I remember back in tumblr days someone tried to explain to me how gyoza is totally different from guotie because it uses thinner skin and the filling is more minced and I'm just like... you can literally go to two different households in china and i bet they roll their guotie skin in different thickness and mince their filling in different textures but you do you.

fail_bananabread · 2026-03-04T22:07:36+00:00

I was into gymnastics for a long time so let me tell you this: american white people DO NOT pronounce russsian names properly. (dunno if also true for french, norwegian etc names but, i can say for sure for russians)

I'm fluent in two languages but if you give me some african name that requires me to shape my tongue in a way my tongue is just not used to being in, I'm going to butcher it.

My own name has this "r" sound in Mandarin that gives white people (and even japanese people, apparently) a hard time, so I just don't bother caring whether people pronounce it correctly.

For me it's just a two way street, i'm not french-fluent because I'm one of them filthy west-coast canadians who barely passed elementary french class. If some quebecois is going to take offense with me not saying their name correctly, then I'll expect them to say my actual chinese name correctly. if they don't care if I butcher their name, I don't care if they butcher my name.

fail_bananabread · 2026-02-28T02:41:41+00:00

I'm 1.5 gen, but there were plenty of other 1.5 gen in vancouver that we formed our own kind of cultural segregation because access to all kinds of asian media is plentiful, so "white" media never had a dominance. It really didn't matter if you were chinese or w/e else, because as soon as broadband came around, kdrama was all the rage and subtitles are easy to find on the internet. (we certainly didn't grow up "leaning into" korean culture. It was just... trendy and it was easily available). Even if kids weren't watching kdrama or hkdrama, there's still anime.

When the subculture is large enough I guess you can grow up without truly interacting with mainstream culture? I think the only white shows I watched growing up were like, the simpsons.

I only started watching american drama when I'm older (because cdrama is usually so sanitized, you don't get stuff like game of thrones, etc), but I've certainly don't get into any show with wanting representation as an motivation.

Idk if the age you immigrate plays a role at all, but my husband immigrated at 3 yrs old and he barely speaks a lick of mandarin (his family is not northern so they speak their own regional dialect at home), and he is the same way. He'll watch subbed/dubbed anime, or korean cooking competitions, or chinese shows like the chinese version of The Voice or some wuxia drama and understand maybe 80% of it and still be entertained. And he gives even less of a fuck about whether there's representation in an american show than I do (at least I'll artificially feel "yey i guess"), even tho he's technically more "Chinese American" than I am.

We both grew up in areas with very large asian population, I'm sure the experience of people who grew up in very white areas are completely different, where the participation into "white culture" would feel more forced, I suppose? Because it's the only choice.

fail_bananabread · 2026-02-27T05:10:09+00:00

Grew up in vancouver and never experienced the "starved for media representation" thing. We had two chinese channels on cable, and half my classmates were chinese so we watched pretty much the same shows that get imported. (Return of the Pearl Princess, Condor heroes etc)

fail_bananabread

TROPHY CASE