棒棒 into the room: WTF is Bang Bang?

Hi guys, there has been a controversy in the Chinese community here in the UK recently and I'd like to offer some insights of the story here. There is a brand new Asian food court that has just opened up in North London - it looks very similar to the kind of food courts you could find in KL or Singapore and for anyone craving their fix of Asian food, this is a blessing - so how can something like that result in a controversy? Well, it is the name: Bang Bang Oriental Foodhall. Those amongst the British-Chinese diaspora who are more educated have cringed at the horrific choice of name - after all, Bang Bang doesn't actually mean anything in Chinese and it seems at best a made-up word to mimic the sound of Chinese that would appeal to an ignorant white person. Even if that is the case, one does wonder what kind of white person would respond positively to a word like 'bang bang' and which idiot was behind the choice of such a stupid name. The first thing that comes to mind is the onomatopoeia for gun shots - what has that got to do with Asian food? The official Chinese translation for Bang Bang Oriental is 新东方城 (which actually sounds pretty decent in Mandarin) - that means 'new Eastern city': that's hardly original but at least respectable sounding compared to 'Bang Bang Oriental'.

Some Chinese people have pointed out that the word 'bang' could mean "棒" Bàng - now 棒 is one of those Chinese characters that have two meanings: it can mean sitck/baton or it is an expression that can mean excellent/fine. I was introduced to the term 棒 when I was watching Taiwanese TV programmes as a child and there was a character who kept saying, "哇好棒啊!" (wow that's excellent ah!) whenever she was very impressed by something. However, 好棒啊 would be a very natural way to use the word 棒 in a phrase or sentence, I have never ever heard a Chinese person say "棒棒" in a sentence, it makes no sense like that.  There are other Chinese characters that also have the pinyin of 'Bang' such as 帮 (to help), 绑 (to tie/fasten), 傍 (beside/to be close to) and 榜 (list), but none of them make any sense in the context of a food court. In any case, the word 棒 is pronounced more like 'bahng' or 'bung' to rhyme with hung or lung and not 'bang' to rhyme with gang or sang.  So when white people who have no knowledge of the rules of the Hanyupinyin pronunciation system, they are going to see the words 'Bang Bang' and read it according to standard English pronunciation rules. So what are the origins of the term 'Bang Bang' then? Well, I did quite a bit of research.

One of the few authentic references to 'bang bang' in China were the 棒棒 men in Chongqing - these were labourers who ferried large volumes of goods on their shoulders on bamboo poles. They would wait around market areas, offering to help vendors carry their heavy goods like coolies - it is a hellishly brutal kind of manual labour, done my men who have absolutely no skills to offer apart from their ability to career heavy loads. They are a dying breed as they are slower and less efficient than machines and vehicles which have replaced a lot of this manual labour, even in China. The younger generation in China would turn their noses up at this kind of hard labour, especially since the 'bang bang' men of Chongqing are paid very little. Now they are called 棒棒 men because of the bamboo poles they use for their trade - so there is indeed a genuine reference for the term 棒棒 in China, though how it came into the vernacular of those in the Chinese restaurant trade in the West is a completely different story and there seems to be no reason to suggest that the name of this North London food court had anything to do with the 棒棒 men in Chongqing - it is far more likely to be related to something more local and no, it is not that song 'Bang Bang' by Ariana Grande, Jessie J and Nicki Minaj.

Long before this food court in North London was built, 'Bang Bang Chicken'  has already found its way onto the menus in Chinese restaurants in both North America and Europe - but this is when it gets interesting if you have never ever heard of it. What is Bang Bang Chicken you may ask? Well, there is no consensus! It is either boiled and shredded chicken served with a spicy dressing (and sometimes healthy salad) or it is deep fried crispy breaded chicken nuggets. Confusing? You bet - but it can't be both, right? Well, the answer seems to depend on whom you ask and which recipe you look up. Since I happen to live in North London (in Camden to be precise), Bang Bang chicken is sold by quite a few hawkers in Camden Market and it is the sinfully delicious deep-friend variety. Having grown up in Singapore eating Chinese food, I have had various kinds of fried chicken done Chinese style over the years - but it wasn't until I have moved to the West that I have heard anyone refer to it as 'Bang Bang chicken'. This is because there is a lot of Chinese food that has been 'Westernized' in the Chinatowns in the West, to cater to a Western pallet, hence a real Chinese person in East Asia would probably be unfamiliar with dishes like General Tso's chicken, Chop Suey, orange/lemon chicken, sweet and sour pork (the British version is utterly gross, unlike the authentic Cantonese 咕噜肉 which isn't my favourite but still palatable). and of course, fortune cookies which were invented in California, not China. Looking at the history of Chinese food in the West does give us some valuable insight about how Bang Bang Chicken came about.

There was a time in the West, back in the 1960s and 1970s, when any kind of Chinese or Indian food was utterly gross. This was the period when white people started getting curious about Asian food and Chinese and Indian restaurants altered their recipes in order to please their white customers. So for example, most of the interesting Asian spices were removed from recipes and replaced with ketchup and sugary sauces, because it was believed that white people would not be able to tolerate any of the authentic Asian spices. Like they might faint from a sensory overload of lemongrass, chili and galangal when they have a Thai soup or suffer a panic attack when they taste an authentic Singaporean Laksa with sambal belachan. I remember in the 1990s, when one of the Chinese restaurants in London Chinatown used to have a menu written in Chinese for real Chinese people and one written in English for the white people who wanted their 'fake' Chinese food - yeah it was that bad. Thus there was a time when Asian food was watered-down to make them more approachable to white people, so they wouldn't scare off a family in Huddersfield stepping into a Chinese restaurant for the first time. If they saw an item on the menu like "Chongqing Mala Chicken", they would probably be afraid to order it as they would have no idea what it was. But with a name like Bang Bang Chicken, hey that sounds like something a kid would say, it was approachable, funny, friendly, even child-like and wouldn't scare away your ignorant white customers in Huddersfield. Nobody was going to remember a name like Chongqing Mala Ji, just imagine the customer going, "can you remember what was the name of that chicken dish we ordered the last time we were here?"

So the term 'Bang Bang Chicken' found its way into the vocabulary of the Chinese restaurants in the West over the years. Is it the most popular dish in Chinese restaurants in the West? Not really, not by a long way (the roast duck served with pancakes seems to be the most popular Chinese dish by far in the UK) so it is curious as to why this food court has chosen to associate themselves with a schizophrenic Chinese chicken dish that seems to have a serious identity crisis. Is it a healthy chicken salad or sinful fried chicken?  However, times have changed. It is now 2017 and things have improved a lot - many of the cosmopolitan elite have traveled and it isn't usual for a middle-class British family to have a holiday in Hong Kong or Malaysia during the school holidays. Many richer, younger white people now turn their noses up at 'fake' Asian food served in Chinese restaurants here, having tasted real Asian food on their travels - they now crave the more authentic versions of Asian cuisines and many Asian restaurants have reinvented themselves in response to this by using authentic recipes, recreating the authentic Korean street food or Singaporean hawker food experiences.

Thus if someone came up with a restaurant called 'Bang Bang Oriental' in London in 1967, then yeah I get it: you're trying to appeal to white people who are not familiar with Chinese food - but this is 2017. That's why such a food court with such a crass name is making the many people in the Chinese community quite upset. But to understand why, we have to look a little bit more closely at the British-Chinese community for it is far from a monolithic entity. On one hand, you have the extremely anglicized British-Chinese people like myself who speak English as a first language and if I may shove political correctness aside, we're one of the most assimilated immigrant groups and many of us are extremely 'white' in our cultural perspectives. Then you have the first generation migrants from mainland China who speak Chinese as a first language and English as a second language, now I imagine they are far less likely to be aware of why one might be irked by a name like 'Bang Bang Oriental' given they are far less aware of the cultural implications of such a name. It does take a certain amount of self-confidence to be able to stand up for yourself when you witness something that is racist, even if (as in the case of Bang Bang Oriental) seemingly self-inflicted from within the Chinese community.

Well, the team behind Bang Bang Oriental Food Court are from China and thus probably are unable to appreciate just why someone like me would find a made up word like 'Bang Bang' so offensive. I posted on Facebook that they were only one letter away from Annabel Chong's famous Gang Bang, you don't need to be particularly fluent in English to know why you don't want you brand name to be confused with an act achieved by Singapore's most famous porn star. If it was a small business making a poor branding decision, I would be a lot more forgiving - but this was a multi-million pound project and surely, surely they had the money to hire a brand consultant for their PR & marketing efforts. Or at least they should have bothered asking a few people, "hey we're going to build this huge Asian food court in North London, we're thinking of calling it Bang Bang Oriental - do you think it is a good name?" Even if they didn't have the budget to hire a decent marketing consultant, surely they should have asked someone who spoke English as a first language about their choice of name? It is one thing to use a cliche like "Lucky Dragon", Golden Phoenix", "Fortune Pagoda" or "Jade Chopsticks" but "Bang Bang Oriental"? What the hell does that even mean? Oh dear.

Here's the thing about names in Chinese - there is usually a meaning behind the name. So Beijing 北京 means 'Northern Capital' whilst Shanghai 上海 means 'Upon-the-Sea'. Ask any Chinese person what their name means and you'll usually get a detailed story about how each character represents a certain character trait that the parents whilst their child would possess and each family would usually have their own themes when it comes to naming their children. Even when Western companies enter the Chinese market, they usually try to find a most auspicious translation of their brand name into Chinese - I'm sure many of you have heard about the Coca-Cola in China story, that's a classic story about marketing 101 in China. So for a Chinese company to have a seemingly bland Chinese name like 新东方城  and a totally nonsensical, meaningless English name like 'Bang Bang Oriental' - that just fails on every level from a marketing & PR perspective, whether you're looking at it from a Chinese or Western perspective. The English name is not a translation of the Chinese name 新东方城, it is impossible to figure out what kind of message a name like that is meant to represent.

Am I being too harsh here? Perhaps. They are not the first restaurant or food court to have a stupid name - is there anything inherently wrong with silly names if they are a part of a coherent marketing strategy? There is a very expensive restaurant in Soho called Bob Bob Ricard - I have no idea why the word 'Bob' is repeated, but it has not hurt their brand identity. In Singapore, there's a hawker center called 'Chomp Chomp' - okay, that's the sound of someone chewing their food, but hardly an imaginative name? There is a Thai restaurant in Belfast called 'Thai-Tanic' (hint: the Titanic was built in Belfast). Staying on the Thai theme - there's a restaurant in Bangkok called 'Cabbages and Condoms', okay the name is bound to make you take a second look at it, maybe even want to take a selfie with it, but how is that supposed to suggest delicious Thai food to me? And maybe some of you may say, who cares what that food court is called, surely what is more important is the quality of the food there and also the prices? You can call the food court whatever you want, it's not going to make that much difference to the dining experience - are you just finding excuses to criticize and condemn people from China for being utterly clueless and stupid when it comes to doing business in the West? Perhaps. But you know what they say, there's no smoke without fire and I've always had an uneasy time with PRCs.

But what does this say about the people (like myself) who are rushing to condemn the people behind the naming of this food court? I suppose we're quite keen to portray a version of Chinese identity that is modern and desirable, rather than one that is at best tacky, at worst in very bad taste. Time for an analogy: you remember a few weeks ago, I was at the Henley Regatta - that's an occasion when people dressed up nicely to watch a boat race on the Thames whilst being wined and dined. Well, this lady wore a light blue dress and she must have sat on some mud - it had been raining the day before and there was quite a bit of mud around, but unfortunately for her, the position of the streak of mud on her bottom made it look as if she had pooped herself. Yeah, awkward. People had noticed that muddy stain on her dress, there was then this hesitation, "so who's going to tell her? Not me, you tell her." I barely knew the lady - I was only introduced to her at the event and if she makes a fool of herself, well it was too easy to look the other way. Finally, her boss told her about the muddy stain and they disappeared to the toilets for a while, presumably to try to clean the mud off her dress. I suppose her boss must have felt some sense of responsibility, "Oh no, I bring her with me to a client's event and she does this? I can't let her embarrass my company like that today" - whereas for me, I couldn't care less what she did. By the same token, I suppose a non-Chinese person could easily choose to ignore the awkward name of that food court, but as a Chinese person, I suppose I am afraid of "shame by association" and thus felt the need to speak out. It is like I wanna say, "please don't imagine all Chinese people to be so idiotic to come up with a name like that, some of us do have more class and sophistication. Only someone from China would do something that dumb, I'm from Singapore."

So that's it from me on this issue - what do you think? Would you be offended by a dumb name for an Asian food court or would you be happy to look the other way? Let me know what you think - leave a comment below. Thanks for reading.