Relativist responses to the smelly lunchbox comment

Not everyone’s piece of cake

Yesterday I donated dessert to a friend’s weekly soup kitchen, which takes place at my local Chinese community centre. I baked Chinese sticky rice cake with a twist, and it was pretty tasty, I must say. Most diners loved the cake, even though the crowd was slightly different to the community centre’s demographic; they were mostly white-presenting, non-Asian folks.

After the event, a lady DMed me on Instagram. She had been the only Asian person at a table where a middle aged white man made rude, sarcastic remarks about the cake’s unfamiliar mouthfeel, colour and flavour. She was really upset by his lack of manners and disrespect towards food that represented a lot of cultural and personal importance for her, yet she could not find the words to challenge him. Emotionally downtrodden, her DM asked me for advice on how she might respond in future situations?

I thought deeply about her question, so much so that you are about to read a hypothetical decision tree on how I might assess a situation like this.

Firstly, civil society would agree:

• The man behaved in manner that we would deem impolite. As children we are generally taught that we don’t need to say every single negative thought out loud.

• He was in a Chinese community centre, where there would be unfamiliar things to encounter, not least language, food and faces. Once again, as children we are generally taught to try and be good guests in other people’s safe spaces.

Here are some subjective statements:

• The cake tastes good/bad.

• The man has good/bad taste.

• Food is a cultural practice that should be respected.

• You should always speak your mind.

Here is one thing we don’t know:

• Whether the man was neurodiverse to the point that he presented as rude.

Here are some observed nuances of the dynamic:

• I am a woman, he is a man. He is older.

• I am Chinese, he is white. We are both British.

• I know this place very well, and the centre knows me. I am surrounded by friends and feel safe.

Since the way the man behaved was out of anyone’s control, I thought about all the ways I could have hypothetically reacted to his behaviour:

1. Ask why emotions are arising within me? What are they, and can I - should I - try to control them?

2. Once I have observed and labelled my emotions, do I express or suppress them?

3. Do I need to confront him on his behaviour at all? Have I assessed all information to hand and decided that I need to speak up?

4. What do I hope to achieve if I confront him? Ask him to apologise (for what? being impolite, being culturally insensitive or being rude about someone’s cake? Should he apologise to the baker?) Do I want him to finish the cake (he’ll do this in a resentful and begrudging manner)? Do I want to convince him to like the cake (highly unlikely you can change his taste)? Do I want to educate him about how to behave in public (why would this be my responsibility at all)?

5. Could I start a discussion where we look at the cake from an empirical, rather than emotional, place? Is that even possible with cake? Do I want to engage the other diners to see if they agreed with him or me?

6. If I do confront him, how much emotion do I want to show? How will my tone and language change the way he receives my feedback?

WWJD?

What would Jenny do? Actually, in this situation, Jenny likes to (aside from talking about herself in the third person) try on different relativist hats to help her understand her next course of action. She imagines…

A Buddhist’s response: I see the suffering caused by his ignorance, and suffering is essential. I will show compassion for his ignorance. Eat cake and suffer.

A Daoist’s response: I will be like water. Try not to react to his comment, but find a way to resist using the least possible effort. Eat cake with visible enjoyment so that he may see how tasty it is.

A Confucianist’s response: Ignorance and evil are inevitable, but it’s my responsibility to help cultivate a more virtuous society. I would try to educate this man. Educake-tion is the solution.

A Stoic’s response: I cannot control his behaviour, but I can control my reaction. Suppress my anger and focus on the good: eating the delicious cake.

A nihilist’s response: Nothing has meaning anyway, there’s no point trying to confront this man. Walk away. (Don’t forget the cake)

A non-dualist’s response: There is no difference between me and the cake. Ergo he is also the cake. He is probably suffering with self-hatred? We are all eating our ourselves.

I am not the cake

If this all read a bit glib and Philosophy For Dummies (apologies to any real philosophers out there), rest assured I took the assignment very seriously. Many times I have been asked to give a view on this ‘smelly lunchbox’ phenomenon. This insult trope is analogous to many other tension-creating exchanges, whether it’s Where are you REALLY from? or I thought Chinese people eat dogs?; exchanges typically exacerbated by a power imbalance and underlying ignorance on the part of the aggressor.

I never give blanket statements on this topic. What I was trying to show with my decision tree was that the lady asked something impossible of me, which was to put myself in her shoes. And she also had an impossible task, which was to put herself in that rude man’s shoes. However, I tried my best to empathise with her experience and to show the many ways you can find the best outcome.

And look, I understand that these kinds of interactions happen in the heat of the moment and you have, like, two seconds to throw out the wittiest, most acerbic comeback that casually formed on the tip of your tongue. But sometimes going back to the incident in which you felt powerless and thinking it through again can help us make peace with what just happened.

So what would my actual response have been? Personally, I have no attachment to the cake, just as I have very little attachment to food. I am not the cake, and I am also not a ‘culture’, therefore I would have felt no inclination to defend either. Nevertheless, I would have thought him ill-mannered, and if I saw that his comments were making others upset, I would politely point it out. If he had made outright racist remarks, I would definitely have his throat.

Whether you like a cake or not is informed by 101 things, not least by taste and palate. Whether you understand Chinese food is informed by a further 101 things. Even the rules of social etiquette fluctuate. (Chineseness is often mistaken as rudeness.)

What I do think is useful is building a type of resilience where you have tools to manage those times you feel othered and marginalised. Because, unfortunately, those situations will always happen. Maybe it is developing a public, confident speaking voice. Maybe it’s about channelling frustration into something creative: activism, rage baking, beat poetry, whatever. Maybe it’s designing a cap that claps back.

Should I sell this cap?

Another tool of resilience is having a strong community support network. In the past five years I’m lucky to have co-created a grassroots community of ESEA people, who have all grown and developed alongside me on my own personal journey. I can bring my weird, sticky cakes to our community events and no one will bat an eyelid. But living in the real world means there will also be middle aged British white guys who are rude about my cake, and to be honest… I see that as his suffering. Not mine.