Another fake Jack I slay

First things first – I’m changing the format of my journal around. The long weekly updates are killing me, so I’m updating it sporadically with far shorter updates from now on. It’s difficult to sit down and write a big ol’ chunk of text with images every week is all. The rest of the road trip up with Reed and G will be up eventually.

Meanwhile here’s what’s going down. I am road tripping with my family down to LA again to start another riproaring year of school. I am really looking forward to this year because tons of video games are coming out, and that means more sitting around in dark rooms playing with myself than last year! Wait.

Between Seattle and San Fransisco lies a whole plethora of tiny towns with proportional populations. If there’s one thing I see in this particular corridor along I-5 more than anything else, it’s the goddamned infernal “Chopsticks” font. You know – the font with the fake calligraphy brush strokes for English letters, which basically screams “ching chong chinaman pounding on the black keys on the piano with chopsticks” to anyone reading it. There are very few things in this world that make me furious, and “Chopsticks” is one of them. Cities with populations of people who aren’t racially retarded would probably run the owners of such establishments out of town.

Put it this way – if I had a time machine, I’d make finding the guy who invented the “Chopsticks” font and placing my knee squarely into his nutsack my first priority.

Let me tell you, too, us Asian folk ain’t swayed by that freaking font. Any respectable Asian American sees that font, shakes their head sadly, and drives on right past the restaurant, turns immediately into the liquor store next door, purchases a bottle of Jack Daniels and some rags, and hurls a Molotov cocktail at the establishment and pissing on the ashes as it burns to the ground.

Well, maybe not that extreme, but let me tell you – the only people who see that font and associate it with just delicious Chinese cuisine and blantant idiocy are white folk.

In fact, something about white folk in this particular corridor of the United States strikes me as a bit strange and scares me a bit. When we asked a gas station attendant in Medford, Oregon for any good restaurants nearby, she smiled knowingly, telling us about an all-you-can-eat Asian buffet extravaganza, all but winking and nudging us telling us that’s where we should go if we want some of “our people’s food.”

My dad and mom, perhaps sick of the standard road trip cuisine (that is, Mackers, 3 meals a day) decide on a whim to go. I shout protests from the backseat, because it can’t be a good idea to trust a white, chain smoking Medford gas station attendant’s opinion on “good Asian cuisine.”

The Tin Tin Buffet, which we find after a little searching based on the clues given to us by the station attendant, is tucked into a corner of a massive strip mall. As I enter through the extra wide double doors. I quickly learn that they’re extra wide for a reason – because the entire establishment is chock full of the fattest white folk I’ve ever seen in my entire life.

They attack the buffet lines with the ferocity of a herd of cattle, ambling from lane to lane, perusing the deep fried wares, nodding approvingly as they pile their plates high with fried starches and sweet and sour everything. “Take all you want,” a sign invites, “But eat all you take.”

From the looks of things, that is not a concern. I cannot fathom how many corners were cut to put this much volume of food for nine bucks a person. The chef must be like a neurotic kindergarten girl with a pair of rounded Fiskars, a pile of construction paper, and some bizarre deep seated psychological need to make rounded rectangles.

Jimmy points out, too, that there is nothing that screams authentic Asian cuisine like jell-o and onion rings in the buffet tables. Observe:

“Well,” I tell him, “At least they didn’t use the fucking Chopsticks font.”

-f.w.