Food writer offends 1.2 billion people, for starters

The back page of the TLS of May 13th has an amusing comment on political correction. Calvin Trillin wrote a poem about Chinese food, which he loves, in the New Yorker; it has produced some outrage. Here is the offending passage: "Have they run out of provinces yet?/ If they haven't, we've reason to fret./ Long ago, there was just Cantonese./ (Long ago we were easy to please.}/ But then food from Szechuan came our way,/ Making Cantonese strictly passé./ Sometimes we do miss, I confess,/ Simple days of chow mein but no stress."

It seems that it was the word "stress" that provoked the outrage. A letter of protest from Diana Keren Lee stated that this created an us-them conflict by employing "language that is reminiscent of the Yellow Peril of the nineteenth century, in which people of Asian descent were viewed as dangerous." The TLS's commentary ends with the following: "Have they run out of ways to be offended yet? Will the well of microaggression ever run dry? Even to ask is to offend."

The TLS commentary begins by noting that the writers of an earlier generation, such as Norman Mailer, Jean Genet,John Osborne, Erica Jong etc. considered it their duty to épater la bourgeoisie by defying conventions. Then they were lauded for it; today they would be run out of town. (You may click on the image to read the article.)