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Anonymous Student
12/3/15
Tenenbaum 11-11:50
“The Disgusting Imposter” Introduction
[This introduction is very good; it would be even better if it cited specific
sentences and phrases from both “The Ugly Tourist” and the imitation, “The
Disgusting Imposter, and added explanation to show how the imitation of
these was either successful or unsuccessful.]
My essay is an imitation of “The Ugly Tourist” by Jamaica Kincaid. I
chose to imitate Kincaid’s essay because I liked her style of writing: a blend of
straight-forwardness and humor. She is also very passionate with her voice
and I wanted to challenge myself to see if I could also incorporate such a voice
in my writing. I was really surprised at “The Ugly Tourist” the second time I
read it. I didn’t notice that it was composed of merely two paragraphs when I
first read it. That made me wonder why Kincaid would use this method and
inspired me to think more about my paragraph plannings. I think I was most
successful at imitating the tone of voice Kincaid uses, but least successful at
imitating the sentence structures. I could easily morph my thinking into hers,
but my topic didn’t have as many natural sarcastic spots like hers (such as the
parenthesis). I imitated her voice, but I chose not to follow closely to her
sentence structures. It felt too forced when I tried to do it, so I decided not to
use her wording.
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I really liked the snarky way Kincaid voices her opinions, so I tried to
imitate that. For example, I tried to imitate the part where she is aggressive:
“An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly,
empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish...” (200). I’ve always thought
writing to be flowery and passive, but “The Ugly Tourist” changed my
opinions of that. I learned that it is acceptable to have a gigantic paragraph
and have super long sentences with mulitple parenthesis. This shows that I
could have more freedom in the future as a writer seeing that this essay
completely strays from the “five-paragraph” and “PIE” structure.
The thing that stood out to me the most is the overall structure of the
essay. As previously noted, there are two paragraphs with one being really
long and the other one short and simple. I also liked how the essay talks about
tourists being ugly, but actually implies the guilt Kincaid felt for being a
tourist herself. It was also unclear where her thesis was and what she was
trying to say until the very end. This stood out to me because I had never seen
a structure like that. Kincaid uses long sentences with parenthesis almost in a
talking manner, but concise language when getting down to the point. I was
also surprised at how simple her word choices were and when she used really
descriptive wording: “you make a leap from being that nice blob just sitting
like a boob in your amniotic sac...” (200). I also liked how Kincaid basically
word-vomits over the paper because her essay is just like a rant. She starts off
frustrated, and if she was reading it aloud, would be talking really fast. Then
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she slows down at the last paragraph as if to breathe and explains what she
means. I felt like that stood out too, so in my ode to Orange Chicken, I did my
best to stay in the same mindset as Kincaid was.
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The Disgusting Imposter
The thing you have always suspected about your origin the moment you
are served is true: That serving is a disgusting imposter. You are not limited to
being Orange Chicken all the time; you are not sweet and sour ordinarily; you
are not sweet and sour day to day. From day to day, you switch from being
Sweet Fire Chicken Breast to Kung Pao chicken. From day to day, all the
people who are misguided and misinformed love you for your “oriental”
taste. From day to day, as you are advertised on the big screen in a populated
city in where some mad genius decided to pass you off as Chinese food,
delicious, authentic (oh please, don’t make me laugh), innocent people are
ordering you without a hint of doubt that you might be hiding a substantially
uncontrollable secret (you are fake). This might not be a big deal to you,
seeing that normally people love eating you (because really you are delicious,
but with a hint of bitterness like the taste of lies and deception are fried and
glazed with sweet and sour sauce): You are welcomed at any meal (the kids
all love you), you are bought in bundles — you are accepted as Chinese. But
one day, when an authentic Chinese restaurant adopts you into their menus, a
sudden fear implants in your sweet and sour breasts, and you realize you are
quite different from Twice Cooked Pork and Mapo Tofu. You realize you are
the only item on the menu that calls for a sweet and sour sauce, you are the
only item that is baked in the American oven; while the other dishes are stirfried in a huge wok, you are gingerly placed on aluminum sheets and await
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for perfection in the American oven. Something clicks as the harsh truth rains
down on you: You are not Chinese food. You are a creation invented by the
Westerners to gain profit, you are a disgusting money-pulling lie labeled as a
gateway to cultural diversity, the irony speaking for itself, you have no reason
to stay on the market being categorized as what you are — an American dish
irrelevant to the title of Chinese food — so you are constantly marked as a
joke by the immigrants, a contribution to the distorted image Americans will
continue to have of China. A disgusting imposter, that is what you are when
you are served, a disgusting, meaningless dish, a fake dish, a horrendous
object being fed to the white people here and there, and it will never hit you
that the immigrants who watch your nation-wide success cannot bear to see
the sight of you, that in their own homes they would never cook up
something so foul (nobody in China cooks dishes with sweet and sour sauce);
your strange aroma does not invite them in for a taste (really, why do you
smell like that?); the spice coordinations are unfit to be called authentic. They
do not like to eat you. They do not like to eat me! Nobody has ever said that to
you before. So you ponder for ways to be accepted by the immigrants, you
attempt to offer spice packets on the side to appeal to the taste buds. And so
you are confused as to all the different types of Chinese food there are to
imitate, you cannot shed your Orange Chicken attire and become JinJiang
Beef just by adding a few more artificial tastes. No matter how hard you try,
you will realize by the end of the day that Orange Chicken will never be
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considered Chinese by the immigrants.
Chinese immigrants just don’t like Orange Chicken and all its
westernized variations. By being a dish misidentifying a culture, you are
insulting its people and telling them things about themselves that are simply
not true, as I would be doing if I created an American dish with Szetchuan
peppers and cilantro. But the immigrants also understand. They understand it
is due to the drive of survival that forces companies to keep popping up with
new “Chinese” dishes. They would like to enjoy Orange Chicken too, but it is
their pride holding them back, their pride as Chinese people, not giving in to
the delicious imposter that is Orange Chicken. As much as they would love to
eat you, their pride stands in their way so when the Chinese immigrants see
you, the imposter, they desire to eat you, they desire to pay that $5 and show
you off to their folks back home, they desire to one day hopefully convert you
into an acceptable Chinese dish.