My Life As A "Celebrity" Diner

So everybody has heard about "A" list and "B" list celebrities.  Then  years ago Kathy Griffin made light of this by proclaiming herself as a "D" list celebrity.  But now the attention paid to "celebrities" has gotten so out of hand that people like myself have become borderline celebrities, which I'll refer as being on the celebrity "Z" list.

I'm not sure what makes a celebrity in today's world, but there are celebrity doctors, celebrity dentists, and celebrity real estate brokers.  We know about the celebrity houseguest from decades ago.  A former co-worker has been described as a celebrity real estate developer.   I wouldn't be surprised if there were celebrity plumbers and celebrity gardeners. Perhaps having been referred to as a "celebrity diner" might put me in a similar category, and having a next door neighbor who has won multiple Emmy awards and a backside neighbor who has been an Oscar nominee helps me feel like I could play the part.  Oh and I do have people I refer to jokingly as my “publicist” (Linda Kam), my “agent” (Judy Isozaki), and my “business manager" (Gordon Chow).  But since I’ve never earned anything from being a Z list celebrity, their percentage of zero is zero.

While I'm not sure exactly what makes a celebrity these days, my own experience does provide some clues.  When Clarissa Wei wrote her profile about me for L.A. Weekly  in 2012, I considered the piece to be something of limited interest, just to Los Angeles area foodies.  I had been corresponding with Clarissa about Chinese restaurants when I casually mentioned that I had eaten at over 6,000 of them. Immediately she jumped on the topic and asked whether anybody had ever written me up.  My response was "Why would anybody do that?"  In a week's time we had scheduled the interview, she wrote her article, and it was posted on the L.A. Weekly website.   Even when the article was reprinted the next day by the Huffington Post, I figured interest was still foodie centered, just without a geographic limitation.  But things really got weird by the end of the week when the story was picked up on People.com as their lead current story, and classified it as a "celebrity" item.  That led to dozens of celebrity websites around the world reproducing the People article, even a Bollywood celebrity website in India.  I think that sequence was sufficient to push me onto the "Z" list, at least for 15 minutes.

 

Of course I would have quickly become a has been celebrity if not for intervening events. Those learning I had eaten at over 6,000 Chinese restaurants presumed (though mistakenly so) that made me an expert on Chinese food. Days after the 6,000 restaurant article was posted, I received a request from the Asia Society to do a listing of the top Chinese restaurants in the United States.  When I looked at the listing I came up with, each and every one was located in California, seven in the Los Angeles area and three in the San Francisco Bay area.  Knowing that such lists  usually published were invariably diverse geographically to maximize reader interest, I penned an aside to the editor explaining why my list only contained California restaurants and including some fairly disparaging (though accurate) comments about the sorry state of Chinese food in New York.  To my initial horror, the Asia Society editor published not only the top 10 listing, but also my explanation of why all the restaurants were in California.  Well, the internet immediately blew up, with New Yorkers incensed at having their Chinese food insulted.  My name was mud on restaurant message boards such as Mouthfuls and Chowhounds, though a few brave California partisans defended my point of view.  Indeed, the furor was so great that I didn't bother following any of the aftermath.  Consequently, it wasn't until two years later when I sat down to meet with the editor, Tahiat Mahboob, at the Asia Society offices on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that I learned how wide the readership of that article was, including 3,000 Facebook likes and 300 tweets, including one by New York Times editor Sam Sifton.

All the publicity led to invitations to regularly write about Chinese food, answering random requests for Chinese dining recommendations, and an appearance in the movie The Search for General Tso. A year later in 2013, another biographical profile, this time by Frank Shyong in the Los Angeles Times, who came across my name while searching restaurant message boards looking for Chinese restaurants to take his parents to eat, spread my story to even wider audiences.  Then in the wake of the front page, column one Los Angeles Times article, ABC news came calling with its own interview, going so far as to say they were also dispatching a Good Morning America television crew to do an in-person interview.  Unfortunately, in this post-9/11 world I knew that I would need to get clearance from the building management in the Century City office building I was working in, and by the time the film crew and building management had worked out the details (including insurance coverage), the window for the interview had closed.  Now with a few hundred followers on Twitter, I began to take small steps towards being a social media personality and influencer.  Whodathunkit?

A third window of celebrity came in 2014 with the actual release of the General Tso movie.    Attending screenings for the General Tso movie at the Tribeca Film Festival with director Ian Chaney and in Hollywood with producer Jennifer 8 Lee, I was introduced in the post-screening discussion as a special guest in the audience.  And on both occasions I was approached by numerous attendees after the discussion wrapped up.  

I had figured that my three bouts with 15 seconds of fame was more than anyone could hope for.  At this point I was happy just to remain relevant, settling into a routine of writing articles on Chinese food in America, using the platform to educate people on various aspects of Chinese people in the United States that the general American public was unaware of.  There were the Chinese Exclusion Laws which largely shut off the immigration of Chinese people to the United States from the 1880s to the 1960s.  There was the fact that almost the entirety of Chinese residents in the United States from the time of the Gold Rush, for more than a century until the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion laws, were rooted in a blip of a geographic area in Southern China called Toisan (current population of 1,000,000 compared to 1.4 billion people in all of China) home to the poorest, most unsophisticated and largely uneducated peasants, meaning that everything that the American public knew from their association, from Chinese food, Chinese language, Chinese culture, and everything in between was wholly unrepresentative of China.    There was the rampant racial discrimination against Chinese Americans from massacres and anti-Chinese riots in the 19th century, to total discrimination in the 20th in housing, employment, education, and social relations.  All these factors impacted Chinese food in America, including the Chinese food eaten by the American public.  In addition I found myself quoted on Chinese food topics in various news and food websites, media and publications.

As such, I was not prepared for the fact that this would be just a prelude to an uptick in visibility, primarily sourced from abroad.    First, in late 2018 I was profiled by the South China Daily Post, Hong Kong's leading English language newspaper, in what turned out to be the cover story for their Sunday Post magazine that was republished widely in Asia.  

However, most importantly in early 2019 there was a revisit with Clarissa Wei, who "discovered" me with her LA Weekly article.  Clarissa had gone on to be a Senior Editor with Goldthread 2, coincidentally the video arm of the South China Morning Post.  Clarissa was returning to California for a trip and thought it would be nice to do a video follow-up on what had transpired since.  The project was probably more sentimental than anything, as we shot scenes around San Gabriel Valley, but the results were far beyond anything that anyone would have imagined, as viewership reached incredible heights, over 1.3 million views and counting on various platforms at this point in time.   

To have a video interview seen by so many people was a true game changer.  It was the type of thing that people end up remember seeing, though they might not remember the specific content or even the source, but which makes an impression on their consciousness.  Since then there has been a steady stream of media requests, either about myself personally, or to comment on some aspect of Chinese food in America.  There's really no way to tell which particular contacts were a result of the Goldthread 2 video, but clearly it has had a major effect.  The Instagram account I started in 2016 as an accommodation to people who were demanding to see pictures of the Chinese food items I was writing about had swelled to over 3,000 followers.

Yet, I wasn't through with the lightning strikes, and in some ways the biggest one was yet to come.  It all started innocuously enough back in May of 2021 when I received a message from Zhaoyin Feng of BBC's Washington DC bureau that she would like to write a Chinese language article about me.   She had seen Clarissa Wei's Goldthread video as well as my Instagram posts, and we had a nice Zoom meeting.  It took a month, but the Chinese language article did hit the BBC website, though I wouldn't consider it that impactful in any way. 

I thought that was the end of the BBC episode, but four months later, Zhaoyin sent a message saying that her editors had approved an English language version of the article and we did an update call and a few emails.  Right after I sent my last reply I found a message from one of my followers congratulating me on the BBC article.  They had already posted the article on their website without my last response, and also without telling me that the article was up.

For a short while I didn't think anything was extraordinary about this article since the Chinese version had created barely a ripple, but it quickly became clear that this was something different, as large numbers of new Instagram followers appeared in a continuous stream.  By the time I turned in for the evening I had added 900 new followers, raising my total from 3,700 to 4,600.  And when I woke up at 2am I decided to check for the latest count, finding it had jumped to 5,000.  When I woke up Thanksgiving morning I saw a message from BBC asking whether I could possibly do a live interview on BBC World News that afternoon, but understanding I might not be available because of the holiday.  Fortunately due to conflicts, our familial Thanksgiving celebration was set on Friday instead, so it was no problem for me.

What I only discovered later was that overnight my interview had become the most popular item on the BBC website, explaining the haste in wanting to schedule a TV interview so quickly on a holiday, to further promote the web article.  A number of email exchanges with Sara Monetta at BBC in the UK provided a general idea of the line of questioning, as well as useful technical information.  She also indicated that I would go on the air on the BBC nightly world news show at around 3:14pm, for a period of three minutes, which would necessitate brief responses on my part.  My interview ended up being seven or eight minutes late.  I had no idea who was doing the interviewing, as there was only a one way Zoom screen, i.e., I could only see myself and could only hear the voice of the interviewer.  Fortunately a few hours later the interviewer, Mariko Oi, posted the interview on her Twitter account.  https://twitter.com/i/status/1464073116280229890 so I did see what went out over the air.

By the end of the day on Thanksgiving the Instagram follower count had jumped to 7,000, aided not only by the BBC article, but also a cover article by the Daily Mail, which also included a direct Instagram link.  The follower total was 8,000 by Friday, and 9,000 by Sunday.  After a brief pause, the number kept rising all the way up to 16,500, as intermediate websites such as Nextshark and Asians Never Die picked up the BBC story.

I think I have reached the point where there will be no more lightning strikes to further raise my profile, and that's fine with me. I've done three more similar videos to that originally done by Clarissa Wei for Goldthread.  In 2020 I was profiled by Gabrielle Chang of the prominent Hong Kong Apple Daily News in what was effectively a Chinese language version of Clarissa Wei's Goldthread video, though obviously my part was in English.  Hong Kong Apple Daily news was eventually forced to shut down by political pressures and their website eliminated, but I saved a copy which can be found here.  This was followed in 2022 by an interview by Gerald Tan in the Tso'l Food series on Chinese food in America produced by the China Global Television network.  And in a case of deja vu all over again, I was interviewed at the end of 2023 by Taiwanese-American food celebrity Tzu-i Chuang Mullinax as part of the Melting Wok series on Chinese food in America produced by the Washington DC based Wainow/Whynot website.

In addition, I was turned into an animated character in a Warner Bros. video, depicted on an artistic card deck of Chinese foodies around the world (scroll down to see my card), been quoted numerous times in the Los Angeles Times, with other mentions in publications like the New York Times, Men's Health, Salon, Bon Appetit, Epicurious, Medium and America's Test Kitchen, as well as various other media in China, Hong Kong and the United States, and interviews with NPR, CBC, PBS and various podcasts.

 

Perhaps the primary indication of borderline celebrity is that on a handful of occasions I have been approached by strangers who have read about me, seen my interviews, seen the General Tso movie, or follow me on social media.  Some people assume these encounters happen all the time, but in fact these encounters have been particularly surprising to me. While I know a lot of people have heard about the crazy lawyer who's eaten at over 8,000 Chinese restaurants, I'm quite sure only a small percentage of them remember my name or know what I look like.  And there are the people who recognize me but don't  say anything.  For example, when we were in Hawaii, Mrs. Chandavkl was chatting with some people while waiting in line at a restaurant. She mentioned that I had eaten at a lot of Chinese restaurants, and they said yes they recognized me and followed me on Instagram.   And I've received messages like "I saw you" at a restaurant or Chinese market, but they didn't want to bother me.  So who knows how often people do recognize me and I'll never know about it.

So to be at the same place and same time as one of these people, and have them both recognize and approach me spontaneously, is something that I wouldn't expect to happen, particularly since these days I spend most of my time at home. So to Sherwin Goo, Nate Gray, Jason Silletti, Vince Wong, Joe from Chubby Rice Restaurant in Hawthorne, CA, Louise Yang, Jack Wang of Miao Miao Xing Restaurant in Monterey Park, Reid Burnet, Sathel and Michael Lee, Mr. & Mrs. Daniel Eng, Brandon Ly of the Los Angeles Times, Dylan James Ho, Bill Poon at Mason’s Dumplings, David Satoda Jr., Ken Mak at Colette Restaurant, Michelle Matt, Johnny Chiang, Alex at Blarney Castle in Ireland (!!!), and Alex Park of  Liu’s Cafe, a tip of the hat for putting me on the "Z" list.  And special thanks to J. C. Lin, who I never met but recognized my son who was speaking at a seminar.